The Case of the Questionable Quadruplet Read online

  As I drove up, someone switched on floodlights. They illuminated stone facing, a picture window and a giant camellia bush that reached the edge of the steeply pitched roof. The side gate was ajar.

  Emergency vehicles and a Golden Fine Foods van jammed the curb. Beside me, Morris pointed to the adjacent corner park. “There’s a public lot over there.”

  “What’s wrong with this space?” The wheel responded smoothly beneath my hands as we eased into a tight opening.

  “You have great depth perception.” Behind me, Tory unsnapped her seat belt. “You’d ace the driving course at the police academy.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” I hoped I sounded calmer than I felt. My stomach had been churning the whole way over.

  The three of us had barely paused to cover the food and set the alarm. Keith had whipped out his phone, and I’d caught the words “Sergeant? Sorry to disturb you, sir, but…” before he raced outside. He must have persuaded his superior to approve the assignment, because I spotted his red car behind a patrol unit.

  Why would they need a detective for a simple drowning? But—chilling thought—Dee Marie’s death six months earlier had appeared accidental, too.

  On the sidewalk, we joined a knot of neighbors held at bay by a uniformed officer. Above us on a sloping lawn, a middle-aged woman with pinkish hair signaled to me. I recognized Ada Humphreys, owner of the local toy shop.

  “Dr. Darcy.” She gestured us closer. “Any idea what this is about?”

  I described Billie’s discovery of the client floating in her pool. “That’s all I know.”

  “Oh, dear. Malerie’s in the habit of doing laps before dinner,” Ada told me. “When I warned her not to swim alone, she said it was for exercise. I’d have liked to keep an eye on her, but…” She indicated the five-foot fence separating their properties. Ada was too short to see over it easily.

  “Swimming’s good for lowering blood pressure.” I cringed at the realization that Malerie might have read that in one of our brochures.

  “Did you observe anything unusual tonight?” Tory asked.

  Ada considered. “Now that you mention it, a couple of hours ago I heard raised voices outside, in the back. Malerie sounded furious.”

  “Did you recognize the other person or pick up what they said?” Tory asked.

  “It was a woman, but other than that, no,” Ada said. “My hearing’s not as good as it used to be.”

  “Be sure to tell the police about the argument,” Tory said.

  “Of course.”

  On the street, the catering van pulled away from the curb. Morris, who had his own set of keys, must have decided not to let the food grow cold while he waited for permission. “Is he going to be in trouble with the police?” I asked Tory. “I mean, since Billie was driving it, and she discovered the… victim.” The cruelly impersonal word stuck in my mouth.

  “I’m sure they’d prefer to search it, but Dad’s worried about his other customers. Unless they have a warrant, he’s not obligated to stick around.” She shifted uneasily. “Damn. I hate just standing here.”

  “Miss being in the middle of the action?” I asked.

  “I’m not even sure where the middle of the action is any more.” In the patchy light, my sister-in-law’s usually expressive face was masked.

  “Dr. Darcy!” I heard my name, and again, “Dr. Darcy!” Two young women excused their way through the throng, their flowing red hair unmistakable even in a sepia-toned world. “Is Mom hurt? Why are the police here?” Hard to tell whether it was Doreen or Danielle who spoke.

  It wasn’t my place to tell them their mother might be dead. “She was found floating in her swimming pool. Beyond that, I’m as much in the dark as you are.”

  “We tried to get past that policeman but he shooed us away,” Danielle said. “Can you talk to him?”

  Surely the man hadn’t realized they were Malerie’s daughters. He still wouldn’t have admitted them to the house, though, in case it was a crime scene, as I’d learned from watching TV cop shows with Keith, who scoffed at the inaccuracies. Instead, he’d have isolated them—sensible police practice, but harsh in their emotional state. “It might be best not to interrupt the paramedics.”

  “I just talked to her this afternoon.” Doreen’s voice trembled. Slightly heavier than her sister and with broader features, she was an R.N. at Heights. Although she must often face difficult situations with patients, now she was almost pleading for reassurance. “She told us to stop by after dinner for a big announcement.”

