“Well,” Larry says, chucking a finger under my chin, “I can see you’re pretty ambivalent about all this. I just hope everything turns out the way you want it to, Mattie.”
“Thanks.” I lean over and kiss his cheek, then give him a wan smile. “Now, if I can just figure out what it is that I want, everything will be right with the world.”
Larry laughs. “If only it were that simple.”
Chapter 16
The next morning, I call Lucien first thing and learn that David spent the night in jail and is, in fact, still there, pending his bail hearing, which is scheduled for ten o’clock. The charge, as Lucien predicted, is obstruction of justice. But he suspects the cops will later drop that charge so they can pursue a bigger one, like first-degree murder.
When I get to work, Izzy and I spend half an hour at the conference table sipping coffee and speculating about both Karen Owenby’s identity and David’s degree of guilt. Then we tackle our one autopsy of the day: a forty-eight-year-old man killed in a head-on collision with a semi. The police think the dead man might have been drunk because witnesses said his car weaved across two lanes of traffic before hitting the truck.
The impact of the collision broke nearly every bone in the man’s body, leaving him oddly deformed, his shape compressed by the tons of steel that closed in on him. I take some comfort in the idea that his death was most likely instantaneous and hope he was drunk, at least enough to have numbed him to the horror of his impending doom. But that hope is dashed when the man’s blood alcohol level comes back as zero.
Then Izzy discovers evidence of a massive coronary thrombosis and a lack of blood in many areas of the body, which means the guy had a massive heart attack and was most likely dead before he ever hit the truck.
It is a little after eleven and we are just finishing up the autopsy when a woman pokes her head into the room. She looks like a flower child right out of the sixties: straight black hair, big floppy hat, calf-length peasant dress, sandals, and a string of love beads that hang to her navel. “Hi there!” she says. “You must be Mattie.”
“I am.”
“I’m Cass. I work here part-time. Answer phones, file, that sort of thing.”
“Nice to meet you, Cass.”
“I have a message for you. Lucien called and said to tell you that your husband is out on bail.”
“Good. I think. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And Arnie said he’d like both of you to come up to his office when you’re done here. He has some information for you.”
“Will do, Cass,” says Izzy. “Thanks.”
“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I say once Cass is gone. “Arnie made it sound as if meeting Cass would be a strange experience.”
Izzy chuckles. “It is, but you’ll get used to it.”
“What’s to get used to? She seems just fine to me.”
“Wait until the next time you meet her. Then you’ll understand.”
We clean up and head for Arnie’s office. I can tell from the look on Arnie’s face that he is excited about something.
“I have a tentative ID for the Owenby woman,” he says. “I tracked down a hospital in Kentucky where the real Karen Owenby used to work. Seems there was an operating room assistant named Sharon Carver who worked at the same hospital and who gave notice a few days after Owenby’s death. Then Carver just disappeared from the face of the earth. There’s no further work history, no bank accounts, no nothing.
“However, someone claiming to be Karen Owenby and using her nursing license was hired as an OR nurse in a Chicago hospital two months after the real Owenby’s death. According to personnel records at the Chicago hospital, the work history that the fake Owenby provided conveniently excluded any employment during the period that the real Owenby worked at the Kentucky hospital. During an interview, the applicant apparently explained the gap in employment by saying that she took some time off to help a sick family member.”
“Good work, Arnie,” Izzy says.
“Thanks.”
“How did you figure it out?” I ask him.
“I just assumed that the person who stole Karen Owenby’s identity had to be both someone who knew her and someone who had a working knowledge of an OR. I backtracked from the reference information the hospital here had on file for Owenby and noticed a gap of several years. Using the information from the death certificate for the real Karen Owenby, which listed her place of death as Ashland, Kentucky, I started calling area hospitals. Sure enough, I found one where she’d worked.
“So I asked the hospital if they had any employees who quit or were fired around the time of Owenby’s death and they came up with two names: a man and a woman. The woman was Sharon Carver and she worked as an aide in the OR, which also happened to be where Karen Owenby worked. So I had the hospital scan and e-mail me a picture of the Carver woman from her personnel file. Had them send one of Owenby, too. Check it out.”
He turns to his computer and pulls up two photos side by side. I look over Izzy’s shoulder and sure enough, the woman labeled as Sharon Carver looks exactly like the woman we knew as Karen Owenby but with lighter hair. The real Karen Owenby was quite pretty, I note, her features delicate and refined looking.
“How soon before we can verify?” Izzy asks.
“Sharon Carver has no prints on file,” Arnie explains. “And I haven’t found any family yet. She listed parents as the next of kin on her job application at the hospital in Kentucky, but apparently the names, address, and phone number she gave for them were fake. No one at the hospital seems to know much about her. Apparently she only worked there for a few months. I’ve got some inquiries out to dentists in the area to see if we can find anyone she might have gone to. Other than that, I’m not sure where to go.”
Izzy says, “The application Carver filled out at the Kentucky hospital. They still have it?”
Arnie nods.
“Give this information to Hurley and see if he can get that application and check it for finger or palm prints. If we can match one up with the woman in our morgue, it won’t be proof positive, but it certainly adds to the slate.”
“Will do,” Arnie says.
“The thing I don’t get is why,” I say. “Why did this woman impersonate a nurse and take over her identity?”
Arnie shrugs.
Izzy says, “Drugs maybe?” He looks at me. “Do you know if there were any incidents of drug diversion at Mercy during the past few years? Maybe she was copping and selling on the street.”
“I know there was a problem back about four years ago, but they caught the nurse who was behind that one and fired her. Sent her away for rehab, I think. And she wasn’t selling, just using.” I shake my head as I think. “I really doubt that Karen was involved in anything like that. She worked there for six years. If she was diverting drugs, someone would have tapped her by now.”
“You’re probably right,” Arnie says. “But just to be on the safe side, I’ll have Hurley check and see if there were any suspected drug problems at the Kentucky hospital around the time Carver was working there.”
“Another possibility,” Izzy says, “is money. After all, Carver was only an aide and they don’t pull down much of a salary. So maybe she just wanted the higher pay that an RN gets. She paid attention while working as an aide in the OR, picking up tips, lingo, and techniques. Then, when the opportunity arose, she passed herself off as an RN by using the dead woman’s name, license, and work history.”
“How’d she come about a work history if she didn’t use the Kentucky hospital?” I ask.