No Place to Die (23 page)

The lieutenant woke me out of a fitful sleep just after one
A.M.
to tell me that a man tentatively identified as Carl McClain had been shot and was in the emergency room at Hayden Memorial. I dressed quickly, slammed the bubble light onto the dashboard of my Chevy, and
raced to the hospital. Fifteen minutes after getting the call, I left my car in a no-parking zone near the ambulance entrance to the emergency room and ran inside.

The victim was still in surgery. The nurse at the desk could tell me nothing about his condition and had no idea how long the surgery might last. Two hospital security guards were on duty at the door to the room where the victim was being treated. I instructed them not to leave the post under any circumstances, except that one of them should come and find me the instant there was any news about the patient’s condition.

The city patrolman who’d originally responded to the call had isolated the shooter in a room on the first floor. “A doctor and a nurse are in there with her,” he said, pointing at the closed door. “She was pretty shook-up.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I’m not for sure myself. The lady was basically incoherent when I talked to her. She’s a nurse who’d just gotten off of work. A couple of minutes after she left, she came running back into the building, screaming that Carl McClain had followed her down the elevator and into the parking garage and that she’d shot him. She still had the gun in her hand. She gave it to the ER security guard, and he called nine-one-one. I was the first to respond, and the guard gave the gun to me. I called for backup. Two more squads arrived and sealed the scene down in the parking garage.”

“Where’s the gun now?”

“Here,” he said, handing me a white paper bag that might once have contained somebody’s lunch. “I didn’t touch the gun myself. I dropped it into the bag using a pen in the barrel. But the stupid security guard had his paws all over it before I could tell him not to. Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t leave this spot until I tell you to do so.”

The patrolman nodded and I tapped once on the door, then opened it and walked into a conventional hospital room with two twin beds and the usual accompanying furniture. A black woman wearing blue nurse’s scrubs lay on the bed closest to the door. She was fortyish, a little overweight, and shaking as if she were freezing to death. A nurse sat on the far side of the bed, using a soothing voice in an effort to calm the woman.

A young man in green hospital scrubs, whom I assumed to be a resident, was taking the woman’s pulse. He finished, laid her arm down on the bed, and walked over to the door. I showed him my badge and said, “Doctor, what’s her condition?”

“She’s terrified, but otherwise unhurt. She seems to be calming down a bit, but I may have to give her a sedative. The patrolman asked me to hold off until a detective could arrive, but I need to stay here and monitor her condition while you talk to her. If she gets too upset, I’ll have to insist on sedating her.”

I nodded and walked over to the bed. The woman watched my approach with wide eyes and gripped the hand of the nurse who was sitting beside her. The woman was still wearing her employee’s badge, and using my most sympathetic voice, I said, “Can you tell me what happened tonight, Ms. Williamson?”

Tears began rolling down her cheeks. She looked at me, swallowed hard, and said, “I served on the jury that convicted Carl McClain. When I got off work tonight, he followed me down into the garage. I tried to get into my car to get away, but he was too fast. I didn’t have time. All I could do was shoot him.”

She began crying harder. I waited for a moment and then said, “How did you know it was McClain, Ms. Williamson?”

The woman sniffled, blinking her eyes to stem the tears. “Two detectives came by yesterday and showed
me a picture and some drawings. I recognized him off of one of the drawings.”

“You say he followed you into the garage. Did he have a weapon?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know…Not that I could see.”

“What did he say—did he threaten you?”

Again she shook her head and then nodded yes. “He followed me out of the elevator toward my car. When I tried to walk faster, he walked faster too, getting closer to me. When I got to my car, he tried to stop me.”

“Stop you how, ma’am?”

“I don’t remember how exactly. He said, ‘Wait a minute,’ or something like that. I turned and he was right behind me, getting ready to grab me. That’s when I shot him. It was all I could do.”

Williamson shook her head and began sobbing harder. The nurse squeezed her hand, promising that everything would be all right, and at that point the young doctor stepped in. “I’m sorry, Detective, but I think that’s all she can stand for the moment. I’m going to sedate her and you can talk to her again in the morning.”

