A Mother's Trial (19 page)

“The captain wants to see you,” Walt called. “Probably wants to tell you to get rid of that VW—bad for the department’s image.”

Ted gave an answering grin. “Yeah, that must be it,” he said. He went off to his own little room across the hall where he worked in the Juvenile Division. It wasn’t much of a division as it consisted only of Ted and Lou Foster, his supervisor, and in fact Ted hadn’t been doing that much juvenile work lately. There had been a rash of homicides that they were all trying to help solve; Ted was working in Adult Investigations as much as he was in Juvenile. Although he had been assigned to Investigations less than a year, he had learned a hell of a lot precisely because they had been so busy over there. When the new chief had been appointed in 1977, it was decided that Ted was to research the backgrounds on prospective department staff. Benaderet told Ted that there was nothing more important than developing a good department and he wanted his best people handling backgrounds. Despite the compliments the chief handed him on the reports he completed, Ted found it boring work. Sometimes he longed to be back on Graveyard patrolling all alone; in some ways that was the essence of police work for Ted Lindquist.

Things had changed in patrol once he made corporal in January of 1975, because many of his new duties were supervisory and that created personnel problems. They had promoted Ted over a lot of the officers with more seniority, causing a certain degree of friction at first because he was only a three-year veteran. But he knew he couldn’t pass up the promotion, not with a wife and two kids to support and a chunk of mortgage payment on a nice older house in San Anselmo.

But since he had moved over to Investigations, new areas of police work opened up to him. For one thing he was able to follow a case from beginning to end.

Ted dropped his leather jacket onto the chair behind his desk and then went over to the captain’s office.

“Walt says you have something for me,” he said.

“Yeah. Take a look at this report and tell me what you think.” The captain flipped a typed report over the desk. Ted leafed through it, reading carefully. Several pages long, it covered the events of the previous weekend, beginning with the telephone call from a Dr. Carte at Kaiser Hospital regarding a possible child abuse case on Saturday, and ending with Officer Grieve’s impressions of Mr. and Mrs. George Stephen Phillips during his visit with them and a Miss A. Jameson from the Child Protective Services. The report sketched the background of the family. Both Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were county employees, it said. It described the contaminated formula discovered by Dr. Carte and summarized a conversation the investigating officer had held with that doctor. The report also made note of the time the apparently contaminated formula had been picked up from Kaiser on Sunday and the fact of its storage in the police department’s evidence refrigerator. There was also a reference to an earlier child who had died.

Ted looked up. “It looks very suspicious,” he said. “Definitely needs some looking into.”

“Yeah. I think so too. I’m going to let you run with it for a while. Normally I’d assign it to Walt, but he’s got three murder cases going. Get him to help you for a couple of days. See what you can develop.”

“Okay.” Ted took the report back into the Investigations Room and dropped it on Walt’s desk; then he took a seat under the No-Pest strip and waited for Walt to read it, idly taking in the decor. They had posted some bizarre material. There was a poster on Murphy’s Law, under which was written, Murphy Was an Optimist. A picture of Sherlock Holmes sported a big Help written beneath it. Ted considered Kosta’s corner decidedly weird. His desk was covered with all kinds of rabbits—a green china rabbit, a candy rabbit from See’s, and several stuffed hares. His bulletin board, too, was covered with bunnies. Walt had posted a sign advertising Free Bunny Ears with Any Purchase. Someone had nicknamed him the Green Rabbit, and he had exploited it to the hilt. The guy made everything a laugh, but he was a damned good cop, Ted knew. He was the “crimes against persons” detective, so all the murders, rapes, robberies—the crimes that involved people rather than property—came to him. It was the most important investigative position in the department.

“Well?” Ted asked. Walt looked up at him with mournful eyes and shifted his weight under a large poster on the wall that warned one and all against playing leapfrog with a unicorn.

“Teddy, my boy, I think you got yourself a case here. It sure looks like someone put something in that little girl’s formula, does it not?”

“It does, Walt. It does. Shall we mosey over to Kaiser and see what we can see?”

