All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [83]
Baldwin flipped open his phone and called Grimes. The voice mail came on and he left a message. “Grimes, it’s Baldwin. Did you get a work history for Shauna Davidson? It’s not in the file. Call me as soon as you get this, okay?”
He hung up and paced around the room. Jeanette Lernier didn’t fit the profile, she was in marketing. All the other girls worked at a local hospital. Shauna was premed. Community hospital. Community hospital. Hmm.
Time to make a leap. He opened his phone again, dialing the 800 information number. When the operator came on he asked for the number for a community hospital in Jackson, Mississippi. There was a pause, and the woman came back to him. She had a listing for a Jackson Community Hospital. He’d been operating under the assumption the community hospital was just a designator, not the name of the place. Well, damn. He thanked her and hung up, fumbling open his laptop and plugging “Jackson Community Hospital” into the Google search engine. Sure enough, it popped up.
He read through the site and saw a link at the bottom. It was called “About Health Partners”, and as he opened it his cell rang. Grimes had finally gotten back to him.
“Shauna Davidson had been taking some summer courses, mostly in microbiology and immunology. She had to spend a few weeks doing practical applications. That’s it.”
“But Grimes, where did she do the practical work?”
“At the local hospital. Nashville Community Hospital. Why, Baldwin, you got something?”
“I’ll let you know.” He hung up, gave his attention back to the Web site and clicked on the Health Partners link.
He entered a sophisticated and accessible Web portal. Someone had spent a lot of time and effort to make it pop. It quickly became apparent that Health Partners was the parent company of the community hospital organizations. He went through all of the information, gleaning names and sites. The company had hospitals in several states, all up and down the eastern seaboard and throughout the Southeast. That was a bust. If the killer was focusing on hospitals this company owned, they would have to put out alerts from Florida to Delaware.
Baldwin closed the laptop, deflated. That had to be the link, and yet it only served to widen the field, not narrow it.
He dialed Grimes’s number again, and again got voice mail. Damn, was the man sleeping already? He’d just talked to him and told him he’d call him back. Baldwin looked at the clock. It was 2:00 a.m. He’d been trolling through the Web for a couple of hours. Well, yes, Grimes probably was sleeping. This could wait until morning. The best he could do was have a background check done on all employees of the community hospitals in the cities where the girls were taken and hope that some aberration jumped out at him. There had to be something else.
Baldwin decided he’d better get some sleep. Maybe something would come to him in his dreams.
Thirty-One
Noelle Pazia stopped pedaling, rested her foot on the gravel and coughed for what felt like an eternity. She’d been coughing like this for a week, and the student health center, realizing she needed more than they could provide, had finally sent her in for chest X-rays. She suffered from asthma, and used an inhaler, but it wasn’t touching this nasty cough. So she’d pedaled her mountain bike down to the Asheville Community Hospital, sat for two hours, gotten her X-ray and cycled back toward campus. Not that cycling was great for her cold or bronchitis or pneumonia or whatever sickness she had that made her feel so horrible. She could hear her father now, in his heavy Italian accent, “Noelle, you knowa you shouldn’t be riding that crazy bike up and down those hills when you sick. You’re smarter than that, cara.” Yes, she was, but she didn’t have a car, nor did she feel like begging a ride off of one of her friends.
As she coughed and tried