Death Glitch (16 page)

She put the checks on the nightstand next to the bed, left the door unlocked, got in the car with the dog and moved it to the far end of the parking lot. Roxanne drove up and parked in front of the room fifteen minutes later. She got out of a late model Ford Explorer along with her children, three girls aged nine, eleven and thirteen.

Izzy had never seen them before. She longed to go and tell them who she was, but they’d never believe her. She wanted so badly to enfold them in a deep hug, tell them she loved them. But she couldn’t, so as soon as they disappeared into the room, she drove out of the parking lot, got back on the road and headed north.

* * *

Detective Bob Mouledoux had a bad feeling. The odds of both Dr. Shaffer and his lawyer’s untimely deaths not being related were astronomical. Using his cell he called Dr. Jordan and received no joy. He tried Dr. Romero, got no joy there, either.

“
Not good,” he muttered. Then he called the station, reported what he’d found, asked for assistance and told his sergeant what he feared.

Fifteen minutes later the crime scene van arrived. Five minutes after that he got word that Romero had been murdered. Shot between the eyes. And five minutes after that he heard about Jordan. She’d been strangled.

Four victims all killed differently, but all killed by the same person. Mouledoux was sure of that and as far as he was concerned, the newly young Isadora Eisenhower was looking pretty good for the crimes.

A sudden thought struck him. He and Peeps were apparently the only other souls who knew about Dr. Eisenhower’s transformation. What if Dr. Eisenhower was going after them next? He called his partner at home and Peeps answered after several rings.

“
Am I ever glad to hear your voice,” Mouledoux said and he told him about Dr. Eisenhower’s murder spree.

“
Christ,” Peeps said. Then, “What now?”

“
I think we gotta find that DVD Shaffer showed us.”

“
I’m on it,” Peeps said. “You?”

“
I’m going to track down the granddaughter,” Mouledoux said. “Then I’m going to see if I can locate any other family. I’m betting she’s on the run, we just gotta find out to where.”

“
I’ll get dressed and get over to St. Catherine’s. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve got the disc.” But when Peeps called him back forty-five minutes later he had bad news. The DVD was gone. There was no video record of the surgery the mysterious young doctor had done. Dr. Shaffer had logged it out and hadn’t returned it.

Peeps said he had gone through Shaffer’s office and hadn’t found it. He went by Shaffer’s house. The place was a wreck. It had been tossed. If someone had been looking for the DVD and if it had been there, they’d found it.

“
Swell,” Mouledoux said into the phone. “We got an APB out for Dr. Eisenhower, but everyone’s looking for a seventy-seven year old broad with cancer. You and me are the only ones alive who know what we know and we can’t tell anybody, because we’ll get laughed right out of the job.”

“
We could link the murders to the granddaughter. They look the same, except for that eye business.”

“
And what do we do if they catch her, the granddaughter? Besides, I’m guessing if she’s still alive, she doesn’t have a clue, because if she did, I’m betting she’d be dead.”

“
You think we’re next?” Peeps said.

“
If she knows about us, she might try, but we’re cops, we got guns and that’s exactly what we want.”

“
I’m going home to get a shower and kiss the wife and kids. See you at around 10:00 or so.”

“
Right.” Mouledoux closed his phone.

It hadn’t been hard for him to convince the powers that be that Dr. Eisenhower was, at the very least, a person of interest, though everybody except him had a hard time accepting the fact that a dying seventy-seven-year-old woman could be responsible for six deaths in one night.

He needed that DVD, but he was beginning to believe he wasn’t going to get it. Dr. Eisenhower had been ahead of him every step of the way. Now she was gone to who knows where, probably turning herself into an unrecognizable child. Christ, he didn’t see how they were ever going to catch her.

Then he had an idea. The flaky neighbor who had been drinking. But first he had to drop by Dr. Eisenhower’s and check out her computer.

