Luke glanced down at himself. He was a bloody mess.
He wiped a red sheen from his arms and hands while watching the trauma team finish its work.
The boy was going to live. They had poured four units of fresh frozen plasma and six units of blood into him, and in a few minutes the team would take him up to the O.R., where vascular surgeons would patch together his blood vessels.
Luke threw the towel in a corner and grabbed a green scrub shirt from one of the cabinets.
“Let’s go.” He pulled the baggy green top over himself as he and Ben walked out of Trauma One.
“Escort this doctor out of the building!”
It was Barnesdale, and he was standing in the corridor with a pair of hospital guards flanking him. He pointed at Luke like a monarch ordering a beheading.
Luke looked from one guard to the other. The shorter one standing to Barnesdale’s left shrugged apologetically.
Ben erupted in a fit. “Well excuse us all to hell, you jackass! Do you have any idea—”
“Is there a problem?” someone down the hallway asked.
Everyone turned.
Detective O’Reilly walked toward them, his left hand holding out a badge for the guards to peruse. In his right hand were what looked like a pair of CD or DVD cases. The cover of the outermost case contained the University Children’s insignia.
21
“And you’re certain you left the hospital at 10:05 on Friday night?” O’Reilly asked.
“I wasn’t looking at my watch,” Luke said, “but that sounds about right.”
The questions had started as soon as O’Reilly pulled him away from the confrontation with Barnesdale. The cop had offered to drive Luke home — he wanted to hear Kate’s phone message, he said — but by the time they reached the hospital lobby, their conversation had become yet another inquiry into Luke’s whereabouts and movements on the night of her murder.
There was something conniving about the detective.
“And then,” O’Reilly said, “you walked across the street to Kolter’s Deli where you were supposed to meet Dr. Tartaglia at ten-fifteen.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t drop by your office, or stop to talk to anyone, on your way over there. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“In fact, you showed up at the restaurant a few minutes early.” O’Reilly nodded at his own observation as they passed through the exit doors. “And that matches what the restaurant owner told us. He remembers you walking in while he was making change for a customer, and the only register transaction between ten and ten-twenty had a time stamp of ten-thirteen.”
Luke stopped suddenly. “What’s your point, Detective?”
O’Reilly took another step before breaking his stride and turning back to Luke. In an awkward motion the detective stuffed the thin, plastic cases with the University Children’s insignia into his right-side coat pocket while pulling a notepad from his left pocket.
“Well, I walked from your emergency room to Kolter’s this morning.” The cop flipped open his notebook. “It took me four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That leaves a little over three and a half minutes that I’m trying to account for.”
“Are you telling me that I’m a suspect?”
“Just trying to account for everybody’s whereabouts, Doc. Chasing after the little details — that’s ninety percent of my job. I’m sure you can understand that.”
“How many of the people you deal with account for every minute of their time?”
“Most people don’t. That’s a fact.”
“You can count me among them.”
Luke figured the plastic cases in O’Reilly’s coat pocket contained DVD-video recordings from the hospital’s security cameras, but until that moment he had wrongly assumed the homicide investigator wanted to examine the segments that showed Kate being carried into the E.R.
O’Reilly was going to use the videos to pinpoint the moment Luke had left the hospital.
Luke pointed at O’Reilly’s right coat pocket. “Detective, why don’t we talk about this after you look at those videos? That is, if you have any more questions at that point.”
The cop let a small smile play at the corners of his mouth while scanning his notes, as though acknowledging Luke’s deduction.
O’Reilly asked, “What about that e-mail she sent you? You ever find it?”
“Not yet. Someone in our MIS department is searching for it.”
The detective pointed at a plain blue sedan along the curb. “Let’s go.”
They were nearing the car when Luke tried to shift the conversation to his discoveries at the Coroner’s Office. “There’s something—”
The detective’s cell phone was against his ear almost as soon as the first ring tone had faded. “Yes?”
O’Reilly was circling around to the driver’s side when he stopped dead.
“He what?” the detective shouted.
Luke turned to find the cop’s eyes locked on him.
The man’s imperturbable mask was gone, replaced by a scowl.
“The answer is no!” O’Reilly flipped his phone closed without saying good-bye. His stare remained fixed on Luke.
“You wanna explain what the hell you’re up to?” he said.
Luke was still trying to decipher the question when O’Reilly pressed on: “At some point, were you planning to tell me about your little trip to the morgue to see Dr. Tartaglia’s body?”
“Kate wasn’t the reason I went there. At least, not directly.”
O’Reilly showed him a doubtful expression.
“And you’d already know about my visit to the morgue if we hadn’t spent the last five minutes rehashing my movements on Friday night.”
The door locks popped up. “Get in,” O’Reilly said.
As soon as they were seated inside the car, the detective gave him an okay-let’s-have-it look.
Luke gave him a brief summary of the past two days: Josue Chaca’s death and its aftermath; the lingering questions that prompted Ben’s call to the coroner; the eerie similarities between Jane Doe and the boy; and how, against any reasonable probability, Kate’s name had turned up in connection with the dead girl.
But he didn’t tell O’Reilly about Ben’s planned testing of the girl’s tissues, figuring the cop’s first instinct would be to seize the evidence and sequester it. Until Luke had a better read on the detective, he wasn’t going to risk that possibility.
“If I’m right about Friday night,” Luke argued, “if Kate was coming to talk about one or both of those children, then I think the timing of her murder is awfully suspicious.”
O’Reilly looked out at the street for several seconds. When his gaze finally returned to Luke, the detective was shaking his head.
“What are you doing, Doc? You trying to run your own investigation here?”
“I’m trying to find some answers, Detective.”
“That’s my job. With all your education, I’m sure you’re smart enough to know that there’re laws against interfering with a police investigation.”
“I haven’t interfered with—”
“It’s not too often that people I question in a murder investigation ask to see the autopsy report of the murder victim. It’s even less often that they tamper with physical evidence by examining the body.”
“I didn’t touch the body. Ask the medical examiner.”
“Believe me, I will.”
Luke stared at traffic for a long moment, waiting for the tension to dissipate.
It didn’t.
“I’m not trying to get in your way, Detective. This whole thing started because I wanted to know why a patient of mine died. Doesn’t the fact that it led back to Kate Tartaglia seem odd to you?”
O’Reilly turned over the engine. “This Guatemalan boy—”