The 5th Horseman

Chapter 97

THE NEXT MORNING, I sat inside my battered Explorer thinking about the long hours I’d just spent with CSU and Jacobi, mulling over Ruffio’s dead body.

Now I watched the light silver rain in my headlight beams as a pale sun rose over the skyline.

I pulled out of the parking lot onto Pine, still wondering if Ruffio’s death had happened as Calhoun had described it — a medical accident. Not the hospital’s fault.

I remembered the despair on Calhoun’s face when she said “superthin blood,” her expression as well as her words sticking with me.

I knew this for sure: no fewer than sixty hospital employees had been near Ruffio as he lay unconscious in the ICU, a respirator doing his breathing for him.

Someone could have injected Ruffio’s IV bag with an overdose of heparin before or after his surgery.

Garza could have done it before he left work for the evening.

But one piece of the puzzle troubled me.

How could Garza have put buttons on the dead man’s eyes?