"Well, I can connect you, sugar," she offered, "but it wouldn't do you any good. Nobody's up there this time of night."
Nobody who wanted to be noticed anyway. "Where is it?" Timmie asked anyway.
"Well, I figured you might know, your daddy being in and all."
"It's late. I forgot."
"It's Dr. Raymond's office, honey. Why don't you call back tomorrow? I heard he was out of town tonight anyway."
Timmie white-knuckled the phone, trying to maintain her composure. "Thanks. I'll do that."
She hung up to find Murphy watching her with quite a bit less objectivity than he had had a minute before. "So, you don't have to call your friend after all?" he asked.
"It's not him," she insisted.
"Was it his office?"
"Yes."
"How many people would have the keys?"
Timmie snorted. "This is a hospital we're talking about," she reminded him. "Not a bank. Half the administrative staff, most of housekeeping, and all of security. Where would you like to start?"
"Do you think we need to make sure nobody's trying to get to Joe after all?"
Timmie frowned. "I don't know. If the offer is to kill him, would the threat be to kill him, too?"
"If you didn't want him dead."
This was way too complicated. And Timmie wasn't about to give Murphy all the truth just because he'd kept his mouth shut. So she dialed the phone and got her dad's night nurse.
"Hi, Timmie," the nurse chirped. "We've been trying to get you all day. Everything okay?"
"Fine. How about my dad?" she asked, shoving the guilt aside for a more convenient time.
"Well, that's it. We talked to Dr. Raymond, and he changed your dad's Prozac dose. I think it's going to make a world of difference. He's already not nearly as afraid now. And the best part is, he's been asleep since nine. How about that?"
Timmie squeezed her eyes shut. "Yeah, how about that? Has anybody been by to see him tonight?"
"Good heavens, no. Nobody comes in here late at night."
"I need a favor, Cathy," she said, praying she was asking the right person. "I need to make sure you don't let anybody in that room but me till I get there and talk to you. Not even Dr. Raymond."
There was a polite pause of disbelief. "This doesn't have to do with what might be happening over on five, does it?"
"Yes."
"He wouldn't do that."
"I know. But it's safer for him if he isn't even considered, ya know?"
"Sure."
She didn't. Timmie could hear it in her voice. But Cathy would stand guard anyway, over both her father and her father's doctor.
"Okay," Timmie said, hanging up. "What next?"
"Call Raymond. See if he's home."
Timmie did notice that at least Murphy wasn't calling Alex golden boy anymore. She should thank him for that, anyway. She spun around as if Murphy's suggestion didn't scare the hell out of her. "Nope. I've been in the house all day. Let's go check on Dad."
"I suppose you want me to drive."
"Only if you want to find out what's going on."
"There's one other thing you might want to know before going over there," he said, not moving, his expression not quite as flippant as Timmie might have expected. It pretty much stopped her.
"The results on Alice Hampton's blood tests," he said.
Timmie guessed she should have known. "So spill it," she said. "I can tell you're dying to tell me."
"Barb said that the old lady's dij level was way high. That mean anything to you?"
At least he had Timmie thinking back along the lines of problem solving. Much less traumatic than responsibility and remorse. "Digitoxin," she said. "It's the generic name for Digoxin, which is a heart medication she was on. Great stuff for old hearts, but lethal as hell if you get too much. It's from the foxglove plant, which is one of the most toxic poisons around."
"Well, Barb thinks that's what probably killed her. Since she evidently wasn't sick first, Barb thinks she got it fast."
And since Alice had had only oral Digoxin in her locked nurse server, the dose she'd gotten had obviously either been deliberately pulled from stock and shoved in by Gladys fifteen or twenty minutes before the cardiac arrest, or substituted for one of the IV push medications Alice already had stocked in her nurse server, which meant that Gladys would have given it without realizing it.
Which led to two conclusions. If Gladys hadn't intentionally killed Alice, which from her reaction, Timmie didn't think she had, then anybody in the hospital with a key to the nurse server could have substituted those drugs any time in the days preceding old Alice's death. The field was wide open.
And if the killer thought nobody'd notice, maybe he or she had left fingerprints on the vials that sat in the evidence box Timmie had upstairs this very minute.
If this ever went to trial, the only way to keep the findings on those medications valid was to protect the chain of evidence. Which meant Timmie had to have that thing in sight until she handed it off to Conrad like a forensics baton.
She hoped Murphy wasn't waiting for an answer. She headed up the stairs instead.
Five minutes later, the evidence box tucked under her arm, Timmie jumped the bottom three stairs and headed for the front door. "Let's go," she said. "I have a chart to read and an old man to visit."
* * *
The only way to enter the hospital at that hour of the night was through the ER. Fortunately, only the secretary was sitting at the triage desk, and she just waved, perfectly comfortable with seeing staff wandering around at odd hours. Timmie guided Murphy past her and through the maze that led to Restcrest.
She stopped by her dad's room first. True to her word, Cathy was lounging in a beanbag chair doing her charting near the memory case that held Cardinals and Clancy Brothers. She smiled benignly when she saw Timmie.
"Quiet as a church," she said.
"Nobody's been by?"
"Nope."
Murphy waited outside while Timmie, needing visual confirmation that her father was still okay, crept into his room.
He was sound asleep. Flung out across the bed as if he'd just fallen there after a hard night playing rebel songs, he snored like a fighter. Timmie couldn't help but smile, kind of the way she did when she watched Meghan sleep. Somehow all the troubles and turmoil eased when their eyes closed, and only the softness remained.
He was soft. Always had been. But it had taken Timmie a long time to figure it out. She'd always thought of him as larger than life. Mountains and thunderstorms, when he was in the mood. Now that she was an adult and he was old, he should have looked smaller, shrunken with the decline of his power. He still looked massive to her. Untamed, unquieted, his only concession to the disease that ravaged that quixotic brain of his the sudden, terrifying detours that sent his thoughts skidding off into space. He was still the man who'd held her above the world to see Bob Gibson and Timmie McCarver and Mike Shannon riding through downtown St. Louis in flashy convertibles and World Series rings. He was the man who insisted, no matter what her mother said, that Timmie was magic. He was the man who would forget her for hours while singing in the pub and then, suddenly, lift her in his arms and proclaim her his fairy child.
God, she wanted him back. Every drunken, wild word. Every silly generosity. She wanted to sit at his knee again and listen to him weave his words into living things and feed on the delight in his audiences' eyes.