Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 37

I parked in my usual spot under the streetlight behind the Regional Forensic Center and let myself in the back door with the keypad combination lock. It was nearly midnight now, and my back and neck ached from leaning into the helicopter’s cockpit for three hours straight. The morgue looked deserted, though in fact it was never unattended. If I’d rung the loading bay doorbell, a video camera would have swiveled in my direction after a few moments, and a groggy morgue assistant would have buzzed me in. But since the assistant was probably a pathology intern — and therefore desperately short on sleep — I’d let myself in, and I moved through the hallways as quietly as possible, lest I disturb a much-needed nap.

Once in the basement of the hospital itself, I caught an elevator up to the seventh floor, which housed the cardiac care unit. The night duty nurse at the station smiled broadly when she saw me. “Hi, Dr. Brockton; good to see you,” she beamed. “What brings you up here at almost midnight? You must be scouting for likely donors.” We shared a laugh at the joke, which I heard some version of almost any time I crossed from the catacombs of the dead to the wards of the ailing.

“Not tonight,” I said, “but if you get any hot prospects for me, give me a call. Actually, I wanted to check on one of your new patients, Sheriff Tom Kitchings, who came in on LifeStar a few hours ago.”

“He’s a popular guy,” she said.

“Oh?”

“A gentleman was here earlier, right before I came on shift, and one of his deputies just left. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him in the elevator.”

Williams? It had to be Williams, since Orbin was over in the osteology lab with Miranda, getting simmered and scrubbed clean. My mind was racing with scenarios. Had the deputy come out of concern for his boss? Had he heard that we’d found the tracking beacon on my truck — and had he known it was there? Had he reclaimed the cartridge cases from the shooting, and if so, why?

“If he’d bumped into me, he’d have been lost,” I said. “I came up from the morgue on the service elevator. I’m surprised he was here, though. This is right on my way home, but it’s a long trip for somebody from Cooke County.”

“A wasted trip, too,” she said. “The sheriff’s asleep — I gave him a good dose of Ativan when I changed his drip at eleven. The deputy said he just wanted to get an update on his condition, so I went over the chart with him. He asked if he could look in on the sheriff and just sit with him a few minutes. I said he could, long as he didn’t wake him up.”

I was bone-tired and raw-nerved, so maybe I was just feeling paranoid, but something about that scared me. “Have you been back in the sheriff’s room since the deputy left?”

“No, that was only five minutes ago. Why?”

“I don’t know; I’m just jumpy. Mind if we go check on him?”

She looked exasperated, but she left the duty desk and glided down the hall, easing into a room. Kitchings was sawing logs, half-sitting in the angled hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a bundle of EKG leads snaking out the top of his hospital gown. A heart monitor flashed steadily at seventy-two beats a minute, and his chest rose and fell at about one-quarter that rate. The nurse flashed a thumbs-up sign. “He’s fine,” she whispered. “He had a very small clot — he probably collapsed more from the stress than from the clot — and he got to the cath lab really quick. A little Roto-Rooter of the artery, and he’s good as new. Probably go home tomorrow.” I was amazed at the cheery prognosis — when he keeled over, I pretty much wrote him off as dead. The nurse turned to go, and held the door for me, but I thought of something. Tapping my wristwatch, I held up five fingers and cocked my head in a questioning manner. She shrugged, put an index finger to her lips, and left me alone with the snoring sheriff.

As soon as the door closed, I tiptoed over to the wardrobe where I guessed his clothes were stored. Sure enough, his uniform — rumpled and stained — hung in the cabinet. His gun belt and empty pistol dangled from a hook at the back. I felt the left shirt pocket, then the right. Both empty. I searched the pants pockets — also empty. Then I noticed a small plastic bag sitting on the floor of the wardrobe. The bag was heavy; it clattered as I picked it up and set it on the rolling hospital tray parked beside the window. Rooting through the bag in the semidarkness, lit only by the heart monitor’s display and the building’s exterior floodlights, I saw the sheriff’s badge, his keys, his wallet, some loose change, a pack of sugarless gum, and the bullets from his gun. But I did not — on my first, my second, or my third survey of the contents — see the sweat-stained bandanna in which Waylon had knotted the cartridge cases that might have led to Orbin’s killer.