Chapter Twelve

The next morning, the Washingtons brought homemade cinnamon rolls, which smelled like fresh-baked heaven. Apparently, Joe had become quite the chef in his retirement. I should have gotten myself some assistants years before.

I didn’t tell the others about my interviews with the daughters of the deceased patients, since I hadn’t told Mackenzie or the Washingtons that I was investigating suspicious deaths. Instead, we reviewed what we’d learned about the Sunshine Haven employees.

“Marty, did you follow up on Felicity Carver?” I asked. “Glad to see you didn’t get bumped off last night, by the way.”

She laughed. “I told you it wasn’t anything dangerous.” Marty turned to Mackenzie and nodded.

Mac looked from me to Dad. “It’s nothing suspicious.”

We waited.

“It’s private, though,” Mackenzie said.

“It can’t be that private if you uncovered it,” I said. “But we won’t tell anyone else, unless it’s relevant to this investigation.”

“All right. Felicity Carver used to be Franklin Carver.”

“He had a sex change?” Dad asked.

“We don’t call it that anymore,” Mackenzie said. “But yes, she changed her name after transitioning.”

I turned to Marty. “How did you figure that out from talking to her for a minute?”

Marty shrugged. “I grew up in San Francisco during the early era of gay rights and transgender riots. I used to visit some of the drag queen clubs with a friend of mine. Felicity had the most perfect makeup I’ve seen in years, and way more makeup than you usually see in this part of the country. She reminded me of the clubs, and that made me wonder.”

“How did you confirm it?” I asked Mac.

“I checked some of her friends’ pages, went back several years, and found some group photos with Felicity before she began her transition.”

“Clever investigating,” I said. “I don’t see how Felicity’s gender would have anything to do with problems at Sunshine Haven. Let’s drop her off our investigation list for now.” I frowned at Mackenzie. “Did you think we were going to be shocked or offended?”

“Well, you’re . . . of a different generation. My parents would be uncomfortable, and my grandparents wouldn’t get it at all. I wasn’t sure about you.”

I felt ancient. I resisted the urge to defend myself or my generation, or to point out that people of any age could be prejudiced, or not.

“Let’s move on,” I said. “Do we know anything yet about Ana Marija Jurić, the Bosnian immigrant whose work visa is running out, or Maximilian Richards, the attendant who was on probation for drug charges?”

We hadn’t made any progress there, and, of course, we hadn’t even looked at a lot of the other employees. I leaned my elbows on the table and stared at the plate of cinnamon rolls as if I could move it closer by the force of my mind.

The plate edged toward me.

I took one. “Thanks.”

Dad had read my mind again. At least he used his psychic powers for good.

I savored a rich bite. “We need to find out more about these people. I’m not sure deeper background checks will help, though. We might need to talk to them, or their friends and neighbors.”

Joe said, “If you can get their work schedules, that would help.”

“I’ll ask Heather for work schedules, and then you can focus on Ana Marija and Max. Leave Berta Lopez to me. I have a PT appointment with her tomorrow. I’ll see what I can learn about her fancy car and expensive vacations. Mackenzie, I’d like you to look into Heather Garcia.”

“The director?”

“Right.” I had to figure out how to explain based on the limited amount Mac and the Washingtons knew. I had told them about the phone call from the man claiming to be Henry Wilson. “She says Henry Wilson, the board member, is a great guy. I don’t think he’s the one who called me, but I’m basing that on his denial and his accent, which was different from the man on the phone. He could have disguised his voice, though. Maybe Heather and Wilson are up to something together. Or Heather and someone else. She’s the one person who would definitely know I was in the building, and that I’m a journalist, so she might have warned someone about me.”

That didn’t really fit with her request that I investigate, but I’d learned long ago that people could be baffling. Maybe she’d asked me to investigate the “suspicious” patient deaths in order to distract me from another crime, such as embezzlement. Sure, she’d have been better off not drawing attention to herself, but people often assumed everyone noticed and judged them. Otherwise we wouldn’t freak out over acne and bad hair days. I couldn’t give Heather a pass simply because I had known her slightly in high school, or because she had asked for my help.

“What are our chances of tracking the phone number that called you?” Mac asked.

“It was blocked,” I said. “I doubt the phone company would reveal it without more evidence of a crime committed. Anyway, a smart crook would’ve called from a prepaid phone he bought for cash. Of course, if he was smart, he wouldn’t have called me in the first place and made me suspicious.”

