Barb laughed, a booming intrusion in the echoing room. "Not Victor. It would have been an insult to the memory of Jack Webb."
"But it does mean they're serious," Timmie admitted.
Murphy allowed himself a minimal nod beneath the towel. "Hard to believe, but I think you're right. We need to make sure your kids are safe."
Timmie shared looks with Barb, her stomach knotting. She could tell that Barb's was doing the same. Decision time. Unfortunately, Timmie couldn't go back on the one she'd already made.
Barb clinched it by bending back to work. "We can take care of our kids," she said. "And I'm not about to insult the memory of Jack Webb, either. The question is, what do we do now?"
"Well," Timmie said, grabbing the scissors and snipping threads to speed things up, "I have an appointment to meet with the St. Charles ME to talk about it. And I have a Morbidity and Mortality printout I'd like you to—" She got that far, and froze.
The printout.
The very same printout she'd sneaked out of the ER like a counterfeit diamond and perused like secret missile plans. Oh, damn. Dropping the scissors at the edge of the tray, she spun on her heels for the stairs. "Excuse me."
Upstairs nothing seemed changed. The same mountain range of books commanded the hallway, now in disarray from where Timmie had burrowed for items for that damn memory case. Her room was still awash in fabric samples and purloined wallpaper books and outdated missalettes. Timmie did a quick check to see if she could spot a strange hand at it, but she couldn't tell because she'd tossed the room too many times herself looking for her dad's things.
In the end, it didn't matter. There between the old sleigh bed and the wall where she'd left it with all her busy work was her cloth nursing bag. And inside that was the list.
Timmie chuckled with embarrassment. As if this would made a big difference. Unless three separate computer systems crashed, the printout was like an extra roll of prints. Yanking the sheaf of papers from her bag, Timmie carried them back downstairs where Barb was telling Murphy what a lucky boy he was.
"I think I found something on the M and M printout," she said, reclaiming the scissors. "I need you to look, too, Barb."
"There's one other thing you have to do," Barb told her in a tone of voice that portended trouble, her attention still on the tiny needle and thread in her large hands.
Timmie held still. Murphy opened his eyes. Barb smiled, and it wasn't pretty.
Timmie blanched. "Not..."
Barb nodded, enjoying herself much too much. "You know damn well that if there's something hinky going on at Restcrest the staff knows about it, and at least one person over there's pissed as hell. You know it, Timmie. And there's only one way to find out who it is."
"No."
"Oh, yes. You're going to have to go undercover."
"You go undercover," Timmie demanded of the big woman, now truly distressed. "I'd rather play coroner truck with Van Adder."
Barb was laughing now. "Sorry, girl. I'd stick out like a sore thumb. But they're always needing nurses over there. And you are, even with all those fancy initials behind your name, a nurse. The next time Restcrest calls for help, you're going to have to go on gomer patrol."
"We could ask Ellen to do it."
"She's sleeping with Van Adder."
Timmie's grimace was purely reactionary. "Well, then, Cindy. She likes it up there."
Barb lifted an eyebrow. "You'd trust Cindy with delicate information? You are desperate."
Timmie shut her eyes. "Oh, man. The things I do for the truth."
"Now," Barb said, dropping the instruments on the sterile towel and ripping off her gloves. "Let me look at that list."
She looked while Timmie cleaned Murphy's face, dressed his cut, and handed back his shirt and ice packs.
She hummed and whistled and paged back and forth as if she were going through a company ledger. And then, when Timmie had all but run out of patience, Barb sat back on the wingback she'd commandeered, crossed her leg over her other knee, and nodded.
"You're right. This is weird."
Timmie looked up from the trash bag she'd been filling. "You do recognize them, then?"
Barb blinked. "Recognize who?"
Timmie's heart sank. "The patients from Restcrest who were dismissed out of the ER. Because of that new policy of transferring all seriously ill Restcrest patients to the ER, the Restcrest mortality numbers are skewed. On the printout, it looks like they're declining. They're really going up."
"Oh, that," Barb retorted. "Sure. I figured that out." She opened the pages again and pointed to several lines. "The thing that bothers me is that they almost all died of cardiac arrest."
Timmie dropped what she was doing. "What?"
Now it was Murphy's turn to look confused. He'd just tottered to his feet and was tucking his blood-encrusted shirt back in. "I guess I don't have this right. I thought cardiac arrest was something you died of."
"Of course it is," Barb snapped. "It's what everybody dies of, if you want to get technical about it. Your heart stops beating, you die. But something else causes the heart to stop beating, and that's what should go on these lines. You understand?"
Timmie imagined that Murphy nodded. She didn't see, though. She was already bent over the printout, furious at her own oversight. "Oh, my God," she whispered, seeing the evidence for herself. "You're right."
Barb kept skimming with a blunt finger. "See? There's Mr. Cleveland, and Mrs. Salgado?" She stabbed at one line in particular and smiled an oddly whimsical smile. "And here's Mr. Stein, you remember him? He always dropped by with cookies."
Timmie shook her head, still too stunned. "I missed it."
Line after line, Barb pointed out the obvious, tucked in among the myocardial infarctions, the cardiovascular accidents, the sudden infant death syndromes, the multiple traumas from MVA.
Cardiac arrest
Cardiac arrest
Cardiac arrest
At least fifteen of them. And they'd never been caught by the hospital, the coroner, or the physician who was the heart and soul of the most advanced Alzheimer's unit in the country.
"They're all Restcrest's?" Timmie asked.
Barb nodded. "I recognize enough of them."
Now even Murphy was looking. "Weren't you suspicious that you had so many people coming in from the same place?"
"Why should we be?" Barb retorted. "They were old. You expect old people to die, ya know?"
That was when Timmie felt the worst. The most ridiculously, pompously, self-delusional worst. "Which is why it's so easy to murder them," she admitted, wanting suddenly to cry. "It's one of the first lessons I learned in forensics. The easiest people to murder are the elderly, because nobody's really surprised when they die."
"Especially people with Alzheimer's," Barb agreed.
Murder. They had been murdered. Maybe not all of them. Probably not all of them. They were, after all, all over the age of sixty, some well into their nineties and frail and high risk.
But enough. Enough that Timmie the death investigator, the Forensics Fairy, should at least have asked. Instead, she'd just wrapped them up and rolled them out and only questioned their disposition when the coroner had been an asshole.