Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (27 page)

She shrugged. A woman of science, not entirely comfortable sharing speculations with someone who wasn't another doctor. With a cop. "It was a complicated scenario. There were a number of tests that needed to be done, some toxicology issues to be explored. Mr. Libby was not a cooperative patient. He was reluctant to take time off from work—"

Burgess was in over his head. Dr. Lee had also suggested that this damage might not have been the result of alcohol and was going to run some tests. "Let me get this straight," he interrupted. "You found Reggie had liver damage that was going to kill him, and you suspected that the source was not his drinking? Or not entirely his drinking?"

"That's the gist of it, Detective, although medicine is rarely that simple."

As though police work was? "Any idea what might have caused this damage?"

She shook her head. "It's a process of elimination, really. We come up with theories, and then we test them, eliminate things. New tests will suggest other possibilities. And then there's the information about the patient's lifestyle. That can be invaluable." She hesitated. "When they tell the truth." She picked up a freshly sharpened yellow pencil, tapped the lead against her notes, then set it down again.

"We... I... suspected that the source of the toxins damaging Mr. Libby's liver might have been wherever he was working. But..." She hesitated again. "You call him 'Reggie.' Did you know Mr. Libby?" She might look childlike, but her mind and observations were all grown up.

"We played football together in high school." His mind ran on with the list of what they'd done together. He had to jerk back.

She nodded and tapped her pencil again, deciding something. "Sometimes, being a doctor is a lot like being a detective. We gather what facts we can, put them together with our experience, and come up with theories about the case. With Mr. Libby, I thought it likely that he might be being exposed to something at his place of employment, but when I tried to get more information, he balked. He refused to tell me where he was working or to describe the nature of his work. I gathered—"

Someone knocked on the door and a nurse stuck her head in, "Excuse me, Dana... will you be much longer? Mr. Sullivan's getting restive." Her eyes rested briefly on Burgess, then she smiled. "What's the matter, Joe... don't recognize me in my working garb?"

Deb Palmer. A friend of Chris's. "Hey, Deb," he said.

"I was so sorry to hear about Reggie."

Dr. Lyndeman dug under the papers again and came up with a box of chocolates. "If I remember right, Mr. Sullivan's got a sweet tooth. Give him a few of these, tell him I apologize, and I'll be right along."

Reggie would have liked this woman. She was a straight shooter and she was compassionate. "Sorry to keep you," he said. "Mr. Sullivan did not look well. You gathered?"

"Many of my patients don't look well," she said. "Otherwise they wouldn't be seeing me. Okay. Two things. No. Three. That wherever he was working, it was irregular. Under the table or something. That his employers were emphatic about not having the arrangement known. Which, you'll agree, is odd. And that he was very proud of having a job and wanted to keep it."

Reggie in a nutshell. He so desperately wanted to work and be normal. And because he'd lived the humiliating life of the mentally ill and the street person, he'd learned to be deeply respectful of other's privacy. "When did you last see him?"

"A week ago Monday. He wasn't doing well."

"Can any of your tests show what he was exposed to?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. The lab might have that capacity. I don't know if they have the time."

She fiddled with the pencil again, her face serious. "Detective, can you find out where he was working? Because if it happened to him, and they fill his job, it could happen again."

He started to rise but she held up a finger, like a teacher holding a class back at the bell. "Hold on a minute..." She shuffled through the file, ran a finger down some paragraphs, and looked up at him, her face troubled. "Mr. Libby said he'd worked there last spring, filling in for someone, then left to go help his brother on the farm. He got the job back this fall because that someone got sick and couldn't do it anymore."

She shoved back her chair and stood, a quick, angry motion. "People the world regards as disposable, Detective. I see a lot of them in my practice. To me, all my patients have value."

She headed for the door, calling over her shoulder, "I hope you'll let me know what you find out."

He followed her out and hurried downstairs to the car, his brain clicking. Reggie gets a job, but he has to keep that job a big secret. He goes to work in a truck with a logo on the door, but no one seems to know what that logo is. Then he gets sick and then he gets dead. And he's not the first.

When he checked his watch, he'd had exactly the allotted fifteen minutes. Just like a patient. The only difference was he hadn't departed with a prescription in hand. A dose of the latest thing the cute young pharmaceutical reps were pushing to cure whatever ailed him. He doubted that even the thoughtful and compassionate Dr. Lyndeman had something in her PDR to treat his current ailment—a severe lack of clues and reliable witnesses. Maybe the prescription for that would be like the time he'd tried Prozac. Just give it four to six weeks and maybe it might help. He couldn't wait four to six weeks. Burgess headed back to his cold breakfast.

Chapter 20

Back at his desk, Burgess stared at the pile of pink message slips and reports. Hazen's truck had left Claire Libby's at midnight. Goodall's black van hadn't moved. The red car never returned. While they were out in that wet lot spending hours and resources picking up a goddamned shoe, Lieutenant Melia would have been at roll call, handing out Joey's picture, pictures of Kevin Dugan aka Leonard Josephson, and info about the red Audi.

This case was like trying to put an octopus in a teacup. He picked up the phone to call Clay and got Mary again.

"Clay's not home, Joe," she said. "He's gone to see the lawyer." Burgess was both relieved and sad.

Before he could respond, she said, "He'll be a while, Joe. He's doing some errands, too. There was some commotion around the place last night. He's gone down to the Agway and to Lowe's. Getting fire extinguishers. More outside lights. Shotgun shells. Cement and some heavy posts. He's going to put a chain across the driveway. And he's going to stop by and see the tenants out there on Reggie's land."

