Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [10]
Other paperwork in the case pertained to Spalding’s hotel holdings. Lowrey recognized a few of them by name: very swanky places in upscale California resort communities. A sleeve held a small number of business cards. Lowrey thumbed through them. One was from a Santa Barbara police captain who headed up the Major Crimes Unit. What was that all about?
Lowrey wrote the information in her notebook. Tomorrow was Sunday. She doubted the autopsy would be done quickly, given the likely absence of foul play. If the results came back as death due to natural causes, she’d drop the matter completely. Until then, she would keep the case open and call the Santa Barbara PD captain on Monday to satisfy her curiosity.
Ellie got up and poured a cup of coffee. She felt good about how the morning had gone. She’d spent five years as an investigator before earning her stripes and taking a patrol assignment. It was fun to work an investigation on her own again. In truth, she missed her old job, but accepting a promotion to the patrol division had been the only way to move up in the ranks.
She returned to her desk and started in on the paperwork, hoping it wouldn’t take all day for the New Mexico cops to find Spalding’s widow and report back.
Chapter 2
After his retirement as an Army nurse, William Price had returned home to California and started a new career as a deputy sheriff. He’d put in three years as a patrol officer and then transferred into the detective unit as an investigator/coroner. During his ten years on the job, Price had seen just about every possible kind of dead body, from gruesome murder victims and gory traffic fatalities to little old ladies who died peacefully in their sleep.
Until her promotion and transfer out of investigations to patrol, Ellie Lowrey had worked with Price on a number of homicide cases. He admired her meticulous attention to detail. Although Price saw no evidence of foul play in the death of Clifford Spalding, Ellie was right to assume a worst-case scenario until it was proved otherwise.
The department contracted for autopsy space with a mortuary in the town of Los Osos, close to the coast. In an office outside the embalming room, Price went through the clothing he’d removed from Spalding’s body. The scent of flowers from the viewing rooms at the front of the mortuary made his nose itch.
In a pocket of the expensive Italian slacks he found a small gold pill case with Spalding’s initials engraved on the hinged lid. It contained a single, small, pale yellow pill shaped in the form of two blunt arrow points with the name of the manufacturer stamped on it.
Price reached for the Physicians’ Desk Reference he carried in his briefcase, known by all who used it as the PDR, and looked up the drug. It was a hormone replacement medication used in the treatment of Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism. He read through the entry and called Ellie Lowrey to give her the news.
“Would having a thyroid condition kill him?” Lowrey asked after listening to Price’s report.
“I’m no expert on immune system diseases,” Price replied. “But not taking the medication would be dangerous, perhaps even life threatening, especially if Spalding had other health problems.”
“Wait a minute,” Lowrey said. “There was a physician’s business card in Spalding’s briefcase. Here it is, Dr. Daniel Gilbert. His office is in Santa Barbara.”
Price reached for a pen. “You want me to call him?”
“Right away,” Lowrey replied. “Get all the information you can and call me back.” She read off Gilbert’s phone number. “And pull the pathologist in to do the autopsy right now.”
“Aren’t you rushing things a bit?” Price asked, knowing that Ellie might catch some flack from the brass for authorizing a priority autopsy for what appeared to be nothing more than a routine unattended death.
“I’ve got a feeling about this,” Lowrey replied,