An hour later he was home with the jpeg files he’d copied from Isadora Eisenhower’s computer. There were several shots of Amy and others in Dr. Eisenhower’s backyard on several different occasions. It looked like they did weekend barbecues for friends, sometimes just the two of them. Dr. Eisenhower wasn’t in many of the shots, so Mouledoux assumed she was the photographer and she was pretty good.

And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, Mouledoux was pretty good at Photoshop. He could put a cow on the Moon and make it real. So, putting Amy in a photograph with herself, then changing the eye color on one of them was dead easy.

Back at Dr. Eisenhower’s, he deleted the originals, set back the computer’s clock, then copied his copies with the two Amy’s into one of the files that had been taken only a couple months back. Now all he had to do was to get a warrant, find the pictures and bingo, the whole world would be on the lookout for young again, brown-eyed, Isadora Eisenhower.

After resetting the system clock, he went next door to prime Thelma Prescott, but when he knocked it wasn’t her who answered.

“
Who are you?” Mouledoux didn’t flash his badge. He didn’t have to. This guy was as shifty looking as they came, the kind who could spot a cop clear across the casino from whatever table he was cheating at and be out the door, before a jack rabbit could jack.

“
Robbie Finch.” The man was wearing a purple shirt with a miniature sheriff’s badge pinned to his shoulder, but the man was no sheriff, no cop, not even a wannabe. Just a shark trying to curry favor with any law enforcement official he might come in contact with by showing his support.

“
What’s with the badge?” Mouledoux pointed to the man’s collar.

“
My dad was an L.A. County Sheriff. Killed in the line of. This was his, I wear it in his memory.”

“
Ah,” Mouledoux said. Then, “I need to talk to Thelma Prescott.”

“
My mother, she’s pretty traumatized about what happened last night.”

“
Yeah, I got that, that’s why I told her I’d come by today for her statement, rather than having her come right on downtown, you know courtesy of the RPD.”

“
That was considerate of you,” Finch said.

“
Different last names,” Mouledoux said.

“
My mother outlived two husbands. My father was the first.”

“
Ah.” Mouledoux smiled. “You tweaking?”

“
No.” Finch was sweating. His pupils were dilated. He was fidgeting. He was lying too. His mother was a drunk and he was a tweaker still living at home.

“
Listen, Mr. Finch, I don’t want to make your mother’s life any more difficult than I have to. She was pretty loaded yesterday and I should’ve taken her in.”

“
She might have had a few drinks.”

“
Yeah and a little meth.” Mouledoux was sinking the hook. “I’m betting if I were to come inside and have a look around, I’d wind up taking you two down to the hoosegow. Wouldn’t that be something, mother and son sharing a cell?”

“
You’d need a warrant.” If fear had a smell, Finch would be reeking.

“
And I have one, but I don’t necessarily want to use it.” He tried to look sincere. “I’d rather tear it up and I would if somebody could corroborate your mother’s story.”

“
Anything to help the police.” Finch reached up to his collar, fingered the badge. “What do you need?”

“
The problem is nobody seems to know anything about this mysterious woman she saw running off with a gun in her hand.”

“
Nobody seems to know what happened to the two cops either,” Finch said.

“
I’m taking this one thing at a time. I need the girl. Maybe she can explain what happened here. We know she killed two, maybe three people, maybe more. Then you’re right, there’s those missing policemen to think of.”

“
So you think the cops vanished, like my mom said?”

“
I don’t know what to think, but I know this, I need someone else who has seen this cousin of Amy Eisenhower, who could pass as her twin sister, otherwise I’m going to have to think your mother was a bit too under the influence, maybe illegally. So if you knew anybody who’d seen these two look alike girls together next door, say maybe a couple months ago, that’d really help the case.”

“
Jeez, yeah, I saw ’em. I thought they were twins.”

“
You see Dr. Eisenhower taking pictures of these girls, you know, like maybe you were looking outside that back window there?” Mouledoux pointed toward Eisenhower’s backyard.

