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“Dr. Hatch’s assistant. Sorry. I can picture her, but I can’t seem to remember her name.”
“Amy Frankel,” his son offered immediately.
Kimberly and D.D. looked at him.
“Blond, beautiful,” said the boy. “What’s not to remember?”
Fair enough, Kimberly thought. D.D. was already jotting down the name. Kimberly went back to her photo of Martha Counsel’s meds. There, on the lower left-hand label, she could see the name of the prescribing doctor.
“Dr. Dean Hathaway,” she read off. “Do you know him?”
“No. But given the critical nature of maintaining the transplanted kidney’s health, it’s highly possible Mrs. Counsel was seeing a nephrologist out of Atlanta.”
Kimberly nodded and moved on to the red silk sash still tied around Martha’s neck.
She could just make out bruising above the fabric, from where it had ridden up on the neck from the force of the hanging. Kimberly had seen cases where someone had manually strangled a victim, then tried to cover it up by staging a hanging. In those cases, however, the distinct bruise pattern of fingers squeezing the victim’s throat always gave the murderer away.
At the moment, she didn’t see anything like that here. Of course, more would be visible once the sash was removed.
If this death looked and sounded like a suicide, why was she so uncomfortable?
She moved away from the gurney, thanked the ME for his time, and indicated that he and his son could go.
“I don’t like it,” D.D. said the moment they disappeared down the hall.
“We’re trained to be paranoid,” said Kimberly. “Doesn’t mean they’re really out to get us.”
“Ah, but my new friend dropped this.” D.D. held out a scrap of paper.
Kimberly looked at the hastily crayoned drawing of a hulking black figure with glowing red eyes. “Is that... what? Some kind of boogeyman?”
“I think it’s a monster.”
“The girl, the mayor’s mute niece, gave you a picture of a monster?”
“She dropped it on the floor when he wasn’t looking. She can’t talk, but she’s trying to tell us something.”
“The boogeyman did it?”
“Or his friend, the devil.”
Kimberly considered the matter. She didn’t understand the drawing and, given the girl’s young age and reported brain injury, wasn’t even sure if she qualified as a credible witness. On the other hand, it’s not like they had any better leads. “All right, let’s talk to her.”
Kimberly turned toward the door. D.D. grabbed her arm. “Wait. She’s underaged. We have to have the mayor’s permission for an interview.”
“We’ll ask for it. Denying us access will look suspicious. You know how it is; put on the spot, plenty of guilty parties consent to things they shouldn’t.”
“I don’t want to call attention to her. I don’t think we know everything that’s going on here.”
“No kidding.”
“The picture projects fear. We may not understand it, but we have to respect it.”
God, Kimberly was tired. She rubbed her temples, wished she was once more on the phone, talking to her husband, catching up with her girls. Deep breath. This was her job and she loved it. Most of the time. “All right. So our best approach... We’ll question her without singling her out.”
“Game plan?”
“We’ll inform Mayor Howard that we need to interview everyone who was in the building last night. Guests, staff, everyone. I’ll ask Sheriff Smithers to handle the guests, while you and I take the staff.”
