I said, “But let me get this straight, it all hangs on the diagnosis?”
“That’s correct.”
“So you personally could change any doctor’s diagnosis—that’s what you’re saying?”
Engstrom stared numbly at me as I spoke, and then she snapped, “That’s outrageous. No, it’s beyond outrageous, it’s completely nuts. I’ll take a polygraph test anytime. Just say the word.”
“We may take you up on that later,” I said. “But right now, we’re just talking. Do you know Marie St. Germaine?”
“No. Who is she?”
“How well do you know Dr. Garza?” Jacobi asked.
“He’s our ER director,” Engstrom said. “We’re both senior staff —”
Jacobi stood, pounded the flat of his hand on her desk. Pens and paper clips jumped.
“Cut the crap, Dr. Engstrom!” he said. “You and Garza are what we call ‘close,’ aren’t you? Intimate, in fact.”
Engstrom’s face blanched.
I was so startled, I thought I might swallow my tongue. What was he talking about?
I remembered Jacobi’s call to me that rainy night when he tailed Garza to the Venticello Ristorante and back to Garza’s house. He’d described a willowy blonde, a babe about forty. As far as I can tell, he’d said, the doctor is guilty of having a girlfriend.
Across the desk, Engstrom’s eyes suddenly welled up with tears.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.”
Chapter 122
ENGSTROM WAS MELTING DOWN in front of us, and loud gongs were going off inside my head. Garza and Engstrom. A perfect partnership for killing, everything probably as neat and efficient as her office.
I needed her to talk more—I didn’t want her to shut down on us now.
“Dr. Engstrom, take it easy. This is your chance to get ahead of this horror show. We’ll work with you if you tell us the truth, right now. Maybe Garza was using you. Does he have access to the computer software?”
I saw fear in her eyes. Slowly, reluctantly, Engstrom nodded, yes.
My skin prickled. All the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up as Engstrom said, “I let him into the computer system a couple of times.”
“A couple of times?”
“Every now and then. But it’s not what you’re thinking! Dennis Garza is an excellent doctor. He’s very conscientious, as am I.
“The unexpected deaths of those patients were driving us crazy. Dennis was checking for inconsistencies between the diagnoses and the prescriptions. Just as I was doing.”
“Did you ever find a correlation?” I asked.
“No. Never. We put the errors down to mistakes made on the floor. Nurses mixing things up on their trays, dispensing medication to the wrong patients after the medication left the pharmacy. That’s the truth.”
“Were you with Dr. Garza every time he—what do you call it? Accessed the computer?” Jacobi asked.
“Of course. My fingerprint was needed—but I didn’t stand over him, if that’s what you mean.”
I saw the alarm come over Engstrom’s face as she realized what Jacobi was getting at. The cords in her neck stood out. She reached out to the desktop and steadied herself.
“Dennis would never, ever harm a patient. He’s a great doctor.”
Jacobi growled, “Yeah, well, sounds like you’re in love with him to me. Are you in love with Dr. Garza?”
“I was in love with him,” she said, a pathetic note sounding in her voice. “But it’s over, believe me. I found out that he was sleeping with somebody else. Dennis was fucking Maureen O’Mara. You know who she is?”
I nodded my head, but I was shocked. Maureen O’Mara had just put the screws to Municipal Hospital. How could it be that she and Garza were lovers?
I wanted to look at Jacobi, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Sonja Engstrom.
“You look surprised, Lieutenant. You didn’t know, did you?” Engstrom said. “It took me a while to figure it out, too. Strange bedfellows, don’t you think?
“Dennis Garza and Maureen O’Mara.” She snorted, a little self-deprecating laugh. “Just imagine the possibilities.”
Chapter 123
AS I LEFT THE HOSPITAL with Jacobi, my mind flashed back and leaped forward.
Garza and Engstrom.
Garza and O’Mara.
Imagine the possibilities.
