GUNNED (18 page)

Two nurses stood behind the counter. One was typing something into her computer and the other was on the phone. I stood there waiting for a few seconds and then the nurse on the phone hung up and looked at me.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, thank you. I was looking for Kathy Pastoretti.”

The nurse shook her head. She was wearing scrubs; black pants and a red top with frogs on it. I wish I could wear scrubs to work every day. How simple would that be? I wondered what Martha Aiello thought of scrubs with tiny frogs hopping all over.

“Oh, she’s not working today?”

The nurse punched something into a computer. “She’s working, just not here. They’re short staffed at our affiliate hospital in Indian Cove, so she’s over there for a couple of weeks. Do you know it?”

I was intimately associated with the hospital. Since I had been diagnosed with RA, both my mother, who also had RA, and I had our infusion treatment at the clinic next to the hospital every eight weeks.

“Yes, thank you. I know where it is.”

I made my way back to Indian Cove and went straight to the hospital. I was tempted to wait until tomorrow when Annie could go with me, but we still needed to speak with Jerry Spiegel so I thought I might as well get Nurse Kathy out of the way.

This time I went straight to the maternity ward.

“I’m Kathy Pastoretti. How can I help you?”

“As a matter of fact, you’re exactly the person I’m looking for. I spoke with your sister, Gwen, a few days ago about the murder of a man.”

“Yes, Gwen told me about it. Not about you, I mean, but about that man dying. He went by their house last week with some crazy story about babies being switched.”

“That’s right. Gwen said you were working the day your niece was born. Would you have a few minutes to speak with me?”

Kathy looked around. She saw another nurse coming back to the station and spoke briefly to her. “I can take a break, but we’ll have to go down to the cafeteria. You’re not allowed to come back into our break room.”

We went down to the hospital cafeteria. The last time I had been here was last year when my precious nephew Henry had been struck by a car driven by a texting bastard. It was the most horrible time of my life and also the best when we got the news he was fine. Kids. I didn’t know how my sister did it. If I had kids I would never let them outside. And the older they got the worse it was. My niece Kendall was old enough now to want to go on sleepovers and movies with her friends. I was glad I didn’t have to make the decision to let them do things.

“It’s just horrible about that man,” Kathy said, as we made our way to the counter. I ordered a tea and she got a hot chocolate. “I’m not sure I can help you. I don’t remember him.”

I paid for our drinks and we took a table by a large window looking out onto a small courtyard where picnic tables had been set up for those wishing to dine outside.

“So, what can I tell you?” Kathy asked. Kathy Pastoretti was a short woman in her late fifties, and age had added the inevitable pounds around her middle area. She had a kind face and a motherly air about her, and I had a feeling she was a good nurse.

“Tell me how easy it might be to switch a baby.”

Kathy shook her head of shoulder-length, light brown hair. “It’s not. It would be almost impossible.”

I took a sip of my tea. “Why is that?”

“When a baby is born, before it even leaves the delivery room, we put an identity band, which is linked to the mother, on its wrist and another on its ankle. Then we take foot prints.”

“But someone could take the bands off and switch them,” I said.

Kathy shook her head again. “No. They’re tight so that they don’t slip off. We have to cut them off before the baby leaves the hospital.”

“Do you check the foot prints before they leave?”

“No, we check the band before we cut it off.”

“So if it was switched, you wouldn’t really know?” I pressed.

Kathy cradled her hot chocolate in both hands. “Someone would have to cut the band off, and then what? The bands are put on in the delivery room, like I said, and we don’t have another. So if a band was cut off, or there was a baby with nothing on its wrist, we would notice.”

I thought for a moment. “So they’re never taken off?”

“They are, in certain circumstances, like if we need to insert an IV. Then we’d have to replace the cut band with one that’s been signed off by the doctors and the nurse in charge. It happens, but not often.” Kathy took a sip of her drink and then looked at me. “Once in a while a band is loose. Someone gets sloppy and doesn’t put it on tight enough. If that happened, it could be slipped off. But then you’d have to find another baby with a loose band to be able to exchange. That would be some coincidence and I just don’t see that happening.”

