Murder at the House of Rooster Happiness (16 page)

The medical records clerk sat behind his desk and pulled a stack of medical charts toward him. As was his habit, he squared them with thin, elegant fingers, so that their edges lined up perfectly. Then he began to flick a corner of the top chart with a fingernail.

Still he said nothing. He looked from her to the charts and back but didn’t speak. It wouldn’t pay to rush things, she knew. Khun Panit would speak up when he was ready.

But her composure began to dissolve a moment later. As she looked at the stack of charts, she noticed that each one was thin. Very thin. There couldn’t be more than a few scant sheets of paper in each one. Just like the chart of the man, Zhang Wei, who had recently died.

She had a sinking feeling as she realized that this would be a difficult conversation indeed. No wonder Khun Panit was so reticent.

And yet… she felt excitement, too. This was a real murder mystery. Or it might be.

She’d just reached that conclusion when Khun Panit began to speak. He was avoiding her eyes now, which confirmed her worst fears about those charts.

And there was the fact that he was smiling. It was the smile known as
yim yae yae
, which meant, “I know things look bad, but getting upset won’t make things any better, so why not smile?”

“I must admit, Khun Ladarat,” he said slowly, “that I doubted your idea that there might be murders.” He paused, flicking the corner of the top chart more frequently now. “I mean, murders involving this very hospital? Unknown to us? It was inconceivable.”

He paused, thinking, as he squared the slim stack of files one more time.

“And yet I did as you asked. And I found these.” He pushed the pile of charts toward her, as if they were trash he wanted to get rid of. And perhaps they were. They were evidence that the orderly world he’d created was beginning to fray around the edges.

“There are eight charts,” he continued. “Eight separate people. All of them were brought into Casualty in the early morning hours. The first about five years ago. And the last—the man you asked me about—only two days ago.”

That seemed impossible. Eight men killed?

“But, Khun, how do you know that they were…” What was the word?

“Connected?” He smiled sadly. “That is the term, I believe? You see, I am not a detective, so I do not have all of the right words as you do. But I think that is the word for which you were searching.” He smiled again.

There was no malice in his teasing, she knew. He was actually paying her a compliment. She had uncovered these murders, and he was giving her credit.

“I can’t be certain, of course. But it is not a coincidence. Look at the name on the top chart.”

She did. It was Zhang Wei, the man who had died two nights ago. But… the date was wrong. The date was from two years ago. She looked at Mr. Booniliang, who nodded.

She looked more closely at the stamp on the upper-left corner of the chart. It was for Central Chiang Mai Memorial Hospital, about two kilometers southeast, near the river.

“Exactly so. Look at the next chart,” he suggested.

She did. It was from about six months later, but bore the same name, and the stamp of yet another hospital.

The real shock came with the third chart. She checked the stamp first—it was her own hospital. Three years ago. But with the same patient name.

Quickly, she flipped through all eight charts and found three from her hospital.

Mr. Booniliang looked grave. And he was no longer smiling. “I don’t know which is worse,” he said. “The fact that there were three deaths in our hospital, or the fact that there were five in other hospitals.”

She thought about that for a moment. There was something about this that was nagging at her. Then she realized what was wrong.

“There are three hospitals in this pile,” she said.

Panit nodded.

“Three deaths at our hospital, three at Memorial, and two at Changpuek.”

Panit nodded again, looking worried.

“Khun?”

“Yes?”

“How big is your cricket league?”

“We have four hospitals,” he said sadly.

“So at least there is one hospital where these deaths are not happening,” she said. “That is cause for some relief.” Ladarat was duly relieved.

But then she noticed that Panit did not look relieved.

“Well, you see, my friend at that fourth hospital just had gall bladder surgery, so he was not able to help me.”

They both sat there quietly, pondering that information. But she wanted to be certain.

“So you mean to say that you inquired at three hospitals and there were suspicious deaths at all three?”

The medical records clerk nodded. “That is what I mean to say.”

“Ah.” It was the only reply she could think of.

There were half a dozen hospitals in or near Chiang Mai. There was Lanna Hospital and Siamriad to the north along Route 11. And McCormick Hospital, to the east of the river. And those were just the ones that were very close.

She looked at the medical records clerk, who was still nodding. “So you see? This is a problem, Khun. A big problem.” He paused. “If you doubt me still, look at the names of these men’s wives.” She did, flipping through the stack as she had before, but looking this time at the line on the first page that listed the patient’s next of kin.

She looked up again at Panit, who was once again wearing the
yim yae yae
smile.

“Eight men with the same name…” she said.

“Married to the same woman,” he finished her thought.

“Peaflower,” they said in unison.

Suddenly very serious, Panit Booniliang leaned across the desk. “You must find her,” he said. “You must find this woman. She kills a man regularly. So she will kill another very soon.”

Ladarat nodded uneasily. Khun Panit’s hard work had confirmed her worst fears, but it hadn’t done much to help her solve the case. The stakes were higher, certainly. But her job wouldn’t be any easier.

She thanked the medical records clerk and made her way out past his smiling nephew. Out in the hallway, though, her thoughts turned back to the conversation she’d just had. She thought, too, about her observation that her job hadn’t gotten any easier. She thought about that very hard, in fact, as she made her way down the hallway to her office.

But this wasn’t her job, was it? It was not. She was… unqualified.

A simple look into medical records was one thing. But a murder? A serial murder? Eight men? As Khun Tippawan would no doubt tell her, she was a nurse, not a detective.