We got into the car, Jacobi taking the wheel, starting the engine. I was feeling the charge that comes when you’re this close to landing a big one. It’s like listening to a live concert and wanting to take to the stage and sing.
Only this was better.
“Cindy was at the trial when Garza was on the stand,” I told Jacobi. “O’Mara asked Garza if he had anything to do with the plaintiffs’ deaths. And get this, Jacobi. Garza took the Fifth Amendment.”
“That makes no sense,” Jacobi said, turning the car onto Leavenworth. “Garza wasn’t on trial.”
“Right. And Cindy’s reaction was ‘Wow. The guy was protecting himself from something.’ She told me that when he blurted that out, it was the turning point of the trial. He devastated the hospital’s defense.”
“So did O’Mara trip him up? Let him twist in the wind? Or did he do that all by himself?”
“Interesting question, Jacobi. I wonder who is letting who twist in the wind. Both of Garza’s girlfriends were involved in the case against Municipal.”
I grabbed the dash as Jacobi took a hard right onto Filbert Street.
“It’s all here, but I can’t quite see the whole picture. If Garza killed all of those people, where’s the connection?”
Jacobi parked in front of Garza’s creamy-yellow stucco house and turned off the ignition.
“Let’s go ask the doctor,” said Jacobi.
Chapter 124
JACOBI GRUNTED AS HE hauled himself out of the squad car. I joined him on the sidewalk, both of us shielding our eyes against the sun as we stared up at Garza’s spiffy three-story stucco house with a large front porch and cropped lawn on both sides of a flagstone walk.
I was thinking of Garza, wondering if he had some kind of relationship with a Haitian nurse by the name of Marie St. Germaine, when Jacobi stooped along the walkway, saying, “Lookit here, Boxer.”
He pointed out drops of blood on the path, the beginning of a trail speckling the walkway and beading up on the painted floor of the porch. A bloody smear sullied the shining brass doorknob.
“This is fresh,” Jacobi muttered.
Thoughts of interviewing Garza blew out of my mind.
What the hell had happened here?
I pressed the doorbell. At the same time, I took out my gun; so did Jacobi.
Chimes rang out, and the seconds dragged by as we waited for the answering sound of footsteps.
No one came to the door.
I banged on the door with my fist.
“Open up! This is the police.”
“I’m calling this ‘exigent circumstances,’” I said to Jacobi. It was a borderline call. We can only enter a home without a warrant if someone’s life is in danger.
There wasn’t a lot of blood. Maybe someone had cut a finger, but I had an overpowering sense that something was wrong. That we had to get into the house right now.
I unhitched the Nextel from my waistband and called for backup.
Jacobi nodded, looked around the porch, then decided on a concrete planter the size of a pillow. He tipped the geraniums over the railing and, using the planter as a battering ram, smashed in a panel of the oaken front door.
I reached in through the splintered wood, flapped my hand around until I located the lock, and opened the door to Garza’s house.
Chapter 125
I YELLED OUT from the doorway, “This is the police. We’re coming in.”
Again, there was no answer, and the place just felt empty.
Jacobi and I advanced through the foyer into a living room that no longer looked like a photo feature in Town & Country magaz
ine. I ran my eyes over the upended furniture and the vast amount of blood that was absolutely everywhere in the room.
“Let me be the first to say,” Jacobi said, scanning the devastation with hooded eyes, “whatever happened here wasn’t the work of a pro.”
My mouth went dry as I took it all in.
Arterial spray was splashed across the pale plaster walls and had dripped down to the baseboards. Constellations of blood spattered the ceiling. A large red-brown stain soaked into the carpet in front of the sofa. Bloody footprints crisscrossed the floor, and handprints smeared the fireplace mantel.
Bile climbed into my throat as I imagined the fury and the terror that had filled this room only a short time ago. Who was involved?
I was locked in a vacant stare until Jacobi broke the spell for me.
“Boxer. Let’s do it,” he said.
