The 5th Horseman - James Patterson [51]
The two cars headed south in tandem, down Leavenworth, flying through twists and turns, steep climbs, and drops until the sight of Municipal Hospital filled her windshield.
Yuki signaled to follow the Mercedes into the parking lot, when she saw a police cruiser in her rearview mirror. She gripped the wheel and tapped the brakes.
Had she been speeding?
She glided into an empty space at the curb, her eyes straight ahead as the cop car sailed past her.
With a shaking hand, she turned off the ignition and waited for her heartbeat to slow.
Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl.
Her pj’s were soaked with sweat, the satin collar and cuffs peeking out from her raincoat. My God. If the cop had questioned her, what would she have told him?
She’d been stalking Garza!
Pedestrians crossed at the red light in front of her. Office workers with briefcases and steaming coffee cups. Nurses and doctors, their coats buttoned over their scrubs, feet in soft-soled shoes.
Everyone going to their jobs.
Yuki reached two weeks back into her memory, recalling going to her high-rise office, being an associate in a top law firm, being a young, fast-track litigator.
She’d loved her work. Now she couldn’t picture going to the office. All she was good for was obsessing about Dennis Garza. Thinking how in some way that monstrous man had killed her mother.
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