A Bitch Called Hope (13 page)

“You must’ve walked to the jail from your office,” she said.

He nodded. His indignant breath puffed out in clouds into the frigid air. Still with the differences between cops and PIs, ending with how the client could fire you at any time. Her toes felt like someone was biting down on them. What was that crap about hypothermia being a painless death?

“Maybe I could talk to Delia. I’m a friend of the family,” she said. “I wanted to ask her about a box of very expensive cigars that was given to Bill, maybe as an enticement to smoke—”

“Are you not listening?” Said too loudly. A couple wrapped in scarves looked over their shoulders at Kline and her.

She and Kline jogged through the slush, Kline lecturing her about cracks in the DA’s case and reasonable doubt. Her shoes were soaked through. “Only one juror and we’ve done our job,” he said. He told her to round up an expert witness for the inhalers. Then more about cracks in the case.

“Cracks,” she said.

“You need to know, if she fires us, I’m out a boatload of money,” he said. “Bet your ass you won’t want to use me for a reference.”

Chapter 19

Kline wanted cracks? Lennox would find cracks. She drove home and turned on her computer. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, over seven thousand deaths occur each year from medication errors: dosage errors, mislabeling of medicines and drug interaction. Only eight percent of those seven thousand deaths were due to mislabeling of medicines and, of that eight percent, there were no deaths reported in the state of Oregon. Lennox pored over the directories for any and all expert witnesses who might have an axe to grind with pharmaceutical companies.

She worked until eight, then turned her light off and walked down the hallway to her living room. The only sound was the hum of the furnace. The porch light from her front windows lit the room just enough to maneuver. She padded over to the windows to pull the curtains closed.

Across the street, parked east of Mrs. Kurtz’s driveway, was an eighties Camaro. The muscle car stood out in her neighborhood, where two out of three cars were Subaru station wagons. The driver lit a cigarette, and she thought there was a passenger as well. Two males. They were parked so that she couldn’t see their license plate.

Lennox closed all the curtains across the front of the house and checked the locks on the front and back doors. She went back to the window and eased the curtain aside just far enough to see if the men were still sitting there. They were. A couple of guys sitting in a car at night. No reason she could think of why they were parked in front of the Kurtz’s house. The only people who visited Mrs. Kurtz were people from her church and never, never at night.

Lennox had lost the shield protecting her from all the sane criminals, the ones who knew better than to harm a cop. Now she was just a civilian. “Civilian”— just a nice way of saying “prey.” Lennox went for her night vision scope.

Clear as clear, the guy at the wheel of the Camaro was John Resnick, the man she’d sent to the state pen. The guy next to him Emory Zimm, the other Altar Boy.

What were they doing in her neighborhood tonight? It couldn’t be anything good. Lennox went upstairs, retrieved Old Ugly from the night table and strapped it on.

Old Ugly was a Colt .45 1911, about as sexy as a pair of house slippers and about as comfortable. She’d been issued a Smith and Wesson M&P service revolver when she’d joined the force but she never bonded with it. Ugly was her firing piece all those years in. When she was called to use it, thank God that wasn’t often, it never let her down. She pulled the slide to the rear, pressing up on the slide release, fed the loaded magazine and seated it with the heel of her hand. She checked the safety with her thumb, then holstered it.

She stood before the mirror in her bedroom and ran her trials, clearing the pistol from the holster, seating it again in the holster, clearing, seating. Drills she could do with her eyes closed. When she was satisfied, she holstered the gun, went back downstairs and checked the window. They were still sitting there, cigarettes glowing red in the dark.

Two a.m. and four cups of coffee later, the Camaro was gone.

The next morning Lennox combed through the public records. There were no cases of mislabeling at Nob Hill Pharmacy where the Pikes got their prescriptions filled. But Delia had a cupboard full of inhaler samples. Delia had told Lennox that when the inhalers became hard to find Doctor E had given her everything in his inventory.

Still, it was possible Bill’s death was a mistake. She called the pharmacy and asked about the availability of both inhalers. The asthma inhaler was readily available; the insulin inhaler was not. No, they could not special order it. Lennox spent an hour on the computer trying to find a source for the insulin inhalers with no success.