He could hear a background clattering and the whoosh of water that sounded like she was doing the dishes. She'd be doing this with a phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder. Their household would not be equipped with a speaker phone or a hands-free headset nor was it a place where hands were ever idle. "This is just so sick, Joe. Everything about it is just sick and twisted. And so unfair. At a time when we should be mourning poor Reggie and planning for a decent funeral, Clay's seeing lawyers and worrying about watching his back."

There was the crash of breaking glass. Silence. The clink of glass on glass. Then she said, "Should we let the sheriff's patrol know so they can keep an eye on things?"

"I'll do it," he said. "And give me the names and address of those tenants, too." He wrote it all down. He'd do what he could but public safety coverage in rural areas was thin on the ground. "Does Clay carry a cell phone?"

"He doesn't hold with those kind of things, Joe. Says he doesn't want to live in a world where a person can't just be by himself now and then. He considered it, a while back, in case there was something... you know... an emergency with Reggie. But he's usually to home, or I am, so we decided not to bother." She sounded breathless and a little scared. "This is just all wrong, Joe. We shouldn't have to be doing this."

He respected her too much to offer comfort that wasn't comforting. "Tell me about the commotion."

"Around three a.m. Tucker, that's our dog, began barking like crazy. He likes being out at night until it gets too cold. Normally, he's a quiet dog. He'll bark to let us know someone's coming down the drive or get between us and strangers, let 'em know who's boss, but last night was different. He really let loose. Clay got up and went out. He said the motion lights were on and Tucker was standing in the yard, looking down the driveway like he was watching something. After a while, Clay heard a car start, then drive away."

The water ran again and something clanged into the dish drain. "Sorry about the commotion. Doing some canning today. I'm washing out the jars."

He pictured the kitchen. Warm yellow beadboard up to the chair rail and flowered paper above. A neat, clean, homey place cluttered with the stuff of a working farm at harvest time. Baskets of late tomatoes, let go as long as possible before the threat of a serious frost. Drying onions. Apples and squash. Full canning jars lining the shelves, empty ones filling the counters. Her big graniteware canner on the stove. Mary, slim and efficient in slacks and a freshly ironed blouse moving briskly through her kingdom, her curly hair pinned back with barrettes. The corner desk overflowing with bills and papers waiting to be filed during a quieter season.

Magazines always showed kitchens with granite counters and gleaming appliances; food, if it appeared at all, artfully arranged in fancy dishes. Farm kitchens weren't like that. They were work places, perpetually in the midst of processing and storing food. Seedlings in spring, produce in summer and fall. Stages in the journey from planting to the long winter. The long, cold winter. A phrase his mother always used, so imbedded that he never heard "winter" without adding "long" and "cold." Even in her city kitchen, the counters had been laden with produce and berries, the late summer and fall air scented with the vinegar and spices of pickles and the sugary warm fruit of jam.

"You know where we live, Joe. There's no call for anyone to be around here in the middle of the night. No legitimate reason, anyway."

Another jar clanged. "I'm concerned for the tenants. They're just a couple of sweet hippie kids who know about organic farming. I doubt they've even got a gun in the house. Not the gun ownin' type, if you know what I mean. Hardest working kids you've ever seen, but they're tree huggers. Probably wouldn't even shoot a woodchuck, and that's saying something. Blasphemy or not, Saint Francis would be tempted to shoot a woodchuck. After they got half a crop cleaned out in one night, Clay went over and shot a couple chucks, then got 'em a dog."

Mary sighed deeply. "Like we don't have enough on our plates, worrying about ourselves. I'm trying to get the canning done and Clay's worn out hauling and splitting wood. Price of oil being what it is, we'll need that wood. Splitting wood is therapy for him, just now, but we're not so young anymore. He may come in with the mad worked out of him, but then he gets up aching. All we want is to get together a decent funeral for Reggie and then get on with our mournin' in peace and privacy."

He'd never known Mary to be this chatty. Normally, like Clay, she was taciturn.

"I guess you're used to it, but I still can't get my mind around it," she said. "That he's gone, I mean. That the phone isn't never going to ring again with someone saying there's an emergency down to Portland, can we come." A good woman, trying for normal, in a world suddenly grown threatening and uncertain.

Abruptly, she broke off. "Listen to me going on, when you've got work to do. Clay's gonna go over to the Baxter's, that's our tenants, and put up some lights for them, too. They're probably outside, getting the last of the harvest in, never mind that it's rainin', but if you want to try over there, I can give you that number."

He didn't want to make a big deal out of this, but Clay wasn't the type to jump at shadows. If Clay thought the situation called for caution, Burgess had to respect that. "I'll take that number, Mary. Thank you."

As he wrote it down, he realized Mary could probably answer his question as well as Clay. Might as well ask. It could take hours to track Clay down. "Nicholas Goodall," he said. "What's the story? The way Star talked, I thought he was dead."

"That's Cindy for sure. Always been the one for embroidering. She likes to make things dramatic. It's four years now and she still talks like he died on the riverbank despite her best efforts to save him. The truth's about as common as cheese. Nick had a heart attack and when he went to the hospital, he met a nurse who made him realize how difficult living with Cindy was. Not that he isn't pretty flamboyant, too. I guess that artists are."