“An excellent idea. I should have thought of that myself.” In an unmarked car heading toward Kaiser, Ted wondered if he’d have problems over there. Kaiser was a hell of a big bureaucracy. There were something like a dozen Kaiser hospitals sprinkled around northern California alone, he knew, with probably an equal number in southern California and some in other states, too. It was the biggest health maintenance organization in the country. He was a member of it himself; so was most of the department. He and Walt would have to check in with the administration there because they were going to need both Phillips children’s medical records. Still, first he wanted to talk to the doctors.

Since Dr. Carte had been the first to contact the police, they decided to start with him. They asked Carte about the formula and he told them about the sodium. It could be ordinary baking soda that had been added, he said. He explained how ingesting too much would cause the sodium level in the blood to rise—just as it had with Mindy, he said. For detailed information, he recommended they see Dr. Shimoda. But there was no question that Mindy’s diarrhea and other symptoms could have been caused by the addition of sodium to her formula. And there was no question that the formula contained nearly thirty times its expected content of the element. Carte also described his activities on Saturday: his discovery of the contaminated formula, the controlled experiment he had carried out on a newly mixed batch of formula, the discussions he had held with the parents, particularly the mother. He told them what the mother had said about being a prime suspect.

“But the most important proof in my mind,” he said, “was that the child became well in the ICU—as soon as she was separated from her mother. There’s a guard on Mindy now, and she’s doing just fine. She should be out of the hospital by the end of the week. She could go now except that we’re waiting for definite word as to who will pick her up. I imagine it will be the adoption service, or one of their representatives.”

After the meeting with Carte, Ted and Walt sought out Dr. Shimoda. She met with them in her small office in the pediatrics wing of the Medical Office Building.

She struck Ted as beautiful and sad and very serious.

“I understand you were away from the hospital last weekend, but I want to inquire about the medical histories of Tia and Mindy Phillips,”  he began, and she sighed, bringing up one hand to touch her cheek.

“I’ll just tell you briefly,” she said. “Because it’s a very long story—particularly Tia.” She started with Tia, describing all the hospitalizations in the different hospitals, the diagnoses, and procedures.

“We never figured out what it was,” she said. “Even the autopsy didn’t tell us.”

“What cause of death was listed on the autopsy report?” Walt asked.

“Secretory diarrhea, etiology unknown. That was just a working diagnosis—an explanation of what we thought was the process of the diarrhea. We don’t—didn’t—know what caused it. She really died from brain damage probably caused from inhalation of vomit that led to oxygen starvation.”

“Could she have been poisoned with sodium, too?”

“I guess... looking back on it—” she paused, her voice shaky, “yes. But we never thought of that. The parents... the mother... was so supportive, so helpful. And the fact that it happened in all these different hospitals, and at home, too. If it had just happened at home and cleared up when she was hospitalized, well, then we might have seen... but that didn’t happen. Oh, I’ll never explain it! It’s so hard to believe that she... Anyway, it was just in these last few days that I began to think there might be some kind of foreign substance—Epsom salts we thought, or Ex-Lax. And then I was going to speak to the San Francisco coroner on Monday—yesterday—till all this happened. I have been told he’s an expert on toxicology. You should really speak to him.”

“Boyd Stephens?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. And I think it would be best if you didn’t mention to anyone that we’ve been by to talk with you. We’re just trying to get at the truth and we’re trying to collect as much information as possible. We’re not pointing the finger at anyone,” Ted said. It was a standard request at the beginning of an investigation, particularly one as potentially sensitive as this one.

“Yes, I understand.”

“Thanks for your help. I’m sure we’ll be back to you later.”

“Yes,” she repeated.

Ted and Walt swung by the administration section of the medical center and talked with Dave Neukom. The administrator wanted to know exactly what they were planning to do in his hospital.

“We’re going to investigate this thing,” Ted said. “We’re going to talk to the doctors and nurses involved—the lab technicians if we need to—everyone.”

“I’d like to know when you’re going to be here—who you’re going to interview. I don’t want you bothering the staff while they’re on duty here. We’ve got a hospital to run.”

“We appreciate that, sir. But
we’ve
got an investigation to run, and we’re going to run it the way it has to go.” Ted let a pause drag out. “You can make it hard or you can make it easy, but we can get search warrants and court orders, and if we have to, we will.”