So then she checked into both the Pike couple’s physicians. Bill’s physician, Doctor Chun, had no lawsuits filed against him, no record of any mislabeling. Doctor Engstrom, however, had a much more checkered past. In the last ten years, four of his patients had overdosed and ended in the emergency ward. Three cases involved a drug taken for ADD. Sixty-year-old women being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder? God forbid he ever got a hold of Aurora. The fourth case involved a barbiturate prescribed for some stress situation. In all four cases it was proved that it was the patients who took too many pills rather than the prescription itself. None of the four women sued.

Cracks in the prosecution’s case. An unhappy marriage? Lennox wasn’t going to touch that with a stick. A trace of Delia’s lipstick on the label? No contest there. The pharmacy didn’t supply Delia’s inhalers. How in God’s name was she supposed to refute this case? Expert witness? An expert witness would declare it impossible that somehow the label switch was an innocent error.

Someone in the family gave Bill a Cuban cigar for Christmas. Christmas, a time to make merry. With all the champagne and brandy Bill had imbibed, he would’ve blown a .115 if he could’ve blown. She had that piece already. But then he smokes a cigar, grows short of breath, stumbles upstairs, reaches for his inhaler from the dresser drawer. Takes a big old pull from the inhaler. The rush of insulin makes him even shorter of breath. He figures he needs more, takes a final pull and collapses on the bedroom floor. The murderer dumps the inhaler in the caterers’ garbage, only Detective Sloane insists on gathering up all the garbage as evidence and the inhaler is discovered.

From her office window, Lennox watched the sky grow from gray to indigo. A gust of wind buffeted the window and it began to hail. Her clay pots on the deck filled with bits of ice the size of peas. The telephone rang.

“I need to talk to you,” Sarge said. No small talk. Translation: Sarge was at work and possibly being overheard.

“When?” she said.

“I get my lunch break in an hour,” he said. “Meet me at the carts?”

Over a hundred food carts were available within walking distance from the cop shop. Sarge’s favorite, the one that Lennox always knew to meet him at, was Starchy and Husk. Starch was something Sarge missed, living with a lifetime member of Weight Watchers, and Starchy’s famous mac and cheese delivered the carbs he longed for.

The air was cold and damp. Lennox spotted Sarge’s bald head across the street from the carts under the porch roof of Cameron’s Books, holding a white carton in one hand and a plastic fork in the other, his back to the dusty plate glass. He looked decidedly grim as he shoveled the macaroni into his mouth. Lennox stuffed her hands in her pockets and joined him under the porch roof. The rain dropped from the eaves and bounced off the sidewalk at her feet.

“What’s up?” she said.

“The evidence from the Pike murder, the cigar butts, everything collected from outside is missing,” he said. “It’s gone, Lennox.”

“Tommy,” she said.

“Since I checked for you, Tommy’s the only one that has signed the log sheet for that locker key,” Sarge said.

“I asked him about it a couple days ago.”

There was reproach in Sarge’s eyes. “You tipped your hand,” he said.

Sarge had been wise to Tommy all along. All of her friends had been. It was only Lennox who didn’t get it, who kept believing in him when it was obvious to the world what bad news Tommy had always been. Her heart, her poor heart, bumped against her rib cage.

She’d looked up to him. She had destroyed her career for him. How many shortcuts had he taken unbeknownst to her? Was this about justice or was it a scorecard kept between the prosecutor and the defense team? And what could she do about it?

Sarge pitched his cardboard tray in the garbage. “He’s destroyed the chain of custody,” he said. “Even if I could get it back, anything you learned wouldn’t be admissible.”

“I know.” The cold leached up through her shoes. She shivered.

“It’s not right,” he said. “I’m taking it to Captain Gerber.” All kinds of things went missing in those evidence lockers. Sarge didn’t have the budget or the manpower to keep track of everything. A cop was on his honor to maintain the chain of custody. A cop played by the rules and justice prevailed, or it didn’t, but a cop lived by the law. That’s the way Sarge lived. That’s the way she lived. She was one of the good guys. And for all his shit, she had always believed Tommy was too. When had he started jacking with the evidence?

