AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I SAT IMPATIENTLY in a big upholstered chair, dense carpeting underfoot, Fortune magazine splayed out on the blond-wood coffee table—the hushed outer office of Carl Whiteley, Municipal Hospital’s CEO.
Whiteley’s assistant hung up a phone and told me that Mr. Whiteley could see me now.
I entered a many-windowed office, where a gray-haired man with smooth pink cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses stood up from behind his desk. He looked like a Republican senator or Santa Claus with a really close shave.
I shook his hand and showed him my badge, thinking how I had no partner, no warrant, no case file, just Noddie Wilkins’s fear and an unsettling image of Yuki’s mom in my mind.
“I don’t understand, Lieutenant,” Whiteley said as he sat down and I took the seat across from him. The sun beat through the plate glass and jabbed me in the eyes. “Someone made a complaint to the police? Who? Over what?”
“You’re surprised? Now I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Your hospital is being sued for malpractice.”
“That lawsuit is total crap. It’s a travesty.” Whiteley laughed. “This is a hospital, a very good one, but patients die. We’re living in litigious times.”
“Even so, I have some questions for you.”
“Okay,” he said, linking his hands behind his head, leaning back in his cushy executive chair. “Shoot.”
“What can you tell me about the coins your staff has found on the eyelids of deceased patients? How long has this been going on?”
“Coins,” he said, returning his chair to its original position. Whiteley gave me a condescending look. “You mean buttons, don’t you?”
“Coins. Buttons. What the hell difference does it make? In my business we call them clues.”
“Clues to what, Lieutenant? This place is crawling with doctors. We know every patient’s cause of death, and none of them were homicides. Want my opinion? These buttons are a prank. A cruel prank.”
“And that’s why you didn’t inform the police about any of this?”
“There’s nothing to report. Patients sometimes die. Where’s the crime?”
Whiteley was incredibly smug, and I didn’t like him. Not his smooth baby face or his jackass laugh. Or the way he was trying to put me down and fake me out.
“Covering up evidence is illegal, Mr. Whiteley. Either tell me about those buttons or this pleasant chat of ours is over, and I’m going to arrest you for obstruction of justice and for interfering with a police investigation.”
“Arrest me? Hang on, Lieutenant. I’m calling my attorney.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “And while you’re at it, think about this. You’ve still got a pretty good reputation. How’s it going to look when squad cars pull up with sirens blasting and I march you out to the curb in handcuffs?”
Whiteley reached for the receiver. He punched out a few numbers before angrily pounding the phone back into its cradle.
“Look, this is ridiculous,” he said, burning a couple of holes into me with his eyes. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”
He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a cream-colored envelope with the hospital’s logo in the upper left corner. He tossed it lightly onto his desktop.
“You can buy these buttons in any uniform supply store in the country, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’m cooperating, okay? This idiocy can’t go public. If you do anything to damage our reputation, I’m prepared to take legal action against the city for libel, and against you in particular.”
“If there’s no causal relationship between the buttons and the patients’ deaths, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
I reached for the envelope, my pulse pounding as I opened the flap and peered inside.
Shiny brass circlets glinted up at me.
There were dozens of them, each button smaller than a dime, with a tiny shank on the back, a raised emblem of a caduceus on the front.
The buttons rattled inside the envelope as I shook it. Maybe Whiteley was right. They were common blazer-cuff buttons. Nothing special about them.
But we both knew that each pair represented a person who had died here at the hospital.
“I’ll need a list of all of the patients found with these things on their eyes,” I told him.