I nodded. “Okay, Doctor, but we’ll be posting a guard at her door and she won’t be able to leave until we’ve had a chance to talk with her further.”

I walked back down to the emergency room and found Maggie racing through the lobby door. She was dressed in jeans and had thrown a blue blazer on over a white T-shirt. She’d not taken the time to apply any makeup, and her hair was a bit more tousled than usual. But as was almost always the case, she still somehow managed to be the most attractive woman in the room, even fresh out of bed at one forty-five in the morning.

I caught her up, and just as I finished, a doctor in bloody scrubs emerged from the hall leading to the
operating room. We identified ourselves, and I asked him how the patient was doing.

“Better than expected, I would say,” the doctor sighed. “Fortunately, he was shot with a small-caliber gun that didn’t do nearly as much damage as a larger weapon would have done. Also, miraculously, neither of the bullets hit any major arteries or seriously damaged any vital organs. He’s sedated of course, and he’s going to hurt like hell for a while, but he should eventually make a full recovery.”

“Can we at least take a look at him?” Maggie asked.

“Not at the moment, Detective. As I say, he’s sedated and he’s not going to have anything to say for a while. You can see him in the morning.”

Glancing at the nameplate on the guy’s left breast pocket, I said, “Look, Dr. Nauman, the man you’re treating in there has been identified as a suspect in six homicides and a kidnapping. The kidnapping victim is still missing, and obviously, time is of the essence here. We understand that we can’t talk to the man now, but we need to begin the process of establishing his identity immediately.

“If this is our suspect, we’ll need to question him at the earliest opportunity. If he isn’t, then we’ve got to know that immediately too so that we’re not sitting here twiddling our thumbs while the real killer is still out there at large in the community.”

Nauman nodded and said, “Okay, you can take a quick look, but that’s all I can allow at this point.”

He led us through the door and down the hall to the recovery room. He pulled back a curtain to reveal a man lying on a bed, attached to a variety of monitors and to a drip line that was pumping some sort of clear solution into his system. The victim appeared to be in his early forties and in good physical shape, save of course for the two bullets he’d just taken in the gut.

I guessed him to be about six feet and perhaps a
hundred and ninety pounds. He had dark wavy hair that fell down across his forehead like a reverse comma and a fading tattoo on his arm that read
SEMPER FI.

I turned to Nauman and said, “Where are his clothes and personal effects?”

“In there,” he answered, pointing to a large black plastic bag under the bed. “Everything’s there except for the T-shirt he was wearing. We had to cut it off, and we simply threw it away.”

I retrieved the bag and carried it over to a chair at the foot of the bed. I opened the bag and found myself looking at a pile of bloody clothes. Lying on top of the clothes was a pair of glasses with dark brown frames.

I asked Nauman for a pair of surgical gloves and another bag. I laid the glasses on top of the second bag and then pulled a pair of jeans out of the first. The front of the jeans was drenched in blood and I turned them around and retrieved a wallet from the back pocket. I dropped the jeans back into the bag and opened the wallet.

According to the driver’s license, which had been issued two years earlier, the man lying on the bed behind me was Daniel Foster, a forty-two-year-old resident of Cave Creek. The photo on the license matched the guy in the bed, and so did the photo on the card behind the driver’s license that identified Foster as an employee of the hospital since October 18 of the previous year.

I showed the ID to Nauman. “Do you know him?”

The doctor shook his head. “No, but I know someone who will.”

Nauman led us through the labyrinth of hospital hallways until we arrived at the custodial department. The supervisor on duty identified Foster’s picture and confirmed that he’d been working for the hospital since a month before Carl McClain was released from Lewis.

According to his time card, Foster had clocked out at midnight, and the supervisor speculated that, like Williamson, he had simply been headed to his car in the employee’s parking area of the garage. “Dan’s a helluva nice guy,” the supervisor insisted. “He’d never hurt a flea. Is this woman fuckin’ nuts or what?”