“Take me back to the day your niece was born. You were working.”

“Yes, I was. Our father had just died, mine and Gwen’s, but they were short staffed so I couldn’t take off as much time as I wanted. Plus, I knew Gwen would want me with her.”

“And did they have the same system in place then to identify the babies?”

“No. Our bands now have bar codes that directly link them with the mother’s ID number. We didn’t have that then. We took foot prints right away and put a little band on their wrist, but it wasn’t scanned like we do now and it wasn’t as secure either. It was pretty flimsy, actually. Look, the truth is back then the hospital was old school. Run by a bunch of antiquated old geezers who didn’t see the future. That’s why we got sold and rebranded.”

I perked up. “So it would have been much easier to switch a baby then?”

“I didn’t say that, exactly. We still had our systems in place, and we all did our jobs, but that day was a madhouse. Six babies born within the span of eight hours. We were short staffed, and things were crazy.”

“So it would have been easy for someone to go in and switch a baby?”

“A nursery is a very busy place. We bring the babies in to clean them and give them their vitamin K shot to help with blood clotting. The nurses are constantly in and out bringing the babies back and forth to their mothers, monitoring their temperatures, and the like. And then of course you have all the relatives coming by to look in.” Kathy’s face brightened.

“So it would be pretty difficult with all that activity,” I said. Or maybe all that activity was just the thing to give the culprit time to make a switch.

Kathy looked thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, but after all the excitement with all those little girls being born, it got very quiet. No new babies came for a couple of days. We were busy most of the time, but the nights were very quiet. And then there was an incident.”

“What kind of incident?” I got chills up my spine.

“Some guy showed up acting very weird. It was late, and I’m not sure how he got in. Just another crack in the old regime’s system, one of many, by the way, but I’ll never admit to that in court. The nurses, the doctors, we were all very dedicated professionals, but like I said, there were a lot of administrative problems. At one point there was talk of the hospital closing.”

“Getting back to the night the babies were born,” I pressed. “What happened with that man?”

“Sorry. There was a lot of commotion with this guy showing up. It was the night after all the babies were born. He was unkempt, looked like he was on drugs or something, and like I said, we were short staffed, and at night sometimes there’s only one or two nurses on duty. I was working that night and I was out in the hall with the other nurse trying to get him to be quiet. We called security and they arrived. They got him calmed down quickly and put him in the elevator. Then one of the mothers got sick to her stomach, several of the babies were crying. It was a mess.”

“Do you know who the man was? Did he say anything coherent?” I asked.

“I had never seen him before he showed up. As far as I know he was just some vagrant. The area around the hospital wasn’t the best in those days, and I figured he came in trying to find something to eat or get warm.”

“Did he get arrested?” I asked, hoping maybe there might be a file on him somewhere that the police could check out.

“I don’t think so. Security came and took him out, but they weren’t actual police. As far as I know they just took him back downstairs and escorted him from the hospital.”

“So how long was the nursery unattended?”

Kathy looked down at her hands. “More than it should have been. But before that idiot showed up, everything was really quiet. All asleep and accounted for, so when the fuss started, it didn’t seem like a big deal to go out into the lobby area and try to calm that man down. We didn’t want him waking everyone up.”

“But conceivably there was time for someone to go in and change the bands? They would have to switch the babies in their cribs as well, right?”

“Yes, they would have, and yes, there was probably enough time for someone to do this, but why would they?” Kathy Pastoretti looked desperate.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t done on purpose. Maybe it was an accident.”

Kathy gave me a look that could melt titanium. “Then it would have to be the fault of a nurse and I’m telling you that never happened. Bands went on before the babies were moved out of the delivery room. Every time. No exceptions. And afterward we would have no reason to remove a band. None of the babies was in critical condition requiring any special treatment.”

“Did any of the babies seem to be at all sick?” I asked, thinking about Rhoda Newman and her little daughter who died a couple of years after her birth.

“Not that I remember. One mother had a C-section, but her daughter was fine.”