“
Come to think of it I did.”

“
You’ve been a big help.” He turned to go, turned back. “You should know I appreciate you telling me this and that it’ll help catch a killer.” Mouledoux smiled. “And you should also know it’s against the law to lie to a police officer. So, if anybody else comes asking—”

“
I’m not stupid, Detective Mouledoux.”

“
I never thought you were.”

Izzy felt like she was running on emotional overload as she pulled into the gas station in McCloud, a tiny Northern California town nestled among tall pines. The sunrise promised to be gorgeous. Lately she’d been spending her mornings enjoying every one as if it might be her last; sunsets too, because at the rate the cancer had been moving through her body, they could’ve been.

She got out of the car, reached into her oversized purse, pushed the forty-five aside, got out her wallet, withdrew a credit card, but stopped herself as she was putting the card in the pump. She jerked her hand back as if she’d been scalded. What had she been thinking? Hadn’t she told Amy to destroy her cell phone, because she didn’t want her tracked? Hadn’t she seen enough detective shows on television? Use the card, tell them where you are.

Oh shit! She’d used the card to rent that motel in Susanville. How bloody stupid. She was going to have to be more careful, because she was sure they’d track her there and now they’d know she was heading to California, where they’d figure she was either going north, to Canada maybe, or south to L.A. and perhaps Mexico beyond.

She put the card back in her wallet, started for the convenience store and the cash register inside.

“
I’d like to fill it on three,” she told a smiling teenager. He had hair yellow as the sun she’d been watching so much these past few weeks. It was long and framed a freckled face with twinkling blue eyes and a golden smile. He was watching CNN on a small ceiling mounted television.

“
Sure thing.” He tapped on a computer screen as she laid three twenties on the counter. “That little girl’s gonna live. They say it’s a miracle.”

“
The one they got out of the well?”

“
Yeah, she rallied during the night. It looks like she’s gonna make a full recovery.”

“
That’s great.”

“
Yeah, it’s good when you can start the day with a positive news story.”

“
It is.” She returned his smile. “I’ll be back for the change.”

“
Okay.”

When she got back he was still engrossed in CNN, but his smile had been wiped away, replaced by a furrowed brow.

“
Something happened to the girl?”

“
No, breaking news,” he said. “Someone went on a killing rampage in Reno.”

“
What?”

“
Six people dead. Three doctors, a lawyer and two security guards, plus another doctor is missing and presumed dead. They all worked at St. Catherine’s Hospital.” He looked worried. “My mother’s there. She’s having cataract surgery.”

“
Did they catch the killer?”

“
No, she’s still at large.”

“
She? A woman?”

“
They’re calling her the Slaughter Queen.”

And for the next five minutes or so Izzy watched newscaster Nick Nesbit on the overhead television with the freckle faced kid and learned that the Slaughter Queen had killed two hospital security guards and hospital CEO Aaron Shaffer at Dr. Isadora Eisenhower’s house. Seventy-seven-year-old Dr. Eisenhower was missing and presumed dead. From there the Slaughter Queen went on to kill Dr. Carmin Romero in his home and then onto young Dr. Elizabeth Jordan. Three doctors dead and one missing, but that wasn’t enough for the Slaughter Queen as she’d also killed the hospital’s lawyer, Simon Drake. Six dead, one missing and who knew who else was on her list.

Nesbit, who looked as serious as Izzy had ever seen him on television, went on to say the killer was somehow related to Dr. Eisenhower, perhaps a niece, they weren’t clear on that, but the police had pictures and they hoped to have them distributed to the media within the hour. Meanwhile they had this description: she was Caucasian, had shoulder length brown hair, brown eyes, was very attractive, weight about one fifteen and was about five-six.

“
Maybe her medical insurance didn’t cover her doctor bills,” the kid said.

“
What makes you say that?”