Michael storms out of the room.
David and Judith shake their heads as if to say, “Poor, poor Michael.” Then they smile a little to savor their triumph.
Christine? She’s looking at me with a very nervous expression on her face.
I’m kind of looking at her the same way.
Because I have to wonder: Did the last elderly patient she took care of, Mrs. Mauna Faye Crabtree, also leave her a little sumpin’-sumpin’ in her will like Dr. Rosen did? Are deathbed bequests the bonuses of the home health aide trade?
If so, Christine might’ve had a solid motive for helping ease another one of her patients out the exit door.
Bright and early Monday morning, Ceepak and I are in his office sipping bad coffee from mugs we poured out of the desk sergeant’s congealed pot and working the phones.
It doesn’t get any more detective-y than that.
Ceepak’s in his blazer and khaki cargo pants. I think there’s a zipper near the knees if he wants to turn them into shorts later in the afternoon. He seldom does.
I’m in cargo shorts and my favorite FDNY Engine 23 T-shirt. It’s been lucky for me in the past. Both of us are carrying sidearms.
We have a busy day ahead of us.
My first call of the morning is to Christine. I tag her on her cell because my apartment doesn’t have a landline. Landlines are like e-mail: so two thousand and late.
I go over the list of all the elderly patients she’s taken care of since losing her job at Mainland Medical.
“They’re all dead, Danny,” she tells me. “But that doesn’t mean I killed them.”
It also doesn’t mean I won’t be making a few more phone calls to the families of the deceased to see if any of Christine’s other patients died suddenly or under suspicious circumstances.
Ceepak spends his coffee and phone time with Bill Botzong at the Major Crimes Unit.
They’re trying to track down and trace any shipments of potassium cyanide into Sea Haven. Botzong and his team will be doing some serious data mining with all the known suppliers of the chemical compound, cross-referencing their records against the names and addresses of all our suspects, including Joy Kochman up in Lavallette, whom we will be visiting just as soon as we finish up our phone calls and hit the head.
Bad coffee? It’s like beer. You can’t buy it. You can only rent it.
We hop into Ceepak’s Batmobile and cruise up the Garden State Parkway toward Seaside Heights.
“Fascinating,” mumbles Ceepak, somewhat randomly, seeing how we’re basically humming up a generic highway filled with generic cars surrounded by garden-variety Garden State evergreen trees.
“You and I have dealt with several murderers in the past, Danny. In all those instances, the killer had to brutally confront their victim. They possessed strength, skill, or, at the very least, a warped sense of courage.”
“But in this case,” I say, “all the killer had to do was plop a pill into a plastic box and wait.”