She should call Khun Wiriya. She should let him know what she’d found. And she should tell him that she could no longer help. She would tell him what she knew, and then she would go back to being a nurse ethicist.

A HIGHLY INEFFICIENT WAY TO CATCH A CRIMINAL

B
ut things did not work out in the way that Ladarat had planned. Not quite. She had tried to call Khun Wiriya, but he hadn’t been in his office. His secretary gave Ladarat the detective’s mobile phone, but he didn’t answer that either. She left a message, and then—what else?—went back to work.

There were seventy-three policies left to review, and not nearly enough time. She couldn’t afford to spend precious hours on a murder investigation for which she was so poorly equipped. As she worked her way through policy after policy, checking expiration dates, she moved them from the left side of her desk to the right. Each wave of migration from west to east across her desk gave her a tiny but noticeable breath of satisfaction. And then she’d turn to the next one in line.

Yet she found that she could not keep herself from thinking about this Peaflower murderer. Indeed, in the gap of concentration that opened as each policy passed from one pile to the other, she thought for just a second about her investigation.

During each momentary respite between policies, her thoughts circled around one very simple question. What would make a person kill again and again and again like that? But no answer came to her. So she would move on to the next one.

Eventually, though, her thoughts began to follow one another down a common path, and that path led her back to the question of Peaflower’s motives. At some point after the twenty-ninth policy but before the thirty-fifth, she began to wonder if her focus on life insurance was incorrect. Sometimes, she knew, when you see a problem initially in a particular way, it is hard to set that initial impression aside. It becomes part of the way that you see the world.

Is that what she was doing? Had she become nearsighted, looking only for Peaflower’s financial gain? Was it a vendetta after all, as Siriwan had suggested? Her cousin was a woman of the world and surely would know about such things.

Or perhaps—just perhaps—this wasn’t murder at all. Could there be another explanation? Could there be a simple explanation that didn’t involve murder?

As Professor Dalrymple warned her readers, a nurse must always take a step back and look at ethical problems—and patients—with fresh eyes.

That was what she must do now. Reevaluate.

And that was precisely what she was trying to do when the phone on her desk rang, startling her out of her reverie. The official Sriphat Hospital Policy on the Appropriate Care of the Elderly Patient slid out of her right hand and fluttered under her desk. Reaching one hand for the phone and extending the other under the desk, she answered as she scrabbled blindly for Policy No. 04-5829.

But she stopped scrabbling and straightened up as she heard the voice of Khun Wiriya. He sounded tired. Tired and… beaten down.

He must have a very hard life. Always chasing bad people. That must be debilitating. Always thinking about the worst in everyone. That must be even worse.

And in that moment, she realized that she was being selfish. How could she think of abandoning the job that she had begun? This was something she had committed to do. So it was her responsibility. She had to finish.

And that is why, as she told Khun Wiriya what she had found, she found herself falling into the role of a detective.

“So what does this mean?” she asked when she’d finished.

“It means we have a problem.”

“But… you don’t sound very worried.”

“Oh, I am worried. Very worried indeed. I think we have a woman who has killed many men and is likely trying to murder another one soon. So I’m very worried. But worrying won’t help protect the next man she has set her sights on.”

“Then what will?”

“Finding him before she does.”

“So you have a plan?”

“For a start, I’ll look for men with the same name in Chiang Mai.”

“And warn them?”

“No, I’ll investigate them. I’ll find out who they know and who they’ve been in contact with.”

“That is your plan?”

“I didn’t say it was a good plan.”

Indeed, that seemed like a highly inefficient way to catch a criminal. A little like posting policemen outside every bank in case someone tried to rob it. But he was the detective, not her.

After they’d said their good-byes, though, as she was finishing the pile of policies on her desk, his answer continued to nag at her. There were many men out there with this unfortunate name who were at risk. It was, after all, one of the most common of Chinese names. Less common in Chiang Mai, of course, than in mainland China. But still.

As she finished gathering her policies into a neat pile, she squared them just as Khun Panit liked to. Then she remembered the policy that had slid under her desk. She retrieved it, putting it in order. She was glad that she’d insisted that each of their policies have a unique number that denoted the year in which it was created. She’d invented that system herself several years ago to try to keep track of a growing stack of policies. Now each policy had a unique number that could be tracked. One number per policy. It was the sort of order that Mr. Booniliang would appreciate.

She was gathering up her handbag and turning off the light when those numbers gave her an idea. She stopped in the doorway, the office dark behind her except for a streak of light sneaking through the narrow basement window. It was a long shot certainly. And probably not worth exploring. And yet… she was increasingly certain that Khun Wiriya’s strategy would not help him find the murderer.

This idea Ladarat was thinking about might not find her either. But at least it was something. And besides, if they both looked in different ways, perhaps they might compare results?

And in the back of her mind, she admitted, there was the tiny hope that perhaps she would succeed where the detective had failed. Not a realistic hope, she knew, since he was a detective and she was only a nurse. Nevertheless…

But she was too tired to think about this right now. She would go home, and she would get something satisfying. Perhaps
gai pad pongali
—yellow curry rice with an egg whipped in. Like a savory curry pudding. Usually more of a winter dish, but perhaps Khun Duanphen would make an exception. And maybe—if she was very lucky—there would be
glooai tawt
. She would sit on her patio and share her dinner with
Maewfawbaahn
. And she would read the biography of Aung San Suun Kyi, with the compelling cover, because it was important to learn about inspiring people whenever one could.