“That’s just the way he was,” she said.
“Was anything out of place at the time you left? For instance, what about the plant in that one examining room. Was it broken?“
“No. It was fine. I put it up on the counter just before I left to keep it out of the installer’s way, but it wasn’t broken.”
“What about this morning when you came into the office. Was there anything out of place when you came to work?”
“No,” she replied. “Not out here. Everything seemed to be fine until I went down the hall.”
“What about the door from outside, was it still locked?”
“As far as I know, both of them were.”
“Both?”
“There’s another door that you may not have seen. It leads from the second examining room and goes directly out into the parking garage. That’s the way Dr. Fred usually came into the office.”
“But you didn’t use that door?”
She shook her head. “I ride the bus, so I don’t use the garage. My key is to the front door.”
“When you came in this morning, didn’t you notice the smell?” Al asked. There was a thinly veiled tone of sarcasm in his voice. I noticed it. Debi Rush didn’t. She shook her head.
“My allergies have been acting up for the last two months. I haven’t been able to smell anything for days.”
“All right,” I said. “One more time. Tell us once more what you did when you got here today.”
“Like I said before, I called today’s list of patients to confirm their appointments, then I came in here and dusted, the way I always do. I always tried to have the dusting done before Dr. Fred got here. And I put the schedule and today’s files on his desk. Dr. Fred liked everything orderly.”
“You dusted?” I focused on that. In this day and age dusting didn’t sound like something that would still be in any self-respecting dental assistant’s job description.
Debi continued. “Every morning. In here, at least. And I polished his desk, too. The whole thing. That’s one of the reasons I got along so well with Dr. Fred. I was always on time, and I was willing to do whatever he wanted.”
“So much for fingerprints,” Big Al grunted under his breath, but I went on with the questions.
“What about the patient files from Saturday?”
“What about them?”
“Shouldn’t they have been refiled? They’re still here in the out basket.”
“I was going to put them away just as soon as I set up Dr. Fred’s tray. That’s when I found him, and I-” She broke off suddenly, too overcome by emotion to continue.
I glanced at Big Al, who looked disgusted. He doesn’t have a very high tolerance for tears. “Anything else you want to know at the moment?” I asked him.
Al shook his head. “Not that I can think of right now. Maybe later.”
“All right then, Debi,” I said. “You can go for the time being, but will you be home in case we need to get back in touch with you?”
She nodded slowly. “Sure, I’ll be there,” she said. “There’s no sense in staying here.”
We found Bill Foster on his hands and knees in the gore-spattered examination room, cutting out the section of blood-soaked carpeting from beneath the examining chair. Big squares where the footprints had been were already missing.
“Finding anything?” I asked, walking up behind him.
Foster looked up at me and shrugged. “Who knows? We’ve raised latent prints all over the place, but I’d lay odds none of them are going to belong to the killer.”
“Why not?”
He nodded in the direction of a Formica counter next to the chair. On it sat an open cardboard dispenser of disposable rubber gloves.
“With that sitting right there? I’d bet money he put on gloves. I sure as hell would.”
“If he had time,” I said.
“Doc Baker and I got talking after you left. He thinks somebody coldcocked the sucker, hit him over the head with something, then finished him off while he was out cold.”
“Hit him with something, like that carpet kicker for instance?” I asked. “It looked like blood on those teeth to me.”
He shrugged. “You’re right about the blood, Beau, but that’s not what clobbered the dentist, at least not the sharp part. There’s no matching wound. Somebody else must be wearing the bite from that set of teeth. In the meantime, I think we may have found the murder weapon.”
“What? Where?”
“A single dental pick. It was in the autoclave.”
“Sterilized?” I asked.
“You bet.”
“What makes you think that? This is a dentist’s office for Christ’s sake! The place must be crawling with dental picks.”
“Maybe so, but what dental assistant in her right mind would sterilize only one dental pick at a time?”
“A dental pick!” Big Al repeated the words, shaking his head. “Come on now, Bill, you’d have to be at pretty close quarters to use one of those things, wouldn’t you? And who’s going to take time to clean it afterward?”
Bill Foster nodded. “You’d have to be a cool customer, all right, but according to Doc Baker, the killer wasn’t the least bit squeamish. He went straight for the jugular.”
I glanced at Big Al, wondering what he was thinking. It wasn’t long before he let me know, sighing as if dismissing some theory that had been growing in his head. “Debi Rush may be lying,” he reasoned, “but she definitely strikes me as the squeamish type. Besides, I didn’t notice any scratches on her, either.”
“At least none we could see,” I added.
“So why’s she lying to us?” Big Al asked with a frown.
“Beats the hell out of me,” I told him.
We left the criminalist to do his painstaking work and made our way out of the office, a plush ground floor space in a building called Cedar Heights at the corner of Second and Cedar. It’s only a block or so from my own building, Bell town Terrace, at Second and Broad.
Both buildings are located at the northern end of the Denny Regrade, a man-made flat area in an otherwise hilly Seattle. The streets are broad and straight, lined with a duke’s mixture of buildings, from high-rise, pricey condominium/office buildings to rat-infested hovels months away from a close encounter with a wrecking ball.
The Regrade is a neighborhood of contrasts. Gay bars and trendy restaurants exist side by side with small appliance repair shops. Flash-in-the-pan delis spring up periodically. During their brief lifetimes they serve the varied collection of longtime, thriving insurance agencies and short-term, faddish specialty shops. Directly across Second Avenue from where we stood, a deserted hot tub company had gone the way of hula hoops and Howdy Doody.
It was still and warm on the sidewalk as we walked out and looked up at a glaringly blue sky. It would be hot later in the day, the kind of hot that many of Seattle“ s older buildings are hard pressed to handle.
Big Al and I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, conferring, trying to decide on a next step. “So why’d the carpet installer leave without finishing the job?” I asked. “And how come he took off without his tools?”
Al shrugged. “He must have left in a hurry. So maybe now we’ve got two suspects, Debi Rush and the carpet installer. What if they’re in it together?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said.
“What now? Notify the family or go looking for that carpet installer?” Al asked.
“We don’t have a choice,” I told him. “Family comes first. We’ll have to find the installer later.”
While we talked, an older man wearing a pair of bright orange coveralls had ambled slowly around the corner of the building. Dragging a plastic garbage container behind him and picking up trash as he went, he gradually edged his way over to where we were standing.
Stopping a few feet away, he removed a frayed toothpick from his mouth and tossed it into the trash can. “Had some excitement around here this morning, I guess.” he said casually. “You fellows wouldn’t happen to be reporters or something, would you?”
“Police detectives,” I said. “I take it you work around here?”
He let go of the handle on the trash can and fumbled in a pocket of the coveralls until he located a hanky, which he used to wipe his hands before holding one out to me. “Name’s Henry,” he said. “Henry Calloway. I’m the resident manager here at Cedar Heights.”