Even now, weren’t they supposedly fighting for justice? So they sat on opposite sides of the bench, one of them destined to lose the battle. Still, the battle was for justice, wasn’t it? And Delia was innocent. Her greediness, her diet pills and her lightning romance with Doctor E—Delia Pike was no lamb, but that didn’t mean she’d killed her husband.

“If you talk to the captain,” she said, “Tommy will accuse you of helping the defense.”

“I’m responsible for those lockers.”

“Like you said, the cigars are no longer admissible,” she said.

“It’s on my head if the brass find it’s missing,” Sarge getting increasingly red-faced. “Tommy’s not going to get away with it.”

“Damn right, he’s not going to get away with it,” she said.

“Give it up, girl,” Sarge said. “He’s bad news.”

A street musician in his late twenties joined Lennox and Sarge under the eaves of the bookstore. He strapped an accordion against his chest and began a song. The rain hitting the sidewalk made its own music. This was one of those times she wanted to weep in the worst way. Instead she dug in her bag and came up with a few bucks for the musician.

“I got to get back to work.” Sarge pitched a few more bucks into the accordion case.

They parted at the corner of Oak and Third, Sarge back to the cop shop, Lennox back to her car. She’d lost the cigars, the only lead she could think of. She started the car and sped out of downtown to the freeway, sending a rooster tail of water over the concrete abutment that divided I-5 from the Banfield.

Chapter 20

It was two in the afternoon the following day when Lennox had the phone meeting with Kline. The meeting ended with Lennox getting fired. She threw her phone at her desk. The trapdoor thingy where you put the batteries popped off on impact, the phone continuing to skid across the desk like a hockey puck until it encountered her lamp. Fuck it. She left the phone where it landed and grabbed her keys and got into her truck. Turned her windshield wipers on high, and twenty minutes later she picked up 99W.

It was crazy driving to Spirit Mountain Casino in this weather, but she’d be damned if she was going to mope around the house. Tomorrow she’d be just as unemployed.

Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t fire you right now
, he’d said when she told him that there was no expert witness that could help Delia’s case. She told him Doctor E had four overdoses in the last ten years. So maybe she could’ve been more politic, but he had sent her on a fool’s errand.

It doesn’t matter whether Delia’s innocent or not. Or even if you get her off, so long as you get paid,
she told him.
That’s why you don’t want me to go too deep with this.
He told her she was impossible, told her he needed a more seasoned, professional team. He had decided to go back to the people at Calderbank.

Lennox could stay home. Lick her wounds, look for a new gig. Or she could drive in the pouring rain to the casino.

Lennox passed through miles of suburban ranch houses and strip malls to open fields, then through Newberg. She’d told Kline that Bill’s pharmacy didn’t supply Delia’s insulin. She got it straight from Doctor E. Who’d had four cases of medication errors that landed his patients in the hospital.
I thought we were clear about laying off the family
, Kline said.

She drove through filbert orchards and vineyard country to the little town of Dundee. The foil Christmas garland strung across the highway through town sagged in the rain. The only thing sadder than rain-soaked Christmas decorations was being holed up in your house thinking about what went wrong. Thirty-four miles to go.

The rain came down harder as 99W narrowed to one lane. An RV with South Dakota plates pulled out in front of her and immediately dropped to twenty miles under the speed limit. A pressboard Santa attached to the back door of the trailer waved at her as she drove behind the RV. Over and over in her head Lennox heard Kline tell her she wasn’t a cop. Santa waved.

You want to relive your glory days; meanwhile, I’ve got a client raising holy hell.
She followed Santa all the way into the casino parking lot.

Inside, retirees in Christmas bear sweatshirts played video slots while a couple of lonely-looking dealers manned the Three Card tables. Lennox chose the taller of the two, a doughy man with thinning blond hair and an unfocused smile that seemed very welcoming at the moment. He reeked of Brut, but there were worse things in life. Pinned to his black shirt was a brass nameplate that read
Axel.

Lennox sat at Axel’s table, bought three hundred dollars’ worth of chips, said how you doing and got an even sweeter smile from him. She placed a five-buck chip on Ante and another on Pair Plus.