“Do you remember the Spiegels?” I asked.

Kathy looked at me over the rim of her cup. “I don’t remember him. But her.” Kathy shook her head. “What a headache that one was. Treated us like we worked for her. Her mother was at the hospital constantly. We couldn’t get her to leave even after visiting hours. The fathers, well, we let them stay, but that mother was a real pain in my backside.”

“Was she at the hospital that night? The night when that man came in?” Maybe I could find out where Mrs. Spiegel’s mother lived and find out if she remembered anything from that night—that is if the woman was still alive. I thought back to whether Jackie ever mentioned one way or the other, but I couldn’t remember.

Kathy shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t recall. I came on duty not too long before that weird guy showed up and I was in the nursery most of the time. Everything was quiet and that’s what I remember. Until he came in. Look, I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain how two babies got switched, if indeed they did. It was a funny thing, though. All the babies had brown hair and a lot of it. It was one of the only times in my nursing career where all the babies in the nursery at one time were so alike. It was hard to tell them apart, I’ll admit that. A bit freaky, really, especially with three of them. They were just so alike. And no, I don’t remember which three.”

“So because they all looked so much alike it would have been hard to notice if one had been switched, correct.”

Kathy looked forlorn. “Not usually. Babies are beautiful and they all have their own little personalities, but this was an odd bunch to be sure. A few of the nurses made comments on how it looked like we had sextuplets at one point. The truth is they didn’t really look alike, but they were just all so similar, if that makes any sense.”

Kathy clasped her hands tightly together and looked up at me, a worried look on her face.

“What is it?” I asked quickly. “Do you remember something else?”

“Not exactly, but, well, after all the commotion I was pretty upset for the rest of the night. Luckily, it got very quiet after about thirty minutes.”

“Okay. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

“For the rest of the night I kind of went through the motions. I did my job. I’m not saying I didn’t, but I was shook up from that guy. I kept expecting him to come back. Anyway, after that night, at the end of my shift, I was gone for a week. I managed to take some time off. The other nurse on duty with me that night was off as well after our shift. The next group of nurses that took over hadn’t been on duty since the six girls were born.”

I let this sink in for a minute. “So if a baby was switched that night, with all the excitement you may not have noticed, and then after that, all new nurses showed up so they wouldn’t have known if a baby had been switched. Is that what you’re saying?”

Kathy wringed her hands together. “Yes. It could have happened that way. I’m not saying it did, but it could have.”

“What about the other nurses?” I asked. “Maybe I could talk with them and see if they noticed anything weird.”

Kathy did the shake of her head again. “Absolutely not. If you’re thinking any one of them would switch a baby, you’re dead wrong. And the ones that came on later, after that night, wouldn’t have known anything about a switch if it happened when that crazy man was on the ward.”

Of course maybe the switch happened later. Maybe the crazy man had nothing to do with the baby switch, but that would be too much of a coincidence.

Kathy was still talking. “They were all dedicated professionals and they had all worked for the hospital for a long time. I promise you that not one of them would ever do what you’re suggesting.”

“Do any of them still work here? Maybe one of them wanted to do something to really cause the hospital some trouble, like a revenge type of thing, or maybe someone bribed one of them?” I asked.

Nurse Kathy gave me a look that said she’d like to stick a needle in me, preferably one filled with something lethal. “No. I’m the only one still around. I was the youngest back then. The others are retired. One died of cancer. And no, they couldn’t be bribed. Absolutely not. And besides, why would anyone want to switch a baby in the first place? Who would want to do that? All you have is the story of this man Spiegel. How do you know he was telling the truth? And look what happened to him. After he went around bothering people, threatening to upset their lives, he got killed.”

I didn’t think Kathy realized what she said. After all, she already admitted to me that her sister called her with the news about the switch, and if she had screwed up that night and either switched a baby herself, or was negligent to the point that someone else was able to, she might well want to keep that information hidden. She had to be nearing retirement and probably had a pension to protect. Maybe she thought with the death of Mr. Spiegel it would all go away.