"Did you ever find the teacher who called in the information?"
"No, it was anonymous, but you know how it is-we don’t take chances if there’re reports of physical abuse. Especially drugs and physical abuse. And we want to get the kid off to a safe place, where she feels safe about talking about it… So, what’s your interest?"
"I think you were deliberately set up to mess with the kid’s mother. She’s a source of mine in this Kresge murder case."
"Really? Set up?"
"I think so. I don’t doubt that the kid smokes a little dope, but then so did you."
Bunker laughed. "Yeah, the good old days. So what do you want me to do?"
"How about releasing the kid to her mother? I’ll pick her up, take her home."
"Damn it; I’d have to sit back down and turn the computer back on…"
"Another little tragedy in your life."
"You gotta be over here in ten minutes," Bunker said. "I’m trying to catch a bus."
"Taking a little undertime today?"
"Nine minutes, now."
"Be right there."
The foster home was in Edina, west of Minneapolis. Lucas picked up the papers for the foster parents, and on the way out, slowed by traffic, he called the medical examiner’s office and got an investigator on the line. "I’m looking for a file on an Amelia Lamb. About twenty years old."
"Nothing here, Lucas. Are you sure of the name?"
"Last name I’m sure of; the first name, I don’t know, there may be an alternative spelling."
After a few more seconds, the investigator said, "Lots of Lambs, but nothing like an Amelia."
"Can you get into the state death certificates from your computer?"
"I’d have to call, I could get back to you."
"Could you do that? This is kind of important." The ME’s investigator was back five minutes later. "You want Dakota County, and specifically, you want Mercy-South. You want that phone number?"
"Give it to me." Lucas got the number, the date of Lamb’s death, and the attending physician, and scribbled it all in his notebook. He called the hospital, spent five minutes working his way through the bureaucracy, and was finally told by an assistant director that he could see the records if he brought a subpoena with him.
"Even if the woman’s dead?"
"It’s our policy," she said.
"It’s a pain," Lucas said. "But I’ll get one for you. What’s the name of your director out there?"
She gave him the name and he said, "Ask him to stick around the house tonight, we don’t want to have to have a cop run him down. We can probably get the subpoena out there before midnight."
"Really? I think he and his wife are going to the chamber orchestra."
"Well-he should be home before we get the subpoena. If we do get it earlier, we’ll just ask the orchestra people to page him during the concert."
"Hang on."
And she was back in five minutes: "The director tells me that I was misinformed. Since Mrs. Lamb is dead, and you’re a police officer conducting an official investigation, we can show you the records." She sounded faintly amused.
"Gee. Thanks. That’s really nice. Will somebody be in your records department, about seven o’clock?"
"There’s always somebody there. Around the clock."
"Tell them I’m coming…"
Connie Bell started crying when she saw Lucas. She had a small bag with her, and the foster mother patted her on the shoulder, and Connie said, "Did you do this?"
"No."
"Then who did?"
"I don’t know," Lucas said, leading the way to the car. "But it was pretty mean."
"My mom is really upset, I thought she was going to fight those people last night, I’ve never seen her like that."
"Why don’t you call her?" Lucas said. "There’s a phone in the car."
Connie called, told Helen that she was on the way home, and that Lucas was bringing her. She handed Lucas the phone and said, "Thank you, thank, thank you…"
And when they arrived at Helen’s home, Helen ran out and wrapped up her daughter, and they both started crying again, and after a moment, Lucas said, "Could you send Connie inside to get cleaned up? I’d like to talk to you for a minute."
Connie went, Helen watching her running up the steps.
"Do you have any feeling who might have done this?" Lucas asked.
"There was a literature teacher she had last year, who hated Connie-and several other kids too. If this was last year, I’d say her. But I can’t believe that she’d wait a whole year. I’ve been racking my brain…"
"This is not the way they do things in the school system," Lucas said. "They’ve got a whole bureaucratic procedure they follow, and it’s all very routine. This was strange, right from the start. I don’t think it was a teacher at all. Could you think, really hard, about who it might be?"
"Okay, okay… but you’re scaring me. Why?"
"Because it might be related to something else. Anyway, think about it. If you come up with anything, you’ve got my number."
"Okay." She stepped close and gave him a hug. "Thanks."
Traffic was beginning to ease as he headed south, down to Dakota County, finally to MercySouth. He went in through the emergency entrance, was directed by a nurse to Records, and found a dark-haired young woman sitting in a pool of light from a desk lamp, in an otherwise dark room full of file cabinets and computers. Her feet up next to a computer, she was engrossed in a Carl Hiaasen novel. A stack of what looked like thick textbooks sat on the floor.
"Good book?" he asked in the silence.
She jumped, turned, saw him, looked down at the book, and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact." She looked at the photo on the back cover. "And this Hiaasen is a yummy little piece of crumb cake, if I do say so myself… You’d be Officer Davenport, and you need some records."
"That’s right."
"I’m supposed to Xerox your credential," she said. She went for the double entendre: "You’ll hardly feel a thing."
"Young women these days," Lucas clucked. He gave her his ID, she xeroxed it, and said, "There’s not much in the computer file-mostly just the bare bones. If you want to look at her actual file, we don’t have the paper anymore, but it’s on fiche."
"I’d like that, if I could."
"Sure." She found the right fiche, set him up with a reader, and went back to the novel.
Thefile was short, and echoed the Oxford doctor’s report of symptoms on George Lamb. Amelia Lamb suffered from flulike symptoms-gastric discomfort, sporadic vomiting. She saw the doctor twice, the visits two weeks apart. The discomfort had increased in the two weeks, and he ordered a number of tests. He noted that her blood pressure was high and that she had been asked to come in for a series of blood pressure tests, but there was no indication that any blood pressure medication had been prescribed. Four days after the second visit, she was brought to the hospital by ambulance, and was reported dead on arrival. The record noted that the daughter reported that she’d been suffering chest pains but had refused to come to the hospital because of cost, and she’d called only after her mother had collapsed.
"Relative reported that final collapse was accompanied by severe chest pains and rapid loss of consciousness. Myocardial infarction indicated." There was no mention of a rash.
Lucas looked at the woman with the book: "Is there a doctor around that I could talk to? Who’d have a little time?"
"I’m a fourth-year med student," the woman said. "What’s the question?"
"Look at this blood pressure," Lucas said. "Should she have been on medication?"
The woman bent over the screen, read the report, and said, "She would now. That’s definitely way high. But back then, the drugs weren’t so good. You’d have to talk to somebody older, who’d remember. But back then, she might not have been."
"All right: then look at this. On her second visit, they do some tests. But the tests never show up in the records."