Maggie and I turned the shooting over to a team of night-shift detectives and left the hospital a little after three. We were both still wired, and neither of us was going to be getting back to sleep any time soon, so we decided to get some breakfast. I followed her to a Denny’s a few blocks from the hospital, and we slid into a booth at the back of the nearly empty restaurant.

A waitress who seemed far too chipper for that hour of the morning brought a cup of coffee for Maggie and a large orange juice for me. As the young woman walked back toward the kitchen, Maggie gave me a look of mock amazement.

“You’re drinking something that might actually be good for you? What the hell happened—did the Coca-Cola Company go out of business overnight?”

“Jesus, I hope not,” I countered. “I can’t begin to imagine how horrible the withdrawal pains would be.”

She shot me a look, then blew across the top of her cup and took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee. Setting the cup back down on the table, she said, “So, can you believe this shit tonight? This woman guns down some poor schmuck just because she thinks he looks like McClain?”

“I don’t know, Maggs,” I sighed. “The guy
does
vaguely resemble the sketches we’ve been circulating, and I can imagine that the poor woman was terrified. She had to be scared to death just at the thought that McClain might be out there somewhere gunning for her. And then to see somebody who looked like him following her through that empty garage…”

“I suppose,” she conceded. “God, I just hope that the rest of the people on the list don’t get that trigger-happy. It’ll look like the friggin’ O.K. Corral around here.”

I took a sip of the orange juice, set the glass back down on the table, and shook my head. “For a few minutes there tonight, I actually thought that we might have our hands on this bastard.”

“Me too,” she sighed. “It would have been nice to have a hold of the cocksucker, in a world of pain, but still conscious enough to tell us about Thompson.”

“Yeah, shit. Speaking of poor women…”

I drained a third of my orange juice, then said, “I know it makes no rational sense, but for some reason, that’s the part of all this that angers me the most. I mean the guy’s shot and killed six innocent people, and yet the thing that’s got me the most pissed off is that he’s holding Thompson out there somewhere and we can’t fuckin’ find her.”

Maggie let out a long sigh. “Well, yeah, I
hope
that he’s holding her out there somewhere and that we can still get to her in time. But you know as well as I do there’s an excellent chance that Thompson’s already dead and buried out in the freakin’ desert someplace where we’ll never find her.”

The waitress served our breakfasts and we ate in silence for a few minutes as the tension of the last couple of hours slowly dissipated. Maggie pushed some scrambled eggs around on her plate and then, without looking up at me, she said, “While I was walking out to my car tonight, I bumped into Elaine. She said that Riggins had just taken Doyle to the hospital.”

I put my fork down, leaned back in the booth, and sighed. “I thought you’d left before all of that happened.”

“And you weren’t going to say anything about it?”

“Not at the moment. I figured it could wait until morning.”

She nodded and pushed her eggs around some more. “The fat prick really called me Little Miss Affirmative Action?”

“The hell with him, Maggs. The guy’s a cretin. Don’t give it another thought.”

She nodded. “I understand that wasn’t all he said…”

“No, it wasn’t,” I sighed. “But again, don’t worry about it. Nobody pays any attention to anything that moron says.”

Finally she looked up to meet my eyes. “You don’t have to defend me, you know.”

“Yeah, Maggie, I do. You’re my partner and I have your back, just as I know that you have mine. That said, I understand perfectly well that you don’t need my help or anyone else’s defending yourself against a clown like Chris Doyle. In that matchup, he’s the one who needs all the help he can get. And if it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t defending you tonight. I was defending myself.”

For a long moment, she said nothing more. Then she gave the slightest of smiles. “Jesus, I’ll bet that felt good, even in spite of all the shit you’re gonna be in. God only knows how many times I’ve wanted to do it myself.”

“Yeah, maybe. But as you say, there will be a price to pay…”

She nodded, saying nothing more. Finally, after another couple of minutes had passed, she pushed her plate away and said, “So, on an entirely different subject, how are you doing otherwise—aside from all this shit, I mean. You’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of days.”

I pushed my own plate away, balled up my napkin, and dropped it on the table. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”