We swept the downstairs rooms, covering each other. Blood smears on the dining-room walls led us to the kitchen sink, where an eight-inch Chicago Cutlery meat knife rested in the watery blood rimming the drain.
We climbed the stairs to the second and third floors, clearing the rooms, throwing open the closets and shower-stall doors, checking under the beds.
“Nobody. Nothing.” Jacobi grunted.
The master bedroom was furnished in heavy mahogany furniture, navy-blue carpet and curtains, pale-blue sheets. But the blankets had been stripped off the bed and removed from the room.
We holstered our guns and headed back downstairs to the living room.
That’s when I saw the heavy crystal vase lying on its side in the niche of the fireplace.
“Jacobi. Come here and look at this.”
He stepped heavily across the room, put his hands on his knees, then bent down and examined the vase.
“It wouldn’t take much to clobber someone with that thing. Take a nice chunk out of their skull,” Jacobi said.
“Look here,” I said, feeling a chill as I pointed to the hairs sticking to the bloody, sawtoothed lip of the vase. The strands were black, about five inches in length. It would take days of lab work to confirm what I already knew.
“Jacobi—this is Dennis Garza’s hair.”
Chapter 126
SIRENS SCREAMED UP Leavenworth, the swooping wail getting louder as the line of patrol cars turned onto Filbert.
“I’ll be outside,” Jacobi told me.
We’d only been in the house for a few minutes, but I felt time whizzing past. I took up a position in the foyer that gave me a full view of the living room. I ran the scene through my mind again, trying to make sense of evidence that didn’t want to make any sense.
It didn’t look like a robbery gone bad. The doors were all locked, and the only sign of forced entry was what Jacobi had done to the front door.
I imagined someone ringing the doorbell as we had done, Garza letting in a person he knew. But who was it?
The overturned club chair, the broken lamp, the whatnots scattered on the floor made me think that an argument had turned physical, had spun completely out of control.
I imagined this unknown assailant conking Garza on the head with that vase, Garza’s skull splitting, the wound spewing blood as only a head wound can do.
I could see Garza falling by the fireplace, pulling himself up using the ornate wood carvings as a handhold. The attacker must’ve panicked that Garza was badly injured but still alive, going from a terrified “Oh, shit, I didn’t mean to go this far” to a determined “This prick’s got to die.”
There were bloody handprints on the door frame leading to the kitchen, where the killer had gotten the knife.
The castoff blood on the ceiling could only mean that Garza had been stabbed repeatedly while he was alive.
Then the attacker had taken Garza from behind and slashed his throat. That would explain the arterial spray across the walls.
The trail of blood seeping into the carpet made me think that Garza hadn’t stayed down. He had tried to reach the front door, his will to survive propelling him forward, his mortal wounds slowing him down. He’d finally collapsed in front of the sofa, where he’d bled out and died.
Someone hated Garza enough to attack with such incredible violence. Someone he’d trusted enough to let inside the house. The same person who’d then removed Garza’s body and locked the door.
Who?
Sirens cut out as the squad cars pulled up on the lawn. I walked out to the front steps and was calling the DA’s office for a Mincy warrant to secure the scene, when Charlie Clapper came up the walkway.
He greeted me with a “Hey, Lindsay” and a flip of his hand. A second later, I heard him say “bloody hell” as Jacobi came out of the garage and crossed the lawn toward me.
“Garza has two cars,” Jacobi said. “His SUV is in the garage, but his Mercedes is missing. There’s another car parked next to the SUV. It’s a black BMW sedan, with vanity plates. Spells out redhead.”
Chapter 127
A DOZEN MOBILE UNITS and the crime scene van had walled off Garza’s house from the main road. Yellow tape flapped in the breeze and was tangled on the railing going up the front stairs.
I stood under glaring sunlight, blinking at Jacobi as my hypothetical reconstruction of the homicide totally blew apart. Why was O’Mara’s car at Garza’s house?
Had she killed Garza? Could she have maneuvered his body into that Mercedes Roadster? Or was it the other way around?