Joe looked at his watch. “We’d better go if we’re going to make the second church service. I’ll leave some of these.” He grabbed a plate from the cupboard and put a few extra cinnamon rolls on it. “Let us know when those two people work. Maybe we’ll arrange to run into them in the parking lot and chat for a few minutes, and then we can follow them.”

“All right. Be careful, of course.”

Marty winked. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after him.”

They headed for the door. We called out our thanks for the delicious breakfast. They both smiled at me with something like sympathy.

“I’ll go home to research Ms. Garcia, if you don’t mind,” Mackenzie said. “My internet is faster.”

“Let me know what you learn,” I said.

She downed the last of her coffee, put her mug in the sink, and left Dad and me alone at the table.

“Do you think they’re getting suspicious about what we’re really doing?” I asked. “Since they don’t know about the patient deaths, some of this must seem pretty weird, like we’re fussing over nothing.”

Dad looked guilty. “I may have hinted to Joe that you weren’t dealing very well with being injured and out of work, so we’re trying to distract you and make you feel useful. Only because I wanted to keep them from asking too many questions.”

He grabbed the coffeepot, topping off my mug and his own. “Oh, and something Jen said made Marty think you might be feeling guilty over not being here when your mother went into Sunshine Haven.”

I gave a short laugh. “Great. Though I can’t say you’re wrong on either count.”

“You had a good reason not to be here right away.”

I nodded. I’d been covering a big story when Jen first informed me that Mom had heated up a can of soup in the microwave—the soup still in the can, thereby destroying the microwave. That was the last straw. For months, Mom had been leaving food in the oven to burn, wandering in the middle of the night, and putting her purse, glasses, and other items in odd places and then claiming someone had stolen them. Jen decided Mom could no longer live at home, and Dad had reluctantly agreed that he couldn’t take care of her anymore. He’d given up his coffee group and other social activities, but even then, simple tasks such as grocery shopping were hard if he couldn’t leave Mom alone.

When I’d heard, I started making plans to come home, but I thought I could take a few weeks to finish the story, schedule vacation time, and make travel arrangements. Then the explosion had delayed my return another two months.

Having a reason to be gone, even one involving a long hospital stay, didn’t lessen my feelings of guilt. Plus, if I had returned as soon as I heard about Mom, I wouldn’t have been in Syria to be injured. It almost felt like a punishment for not being a good daughter.

Dad patted my arm. “What would you like me to do today?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I sighed.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s frustrating. We keep learning things, but we’re not getting anywhere. When I’m investigating for a news article, I expect that. Life is complicated, and politics are insane, so I don’t hope for easy answers, no matter how much the paper and the public want things simple. But here, it’s not enough to simply find out all the weird random things happening, or to uncover everyone’s secrets. We need one specific answer. We need to know who is responsible for patient deaths, so we can stop it from happening again.”

“We’re making progress.”

“I feel like we’re going in circles. We look into person A and find a secret or something suspicious. Then we figure out what the secret is, and it has nothing to do with killing patients. But that doesn’t mean person A isn’t also killing patients, or that the secret isn’t connected in some weird way. For example, I don’t think Kellie Armstrong would have killed her mother, but would her lover or husband have done so for some reason? Knowing her secret is an affair doesn’t clear her family from suspicion.”

“We don’t even know for sure that someone is killing patients,” Dad said.

“Right. We know Mrs. Gregorian got mysteriously sick but recovered. A week later, Penelope Valentine died. She was eighty-six but not expected to die so soon. In another week, Brit Egland died at sixty-eight from heart failure when she didn’t have known heart problems. I wonder how long the average patient lives at a place like that.”

“Eighteen months to two years.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Jen researched it. I think there are about fifty patients at Sunshine Haven.”

I shoved aside the thought that Mom was in there, and two years was no time at all. That was the average, and surely some patients had many more health issues before they got there. Mom was healthy, except for her brain.

Don’t think about the future. Focus on now.

“Let’s see . . . to make the math easy, if each of those fifty patients lived two years, you’d have twenty-five deaths per year, or two per month. Two within a week on occasion is within reason.”

“But fifty includes everyone,” Dad said. “Short-term nursing care, assisted living, and Alzheimer’s care. Mrs. Gregorian is in Alzheimer’s care, and I think that wing only has fifteen beds. Do we know what unit the other women were in?”

“Brit Egland must have been in Alzheimer’s, because her daughter mentioned memory problems. But I’m not sure about Penelope Valentine. It would certainly be suspicious if they were all in the same small unit.” Suspicious and terrifying, since Mom was there. If someone was targeting Alzheimer’s patients, and only had fifteen to choose from . . .

