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Navarro frowned. “I feel like I should caution you about getting involved, Dr. Reeves, but I realize it’s way too late for that. Just…tread carefully, or I’ll have to pull you.”
“Of course,” Sam said, but Kit recognized the determined look in his green eyes. He was a man on a mission now. She thought Navarro might be thinking the same thing.
She lifted her hand to divert Navarro’s attention. “Boss, we still need to search Mr. Flynn’s home in San Francisco. If he drove there recently, he might have hidden evidence there.”
“Good point.” Navarro wrote it down. “Ryland, can you send up a CSU team?”
“As soon as we’re done here,” Ryland promised.
“I’ll make sure you have that warrant for Crawford’s offshore account,” the assistant chief added.
Kit looked at Jeff. “Can you send us the key-card logs along with those emails and dates?”
Jeff nodded. “I’ll send you a list of all key-card activity on all doors at the facility. I’ll have it to you in a few hours. I made a copy of the Shady Oaks server, by the way. I had to return the original server to their server room because they still have to track key cards and access email and the security cameras. I put a program on the original server to alert me to any attempts at a connection, whether they be hackers or someone legitimately using the server-based systems.”
“We have camera and key-card logs for this morning?” Kit asked, relieved. She’d thought those had been lost without a working server. “Who entered Benny Dreyfus’s room during the night?”
Jeff looked it over. “Quite a few people, but that made sense to me considering they were monitoring Mr. Dreyfus’s heart. Roxanne Beaton went in twice before ten p.m., then the head nurse, Janice Lenski, went in twice more at one and three a.m. Devon Jones went in at five a.m., then nobody went in until Georgia Shearer entered at eight oh five a.m.”
Kit stilled. “Devon Jones? The nursing assistant? Are you sure?”
Jeff nodded warily. “That’s what the key-card log says.”
Sam frowned. “That’s impossible. Devon wouldn’t hurt Benny.”
Kit hoped he was right, but she couldn’t assume so. “We’ll track her finances and movements. She’s a single mother with a toddler. She definitely needs cash.”
“What did the camera show?” Connor asked. “We do have cameras now, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir,” Jeff said quickly. “I didn’t check the feed, but I will as soon as we’re finished.”
“Get back to me ASAP,” Navarro commanded. “Anything else?”
Kit shared a glance with Sam. He was clearly vexed, but he’d said his piece and wouldn’t push it. She gave him a small smile. “We’ll try to clear Devon quickly, Sam.”
“Thank you,” he murmured. “I’d hate to see her reputation smeared over this. It sucks to be wrongly accused.”
Which Sam would know all too well, having been a suspect in a murder case six months before. Kit had never believed he was guilty, either. She trusted her gut, which was saying that Devon Jones was not guilty. But she’d dot her i’s and cross her t’s.
Connor lifted his hand. “I have a question. If Crawford and Miss Evans were meeting, that suggests that she might be involved in his embezzling—if that’s what he’s been doing, and I think he has. I also think that he’s been doing so for at least ten years, so I’m wondering about Evans’s predecessor, if he or she knew. Who was that, Dr. Reeves?”
“Selma Waite,” Sam said. “She wasn’t with Shady Oaks that long. She’d been a nurse at one of the local hospitals but had administrative experience. She was hired when the previous director retired. Both Kent Crawford and Archie Adler were hired by Waite’s predecessor, whose name was JoAnne Tremblay. Selma was director for only about eight months.”
“Did you trust her, Dr. Reeves?” the captain asked.
Sam hesitated, then nodded slowly. “I suppose so. She wasn’t overly warm, but she took time to know each resident. She was very efficient with her time and with paperwork. She examined all expenditures. I once asked to have the piano tuned, and I had to fill out a stack of forms and she had to personally approve the expense. She was a real micromanager.”
Kit made a mental note to check out the facility’s financial advisor, too. She wondered if any of the board members suspected anything was amiss, so she added that to the list, too. But for the moment she was focused on Sam, because he suddenly looked a little sick. “What happened to her?”
Sam met her gaze. “She fell down the stairs in her house. She had a broken neck.”
The room went quiet, then Navarro turned to Alicia. “Dr. Batra, can you look into the woman’s autopsy records?”
“Of course. Selma Waite with an ‘e,’ Dr. Reeves?”
Sam nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s worth checking,” Navarro said. “Something fishy is going on at that home, and if this woman saw it, she might have been killed to ensure her silence. What about the director before Waite? JoAnne Tremblay? You knew her, too?”