Had O’Mara clipped Garza with that crystal vase, and he’d retaliated with killing force?
Either way, we had no body, a missing car, O’Mara’s car in the garage, and one of the bloodiest crime scenes I’d ever seen.
“Okay,” I said to Jacobi. “So where is O’Mara? Where is Redhead?”
While inspectors and uniforms canvassed Garza’s neighbors, Jacobi and I used our squad car as an office. He got out a BOLO on Garza’s Mercedes while I called O’Mara’s office and got her assistant, Kathy, on the line.
I imagined her sharp blade of a face, her big hair, as O’Mara’s assistant talked and ate her lunch in my ear.
“Maureen’s taking a week off. She needed a vacation,” Kathy said. “She’s earned it.”
“I’m sure. Where’d she go?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice. Repressed panic.
“What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”
“It’s police business, Kathy.”
“Maureen didn’t say where she was going, but I can give you all her numbers.”
“That would be a big help.”
I dialed O’Mara’s cell phone, got her mailbox. I left my number on her pager. Called her house and got a busy signal, again and again.
Jacobi punched out O’Mara’s name on the console computer, and got data from the DMV.
He read it out loud. “Maureen Siobhan O’Mara; Caucasian; single; date of birth eight, fifteen, seventy-three; height five nine; weight one fifty-two. She’s a big girl,” Jacobi mused.
He turned the screen so I could see O’Mara’s photo and her address.
“We can be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.
“Let’s try for ten.”
Jacobi backed the car away from the curb and, with tires scraping the concrete, cut around the scene-mobile and into the traffic lane.
I flipped on the grille lights and the siren as we shot up Leavenworth toward O’Mara’s house in the tony enclave of Sea Cliff.
Chapter 128
NUMBER 68 SEAVIEW TERRACE was a mango-colored Mediterranean-style villa with an unobstructed view of the bay, the bridge, Sausalito, and maybe Honolulu for all I knew.
Birds chirped in the shrubbery.
Jacobi and I mounted the porch, my mind seething with vivid images of the carnage at Garza’s house and the cyclone of questions whirling in my mind.
Come on, Maureen. Please be home.
I pressed the doorbell, and a no-nonsense buzzer blatted loudly at my touch. I heard no answering voice, though, no footfalls coming toward the door.
I
shouted, “Police,” pressed the buzzer again, stood back as Jacobi stepped in and banged the door with his fist.
No answer. Nothing at all. C’mon, Redhead.
That creepy feeling came over me again—the horrors of death playing my vertebrae like a xylophone.
O’Mara was missing, and her secretary didn’t know where she was. We’d already played fast and loose with exigent circumstances once today. I was going to chance it again.
“I smell gas,” I lied.
“Take it easy, Boxer. I’m too old to walk a beat.”
“Garza’s place looks like a slaughterhouse, Warren, and O’Mara’s car is there. It’s my ass if we screw up.”
I wrenched the doorknob, and it turned in my hand. I let the door swing open slowly, as if a breeze had given it a tap.
We took out our guns. Again.
“This is the police. We’re coming in.”
The entranceway opened into a bright, many-windowed living room with tropical printed furnishings and large, brilliant oil paintings. I was looking for trouble inside O’Mara’s house, but as far as I could see, nothing had been disturbed.
We swept the ground floor, calling out to each other.
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
We found one bright room after another, empty and spotlessly clean.
As we climbed the stairs, a scent I’d thought was potpourri got stronger, leading us to the master bedroom.
The bedroom was painted peach. A life-size oil-on-canvas painting of an entwined couple doing the deed faced the king-size bed. I don’t get this kind of “art” in bedrooms, but obviously some people must like it. Apparently, Maureen O’Mara was one of them.
To the left of the bed was a wall of windows with a view to die for.
The opposite wall was made up entirely of closets. The mirrored bifold doors were open, all eight of them, and O’Mara’s clothes were strewn everywhere. What happened here? How long ago?