If it were any other situation, any other threat, she would have asked him to think of his mother. She would have asked him whether he would have wanted to put his mother in this kind of peril, simply because she was ill. But she'd walked much too close to that truth to offer it up now.
He was shaking his head again. "There has to be some other explanation."
"Then help me find it. Order a postmortem on Alice Hampton. Go back through those other charts with a fine-toothed comb. Call the police and demand an investigation. Raise holy hell before somebody else does and blames you and the unit."
Still, unbelievably, he just sat there. Just as Timmie had done only yesterday, which meant she couldn't really blame him merely because she was finally ready to act. She could blame him for being deliberately blind, but that wouldn't help.
"Let me think," he begged, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I need to think."
"If that's what you need to do," Timmie conceded. "But I can't wait."
She didn't. Even before Alex made it all the way out the front door, she was on the phone to Micklind. By the time Timmie went in to work at three, she had assurances that Conrad was hard at work sending the medicines in her box through both his gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and his fingerprint techs, Ginny was making a statement to Murphy about Dr. Davies, and Detective Micklind was pressuring his chief to open a case investigating the strange death of Alice Hampton.
Which left Timmie with the big question of what Alex was going to do. She never got the chance to find out. Twenty minutes after she arrived at work, the area had its first full-fledged ice storm of the year, which inevitably signaled the kickoff of the Puckett County TraumaFest.
* * *
Murphy realized what was happening to the roads when he made the last turn onto Charlie Cleveland's street and slid sideways into a mailbox. The mailbox, one of those craft-show specials that looked like a barn on a milk can, tilted over. The Porsche stopped, without noticeable injury. Murphy cursed himself blue. Then after pulling the mailbox upright, he left the car at the side of the street and slid the rest of the way downhill to Charlie's house.
He'd spent the first two hours of the afternoon getting a five-minute statement from the hospital night operator who had seen Peter Davies wandering around the hospital two nights in a row, when he had no reason to. The operator had said he'd been mumbling to himself, a man intent on a mission.
Or a man terrified of an outcome.
Murphy had followed the talk with the operator with a call to his friend at the Post about the state of Peter Davies's research.
"Fine," he'd said, punching up names on his computer, which was even more ancient than Murphy's. "Getting a lot of notoriety. Matter of fact, he's in the final running for a huge health department grant that could set him up into the next century."
"He is, huh?"
"Yeah. Finalists' names came out this week."
"When do they decide?"
"Next couple of weeks. I've had four calls from the Price PR department in the last two days about it, and the health and leisure editor's three up on me."
Which meant that Davies might well have had an impulse to quiet things down the last few days or so. Tough to convince a government agency that you're working for the welfare of patients you're killing to get their brains.
But if Davies had just been informed in the last week about the finalists' position, would he have had as much reason before to kill people off, raw material or no? Murphy had sat and talked with the guy, and he wasn't convinced that murder was his standard MO for getting his material. And an offer made out of desperation was a lot different than one made during the course of a regular working day.
Davies was gifted, no question. Dedicated, focused, probably brilliant. Definitely a geek with clusters. But a man who didn't just murder people, but made their relatives take part in it? Murphy couldn't quite see it.
Which was why he'd decided to visit Charlie Cleveland.
"Well, hi there, Mr. Murphy," the gray man greeted him when he opened the door to Murphy's knock. "Awful day outside, isn't it?"
"It is, Mr. Cleveland," Murphy agreed. He'd traded in his standard uniform for the turtleneck, leather jacket, and combat boots he'd used for some of his more mobile assignments, and he was still wet and miserable. "Mind if I come in?"
Mr. Cleveland cast a careful look over his shoulder. He wasn't reading the paper this time, but his half glasses were pushed up to the top of his head as if he'd been working at something. Behind him, Murphy could hear the chatter of a television.
"It's important," Murphy insisted gently. "The woman who was here with me before got a call very much like yours, and we taped it. I need to know if you recognize the voice."
Mr. Cleveland said not another word. He just pushed open the storm door and stepped aside.
And then reinforced Murphy's suspicions ten minutes later, after he'd heard the tape.
"That's not him."
Mrs. Cleveland stood in the doorway to the kitchen, as if distance could protect her from her husband's admissions. She was as tidy and unremarkable as Mr. Cleveland, with helmet-permed steel-gray hair and the kind of housedress Sears sold. She was frowning, but Murphy had the feeling she wasn't given to it.
"You're sure?" Murphy asked her husband.
Mr. Cleveland nodded emphatically. "The person who called me didn't have as deep a voice as this. Also didn't sound quite so... unsettling."
"Are you saying it wasn't a man?"
Mr. Cleveland blinked. "I'm not saying that at all. It could have been either. I just know it wasn't this voice."
Murphy nodded and pocketed his tape recorder. "Thank you."
"Something else," Mr. Cleveland said, sliding those glasses back onto his nose as if making a statement. At the kitchen door, Mrs. Cleveland deliberately turned away. "Remember we talked about people possibly donating to Restcrest?"
Murphy had been about to get to his feet. "Yes?"
Mr. Cleveland nodded without emotion. "I thought I'd ask around myself. Seemed to make more sense that way."
"Yes, sir?"
The man nodded now, his fingers tapping against gray serge pants legs. "So far I've talked to five people in town who had parents there. All five made donations. Also asked for donations in lieu of flowers, if you know what I mean."
"Yes, sir, I do."
He nodded again. Tapped his leg as if putting in the final punctuation. "At least five of them."
Murphy got to his feet. No wonder none of them had wanted to talk to him. "Thank you, Mr. Cleveland. I'm sorry we had to put you through this."
When Mr. Cleveland looked up to answer, Murphy saw the tears in his eyes. But the man couldn't manage an answer after all. He just shook his head, and Murphy showed himself out.
* * *
Timmie got a call from Murphy at five, but she was busy helping to put pins in a femur fractured in a motorcycle accident. She told the tech to tell Murphy she'd call him later. She never got around to it.
By six she'd increased her take to seven various injured limbs, a brace of back pains, and a gunshot wound of the lower leg, and by seven, she was triaging a busload of high school athletes who'd run right through the front window of a Stop & Shop, where a gaggle of senior citizens had been making a run on toilet paper, bread, and milk to get them through the storm.