  “She isn’t sick, is she?” Danielle regarded me wide-eyed, approaching meltdown. “Is that why she called us here?”

  “Her health’s fine.” I wasn’t sure how much I could say without prejudicing their testimony. And why destroy their hope? Maybe the paramedics would resuscitate Malerie. “She didn’t drop any hints about this announcement?”

  Doreen thrust her hands into her jeans pockets. “I thought it might concern her will. She’d talked about changing it.”

  “She did?” Danielle challenged. “She never mentioned it to me.”

  “That was a few months ago.”

  “Pardon me for butting in.” Tory’s patience had obviously reached its limit. She’d been frowning at me, which I’d ignored. “You guys shouldn’t talk among yourselves until the police debrief you.”

  “What do you mean, debrief us?” Danielle asked.

  “Who’re you?” Doreen demanded.

  I introduced Tory. They both seemed appeased on learning she was my sister-in-law. Then Danielle clapped her hands. “Mom must be all right! The paramedics are leaving.”

  Yes, they were, without a patient. Not a good sign.

  “Let’s go in,” Doreen said. “I’ll tell that policeman…”

  “Oh, God.” Her sister grabbed her arm.

  Into the spot vacated by the paramedics slid a white van bearing the logo of the Orange County Coroner’s office. “That was fast,” Tory muttered.

  Danielle gasped. Around us, neighbors stopped chattering. After a shocked moment, they started up again.

  “Oh, dear,” Ada said from her porch. “My condolences.”

  Malerie’s daughters shouldn’t be learning of her death amid a clump of bystanders. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said, as if there could be any other reason for the coroner to be there. In my phone, I pressed Keith’s number.

  “Yeah, what?” came his voice.

  “It’s Eric.” As if he couldn’t read my name on his screen.

  “I’m busy,” growled my friend, in full homicide detective mode.

  “You might be interested to learn that Mrs. Abernathy’s daughters are out here with Tory and me,” I said. “Also that one of the neighbors heard her arguing with someone earlier.”

  “Oh, hell! I told the patrolmen to separate the witnesses.” He clicked off.

  Beside me, Danielle was sobbing. “First Dee Marie, now Mom!”

  “I can’t believe it.” Doreen hugged her sister. She was shaking, too.

  “Please come inside and sit down,” Ada said.

  “Hold on a sec.” I indicated Keith stalking out of Malerie’s house. “That’s the detective.”

  After pausing for a sharp word with a couple of uniformed officers, he approached us, accompanied by a solidly built man whom he introduced as the coroner’s deputy. They spoke with the sisters quietly and, when Mrs. Humphreys repeated her invitation, accompanied them into her house.

  That left me with Tory. “Do you see Billie?” she asked. “Dad was worried about her. This must be a shock.”

  I nodded toward a police cruiser where a purple-haired young woman occupied the front with the door open. “About to be questioned, I guess.”

  “When no one answered the bell, maybe she peeked over the fence,” Tory said. “Since she’d been assisting Dad with deliveries, she might have figured Mrs. Abernathy went for a swim.”

  “What a disturbing discovery.” Reactions to a situation li
ke this can include nightmares or, at a minimum, an intensified awareness of the fragility of life.

  Into the welter of vehicles on the street angled a police crime-scene unit. “Keith’s treating this as a homicide,” I surmised.

  “She was murdered?” A man in a jogging suit stared at me. “I thought she drowned.”

  Tory regarded him coolly. “Do you have information to contribute aside from gossip?”

  He ducked his head. Well, we had nothing to contribute either, I thought. Since we’d accomplished our mission of delivering Morris to his van, perhaps we ought to leave. Yet I felt as if I had unfinished business.

  My sister-in-law appeared riveted by the movements of the emergency personnel. She’d spent seven years in uniform and three years in crimes against property. Despite her claim that she was happy doing private security work, I feared she’d abandoned her career too readily after her breakup.

