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Chapter 75
I SAW THE DUSKY-BROWN ENVELOPE lurking inside the tower of mail in my in-box. I fished it out and slit the flap with the shiv I kept in my top drawer.
I read the report. Read it again to make sure I was right. Latent had pulled fifty million smudged partials from the caduceus buttons.
There was nothing even remotely usable in the batch.
I got up from my desk, walked over to Jacobi, who was unwrapping an egg salad sandwich, piling coleslaw and garlic pickles onto a plate for his lunch.
“Join me?” he asked, holding up a sandwich half.
“Okay.”
I dragged up a chair, shifted his piles of junk, and made a space for myself.
As we ate, I downloaded my humming mind, filling Jacobi in on Yuki’s charge that her mother had been murdered at one of the city’s most revered hospitals.
I told him the rest of it—my conversation with the nurse at Municipal and about the caduceus buttons I’d scored from Carl Whiteley during our executive-suite fandango.
I kept talking, and Jacobi didn’t stop me. By the time I got to the malpractice suit, he’d broken out the box of Krispy Kremes. Put a chocolate glazed on a napkin in front of me.
“So, what are you thinking, Boxer? You thinking like a lieutenant, or an investigator?”
“The only autopsy report we have is Keiko’s.”
“And how did Claire call it?”
“Without any evidence to the contrary? Pending, until all the facts are in.”
“So, what am I missing here? Where’s the tie-in with Garza? You girls don’t like the way he looks?”
“He’s very handsome, actually.”
I told Jacobi that Keiko, like the patients in the malpractice case against Municipal, had entered the hospital through the ER—Garza’s turf.
This was also true of thousands of patients who survived, checked out, and, for all I knew, lived happily ever after.
“I have to find something in Municipal’s list of doctors, nurses, and maintenance staff that will either explain away my uneasy feelings or solidify them,” I said.
“So, what do you want from me, Boxer?” He crumpled up the rubbish from our lunch, dunked it into the trash can.
“I need you to work overtime.”
“Tonight?”
“Unpaid overtime.”
“Aw, jeez, Lieutenant. I just remembered. I’ve got opera tickets. . . .”
“Because I’ve used up my overtime budget for the month. Because I don’t have a bona fide victim. And because I don’t even know what the hell this is.”
Jacobi caved, knowing I’d do the same for him.
As the day shift stumbled out of the squad room and the graveyard shift trickled in, Jacobi and I ran the names of six hundred Municipal employees through the database.
We uncovered doctors with spotty medical histories and rap sheets on lower-level staffers for domestic violence, assault, armed robbery, drug abuse, and DWIs aplenty.
My DeskJet spat out a summary of the “button” victims.