Neukom shrugged and finally agreed, but he insisted he wanted to be in on the investigation as much as possible. Ted wanted to obtain samples of the Cho-free and polycose formulas Carte had mentioned, and Neukom asked him to come back through the administration rather than go directly to the pediatrics ward. Ted agreed to this; it was a minor point to surrender. But he felt strongly that he didn’t intend to report to the administration on every detail; it was too complicated and too time-consuming and it was unnecessary. He’d hold his interviews where and when he could. Of course many he’d conduct by telephone. That way he could tape the interview covertly. This was valid police procedure and very valuable because tapes could later be used in court if ever a witness tried to change his story. It also gave Ted a much more complete record than was possible otherwise.

Neukom had given them one interesting lead. He had spoken to the Phillipses’ minister. “This Reverend Hutchison said Mrs. Phillips made a rather odd comment to him—something about the police not being able to prove anything,” Neukom reported. Ted decided to follow it up immediately.

“What do you think?” Ted asked Walt as they made the two-minute drive down the hill to Aldersgate Church where Hutchison was pastor.

“I think it looks damn bad for the mother.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“We’ll have to get hold of the medical records on the kids and have somebody look them over—maybe Dr. Stephens or someone he might recommend,” Walt said.

“Yeah, and try to track down who made that formula. Also we gotta get an independent lab to run a test on it. I’ll call around and see who’s the best lab to do it.” Ted paused, then sneaked a look at Walt. Walt might not have any kids, but Ted had spent a lot of time with the man: He knew a lot about human nature.

“What the hell makes someone do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Walt said. “Maybe this minister can shed some light on the mother.”

“I doubt it. He’ll probably just stand up for her, say there’s no way she could be involved.”

“Yeah, probably. The minister and the husband’s always the last to know!”

But Ted was wrong. Reverend Jim Hutchison did not stand up for her.

“I had a bad feeling the minute Mr. Phillips called me on Sunday and told me that someone was trying to poison Mindy,” he said as he sat with them in his office in the back of the church, Ted’s tape rolling. “Everything seemed to come together suddenly—it seemed possible that maybe Mrs. Phillips was involved. And ever since Steve called, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I recalled there have been several unexplained deaths of children in the last few years—all young children. And I think most of them involved people in the baby-sitting co-op Priscilla started. There was the little Dacus girl—Holly Dacus—and then Matthew Bloch. I think they diagnosed him as spinal meningitis—he died the same day they found it. I’m sure he was under three years of age. And then Tia—and of course they didn’t know what she had. Just last month there was little Cindy Searway. She was sick one day and then died within one or two days and they never figured out what she had either. Her poor father tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And then Mindy, of course. It seemed like an awful spate of infant illnesses within that one tight little group. I don’t know if it has any significance, but I thought I’d mention it,” Hutchison said.

It was certainly interesting, Ted thought. Maybe nothing would develop but they’d have to look into it. What if this thing turned into a whole lot bigger can of worms than they expected? It was already looking like a possible murder investigation.

Ted wrote down the name of the woman who currently headed the baby-sitting co-op, Mrs. Virginia Gaskin.

“She used to be a pretty good friend of Priscilla’s but they had a falling-out over Mindy’s illness. You see Mindy has this contagious virus that can affect unborn children and the co-op voted to expel her until she stopped shedding the virus. Ginger Gaskin was one of the main proponents of banning Mindy. Priscilla was terribly upset by it. Anyway, Ginger can give you any more information on the co-op if you need it,” the minister said.

“All right. Can you tell me a little about the Phillips family—just your impressions of what they’re like?” Ted asked.

“Yes, well, I’d have to say Priscilla’s the dominant one in the family. I don’t think they have a very close relationship—they seem to argue a lot and compete with each other. Frankly I don’t believe Priscilla has that many close relationships because she’d rather talk than listen. However she is very active in the community. In the church she’s on the board of the United Methodist Women, and in some other groups as well, I believe. And she’s involved in the nursery school and in AAUW. She’s on every sort of committee—or she was till little Tia fell ill. Things were very quiet over there after Tia died. Then Priscilla was so excited about Mindy. And when Mindy got sick I couldn’t believe it. We all thought, Oh, no, poor Priscilla. It was hard to take in.”