The delicious cinnamon roll threatened to come back up. I forced it back down with coffee that burned in my gut.

“I’ll ask Heather where Penelope Valentine was,” I said. “Heather must have had some reason for worrying. I guess I should also ask Heather who else has died in the last six months to see if any of the deaths look suspicious now that we have some leads. On the bright side, it’s been a week since Brit Egland died, and I haven’t heard of any more deaths.”

“It was a full week between the two deaths, right?”

“I think so.” I glanced at the calendar on the wall but getting up to go four steps was a lot of work these days.

Dad retrieved it, placing it on the table so we could both see the month of November. I double-checked the death dates from the obituary.

“The most recent death was Monday of last week. The first one was the previous Monday.” I frowned. “I’m not sure when Mrs. Gregorian got sick, but her daughter said . . .” I searched my memory, since I hadn’t taken detailed notes of that conversation. “Her mother always has dialysis on Mondays, so that’s the day she recovered. Which means she got sick Sunday evening.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Dad said.

A shiver ran up my back. “I’ll say. Penelope Valentine died at dawn, according to her obituary, so if she was poisoned it probably happened Sunday night or early Monday. And Brit Egland’s daughter said her mother was fine in the evening and dead in the morning.”

“All three of them got sick sometime Sunday night.”

We stared at each other. I could barely force the words out. “So if the killer is on a regular schedule, they’ll strike again tonight.”

Dad shot out of his chair. “We need to get to Sunshine Haven.”

“Yes.” I struggled to my feet, one hand clinging to the table for balance. “Someone should stay with Mom all day. We need to keep an eye on the wing overall. We have to solve this fast. In the meantime, we need to protect the current patients.”

“Is it time to call in the police?”

“Yes. No.” I groaned. “We don’t have any evidence. Would they believe us?”

Dad shrugged. “I’m still having trouble believing it. If we could convince them to send someone over, having an officer around might stop the killer from trying again.”

“Yeah. But it wouldn’t tell us who the killer is. It might drive them away for a while, until things settle down. It might create enough chaos that we never learn the truth.”

“I can’t leave your mother there if we don’t solve this.”

We stared at each other for a minute.

Dad said, “You have to keep investigating. I’ll stay with your mother today. I’ll ask Marty and Joe to come over after church, and I don’t think Simon’s shop is open on Sundays. They can take turns watching the hallway and keeping an eye on anyone who goes into one of the patient rooms. You and Mackenzie should focus on finding answers. But I don’t know how we’ll do this without telling all of them what we’re really doing.”

“You’re right.” I closed my eyes. My fingernails dug into my palm. Panic battered my mind, screaming, Run, run! But I had to be stronger than my body’s instinct. We wouldn’t save Mom, and the others, by irrational action.

Don’t run. Think!

We needed to solve this fast. The police might not believe us, and they almost certainly couldn’t afford the resources to protect everyone and track down clues quickly.

Confidentiality be damned. I opened my eyes. “It’s time. Marty and Joe, Mackenzie, even Simon, I guess. We need a full squad.”

We grabbed our things and headed for the car. As we pulled out, Dad asked, “Would it help to know who is on duty Sunday nights?”

“It might. If the patients were suffocated, that narrows it down to who might be there early on a Monday morning. But a doctor would notice signs of suffocation, even if without a thorough autopsy, I think.” I shook my head. “Anyway, they got sick, which doesn’t fit with suffocation. If the women were poisoned, it might take time for the poison to work.”

“Mrs. Gregorian’s illness and recovery after dialysis suggest poison.”

“Right.” At a red light, I leaned forward as if my glare could force the color to change. “Poison might take hours to work, so that opens up all day Sunday. You’d think the killer would want an alibi for the actual time of death.”

“But if an employee is killing patients because he has some kind of God complex, he might want to see it happen.”

“Good point. There’s another reason to ask who was around when the patients died. An attendant might have noticed symptoms that were gone by the time the doctor determined the cause of death.”

“It will be hard to ask the staff questions like that without making people suspicious,” Dad said. “But if it turns out that Penelope Valentine was in the Alzheimer’s unit . . .”

I nodded. “It’s getting harder to believe in an innocent explanation. Protecting the patients takes precedence over protecting Sunshine Haven’s reputation.”

We didn’t have to say it: this was getting too close to Mom.