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“Sorry?”
“Well, I mean… you…”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Let me touch you.”
“No, let me touch you.”
Chapter 7
With Steffi driving, she and Smilow reached Roper Hospital in record time.
“How many did they say?” she asked as they jogged across the emergency room parking lot toward the building. She had missed the details when she left the hotel conference room to retrieve her car. She had picked up Smilow at the main entrance to Charles Towne Plaza.
“Sixteen. Seven adults, nine children. They belong to a touring church choir from Macon, Georgia. They ate lunch early in the hotel restaurant before setting out on an afternoon walking tour of downtown. They returned a couple hours later, after the kids began getting sick.”
“Stomach cramps? Vomiting? Diarrhea?”
“All of the above.”
“You don’t forget food poisoning if you’ve ever had it. I did once. Cream of mushroom soup from a reputable deli.”
“They traced this back to a marinara meat sauce that was used on the pizza the kids ate. It was also on the pasta special.”
Almost at a run, they entered the hospital emergency room. For a Saturday night, the waiting room was relatively calm, but there were a few patients. A uniformed cop was guarding a man in handcuffs. The man had a bloody bath towel wrapped around his head like a turban. His eyes were closed and he was moaning, while his wife provided laconic answers to a nurse’s standard questions regarding medical history. A young mother and father were trying in vain to pacify their crying infant. An elderly man was sitting alone, sobbing into a handkerchief for no apparent reason. A woman sat bent almost double in her chair, her head nearly in her lap. She appeared to be asleep.
It was a little early yet for the real emergencies to start streaming in.
Neither Smilow nor Steffi paid any attention to the people in the waiting room, but walked directly to the admissions desk, where Smilow introduced himself to the nurse, showed her his badge, and asked if the people transported from Charles Towne Plaza were still in the emergency room or if they’d been admitted to rooms.
“They’re still here,” the nurse told him.
“I need to see them right away.”
“Well, I… Let me page the doctor. Have a seat.”
Neither sat. Steffi paced. “What I don’t get is how your guys missed the discrepancy. Weren’t they supposed to check the number of guests registered against the number they interrogated?”
“Cut them some slack, Steffi. People straggled in over the course of hours, after being away from the hotel for hours. We’re talking hundreds of registered guests in addition to employees changing shifts. It would have been nearly impossible to get an accurate head count.”
“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “But after midnight? When everyone is more or less tucked in? I would have expected one of them to think of doing another head count. Or were they too engrossed in their movie?”
“They had their hands full,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah, getting jack.”
Smilow was the first to criticize if a criminal investigation officer screwed up. It was something else if the criticism came from an outsider. His lips turned hard and thin with anger.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Steffi said in a much mollified tone. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Yeah, you did. But let me worry about evidence gathering, okay?”
Steffi knew when to back off. It wouldn’t be wise to alienate Smilow. Despite the new widow’s directive, she had every intention of going to County Solicitor Monroe Mason and asking to be named the chief prosecutor of this case. When she did, she needed the police department’s support. Specifically Smilow’s.
She gave him a few moments to cool down before saying, “I’m afraid that these people with food poisoning won’t know jack, either. They were brought to the hospital earlier than the estimated time of Pettijohn’s murder.”
“The symptoms didn’t strike some of them until later,” he argued. “The hotel manager confessed to sneaking them out as late as eight o’clock this evening.”