  A saying of my mother’s surfaced: Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Dad used to laugh about that. Good advice for an obstetrician, wouldn’t you say?

  “You know the best part of being a cop?” Tory reflected. “Getting outside my own head. When I was on the job, it wasn’t me personally, it was the badge, the sworn oath and the procedures.”

  Having grown up planning to be a doctor like my father, I’d never separated my personal from my professional identity. “Is it different as a PI?”

  “Yes, maybe because I’m new. Once I start bringing in clients, I’m sure I’ll get my feet on the ground. So far I’ve only worked the cases they assign me.”

  Minutes ticked by. Like the other bystanders, we awaited enlightenment, or at least an update. As if this were a hospital and the doctor would soon emerge to tell us how the patient was doing.

  Keith exited Ada’s house and caught my eye. When Tory trailed me, he raised a hand like a traffic cop, halting her. I saw her stiffen, and wondered why he didn’t grasp that insensitivity in one situation affected her overall response to him. I doubted he’d welcome the tip, though.

  “Are Doreen and Danielle all right?” I asked him.

  “They’re holding up.” From inside his jacket, Keith produced a plastic evidence bag containing a prescription medicine vial. The label belonged to the pharmacy in my building, and the physician’s name on it was mine.

  “What’s this for?” he demanded.

  “High blood pressure.”

  A couple of neighbors edged toward us with curious glances. Tory spread her arms to hold them at bay.

  “Could it cause unconsciousness?” Keith asked.

  Although surely the coroner’s deputy had already filled him in, I understood his technique. In searching for a tricky diagnosis, I often rephrase a question in hopes of shedding new light on the symptoms.

  “It happens,” I said. “But BP meds aren’t sedatives. Hold it higher.” When he complied, I studied the bottle. “It’s nearly empty. The label indicates it was refilled last week.”

  “I noticed that,” he said.

  “If she took all those, it could cause a sharp drop in blood pressure. And yes, she might faint.” I hated to think my prescription had contributed to Malerie’s death.

  Keith tucked away the evidence bag. “We’ll have to wait for an official cause of death, but it appears to be drowning, possibly as a result of an overdose of this stuff. Could she have taken them by accident?”

  “Older people can become confused and take too many meds,” I said. “But she was only sixty. And that’s a lot of pills.”

  “Might it have been deliberate?” His tone remained flat.

  “She didn’t strike me as a person planning suicide,” I replied. “For instance, she asked her daughters to meet her this evening. She didn’t say why, except it was important. I doubt she meant for them to find her body.”

  He didn’t react. Danielle and Doreen must already have told him the story. “Did you talk to her recently?”

  Out of habit, I hesitated. However, the privacy protections mandated by federal law don’t apply during a criminal investigation. And definitely not when the patient might have been murdered.

  I explained about Malerie’s visit the previous day and her sighting of a woman identical to her daughters. “She insisted there was a fourth baby, a quadruplet.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “It’s beyond far-fetched,” I said. “Basically, no.”

  “Was she delusional?”

  “I hadn’t formed a medical opinion on that score.” It occurred to me that I ought to mention the missing file, so I did.

  Keith was taking notes so fast I expected his hand to cramp. “Whoever broke into your house stole her file?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I haven’t had any reason to look in those cabinets since we digitized.”

  “When was that?”

  “Before Dad died. Over three years ago.”

  More jotting. “I’ll make certain we fingerprint them,” he said. “Thoroughly.”

  Had a killer broken into my house in order to swipe the file, and seized my wife’s necklace simply because it was there? Fruitless to speculate.

  “The file might surface,” I said. “But it’s a big coincidence.”

  “There are way too many coincidences.” Keith’s nostrils flared. “Starting with someone smothering her daughter.”

  Dee Marie had been a sweet-natured homemaker. It was widely speculated that the police suspected her husband. Although witnesses placed him at his law office on the afternoon she died, it was only a few miles away. Also, killers can be hired.

