The 5th Horseman

Chapter 94

I WAS FRETTING and stalking the corridors outside the ICU at Municipal when Jacobi called saying that Garza was tucked in for the night.

I dropped into a blue plastic chair in the hospital waiting room, thinking what an idiot I was for sending my buddy out into the foul night for nothing. Still, I couldn’t shake my prickling sense of wrongness about Garza.

Images flickered — Keiko’s mom, her knees buckling, dropping to the sidewalk, that feisty, funny lady who should still be alive.

I thought about brass buttons on her dead eyes and on the eyes of the thirty-one others who’d been marked that way.

Those freaking buttons. Markers.

Where was the killer’s fun if no one understood what he was doing or why?

I remembered the arrogance of the man who’d overseen the care of many of the deceased. The doctor who’d said, “Sometimes a bad wind blows.”

And I wondered for the hundredth time if Dennis Garza was one of those deranged and profligate killers, like Charles Cullen and Swango, that surgeon from Ohio, medical practitioners addicted to the power of snuffing out life.

I shifted in my chair, knocked over a half-full coffee container on the floor, watched the lazy brown pool seep around my Nikes. “Jeez, Lindsay. You expect to catch a killer.” Can’t even drink coffee.

I sopped up the spill with a piece of newspaper, threw the cup into the trash, thinking, The day is done.

Garza had gone to bed, and if I had any brains, I’d do the same.

I was zipping up my jacket when my cell phone rang again.

“Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice whispered. “It’s Noddie Wilkins. The nurse from Municipal? You told me to call you,” Noddie said. “Another patient has died. There were buttons—”

A sick feeling washed through me.

“When did this happen?”

“Just now.”

“What was the patient’s name?”

“Anthony Ruffio. His body’s still in the ICU.”

I started running toward the stairs, wondering how many patients had died in this hospital, how many had been found with caduceus buttons on their dead eyes.

But there was one difference this time.

I was in the hospital, and the killer was probably here, too.