  When she and her spouse, Rafe Tibbets, had consulted me about the impact of asthma on a potential pregnancy, he’d acted protective toward her. They’d both been pleased to learn that, with treatment and monitoring, her disease shouldn’t endanger mother or baby. Why would he have wanted her dead?

  Tonight, my main concern was her sisters. If possible, I’d have liked to spare them unnecessary stress. “Do her daughters have to identify the body?”

  “No. We found Mrs. Abernathy’s driver’s license, along with other identification,” Keith said.

  “By the way,” I added, “Doreen indicated her mother might have been changing her will.”

  “I’ll look for a copy.” Beyond that, he remained tight-lipped.

  The coroner’s deputy emerged from Ada’s house and headed back toward Malerie’s. There was, I had learned from Keith in the past, an overlap in their responsibilities to investigate, interview witnesses and safeguard the scene and evidence.

  “I’m sure I’ll have questions for you later, but you don’t have to hang around tonight.” Keith started off.

  Nothing more? My lungs squeezed at the prospect of leaving Malerie without a word of farewell. Or an apology.

  “May I view her body?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m worried I’ve left out part of what she and I discussed yesterday,” I said. “Seeing her might jog my memory.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t hurt. Follow me. Just you.”

  Tory stood close enough to have been listening. Expression blank, she remained in place.

  Keith led me to the far side of Malerie’s property, where it adjoined the park. A uniformed officer had cleared a small area, but beyond the crime scene tape, a handful of people were craning their necks toward the fence. One woman held up a cell phone attached to a selfie stick.

  “Confiscate that.” Keith made a subtle stop gesture toward the cop, which I interpreted to mean he didn’t plan to actually do it.

  “No way!” The woman fumbled with the stick and nearly dropped the apparatus.

  “Well, ma’am, that could be important evidence. We’ll return it once we’ve removed the pictures.” Still deadpan, he added, “Unless it gets lost in the evidence room.”

  Clutching her cell, the woman took off running. The rest of the onlookers dispersed as well.

  “That ought to scare the buzzards for now. For Pete’s sake, expan
d the perimeter,” Keith told the uniform, and gestured me to the fence. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Bracing myself, I peered into the yard.

  A sweep of glowing azure water dominated a pocket paradise. From the kidney-shaped pool and round spa, large flagstones led to a covered outdoor kitchen fitted with stainless steel appliances. I pictured Malerie and her late husband lounging at the glass table, entertaining friends.

  The coroner’s deputy and several crime scene personnel blocked the huddled figure on the deck. Then a photographer moved aside, yielding a view of Malerie lying on her back, where the paramedics must have placed her. In the glare of floodlights, her dyed red curls stood out against her pale skin and one-piece swimsuit. She looked vulnerable and abandoned.

  As a doctor, I’d been in the presence of death before. It’s not as if I were an oncologist, though; relatively few patients died on my watch. Still, it happened, and I’d learned to compartmentalize sorrow by reminding myself that I’d done my best to save them.

  But Malerie hadn’t been sick. Unless the autopsy revealed a stroke or heart attack, nature hadn’t killed her.

  She’d asked for my help. A fat lot of good I’d done.

  “Well?” Keith said.

  I could hardly tell him I believed I had a sacred duty to solve this murder. “When I talked to her on the phone this morning…”

  “You talked to the victim today?” he snapped. “You didn’t mention that.”

  “Quit interrupting the witness.”

  “All right,” he conceded. “Continue.”

  “She repeated the words, `People lie,’ as if it were significant,” I told him. “Spotting a woman who was a dead ringer for her girls—could someone have been manipulating her?”

  “One of her daughters?” he prompted.

  “Or another relative.” I shook my head, unable to dredge up a reasonable speculation. “I have a gut feeling that the quadruplet business is a key, but I haven’t figured out what door it opens.”

  “We’re being metaphorical here?” Keith asked. “About keys and doors?”

  “Right.”

  His nostrils flared. He hated metaphors. “Any other ideas?”

  “Afraid not.”