The 5th Horseman

Chapter 119

A SUSPECT UNDER ARREST? I felt as if maybe all our hard work and risk-taking had finally paid off. Now, who was this monster?

A shifting crowd of nurses and aides were bunched against the far wall of the basement locker room. Some were squawking about their civil rights; others jeered at the cops as they used bolt cutters on the locks of unclaimed lockers.

Jacobi, bulky and scowling, looked more like muscle than he did a cop. He stood beside a dark-skinned woman in blue scrubs, sitting on a bench between the banks of lockers. Her arms were cuffed behind her back. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her before.

She was in her forties, with a plain, unlined oval face and short, straightened hair. A gold charm of a praying angel dangled from a chain around her neck.

She lowered her head and whimpered softly as I approached. Did she know who I was? Was this our killer?

“I asked this lady if she’d come down to the Hall to answer a few questions. She made a break for the door,” Jacobi said.

Then he showed me a small plastic box half-filled with caduceus buttons. I took the box and stared into the glinting brass pool. How could anything so harmless-looking have such murderous implications?

I allowed myself a small but triumphant smile as I looked at Jacobi.

“These were on the top shelf of this lady’s locker, Lieutenant,” he said. “I sent Conklin and Samuels back to the Hall for a warrant to search her apartment.”

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

“Marie St. Germaine.” She had a hint of an accent. West Indian, I thought.

The tag hanging from the chain around her neck identified her as a CNA, a certified nurse’s assistant. That meant that her job took her from floor to floor, giving her the opportunity to get into patients’ rooms.

And she’d have the means to medicate them.

Had this woman killed nearly three dozen patients? Maybe even more than that?

“Did Inspector Jacobi read you your rights?”

“Yeah, I did. But now that you’re here, I’ll do it again,” Jacobi said, his time-roughened face a few inches from hers.

“You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. You understand your rights?”

“You leave that girl alone,” someone shouted from the back of the room. “She did nothing. Let her go.”

A group of nurse’s aides picked up the chant. “Let her go, let her go.”

“That’s enough,” I yelled, slamming a locker door with the side of my fist. The chanting cooled to a low rumble.

“Do you understand your rights?” said Jacobi again.

“Yes. I do.”

“Why’d you run, Marie?”

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“The police,” she said.

I was already thinking how the DA’s office was so overwhelmed with their ever-expanding case load; they’d tell us to kick this suspect unless we had enough on her to convict.

“Find anything besides those buttons?” I asked Jacobi.

“This is all hers,” he said, pointing to a pile of humble clothes and toiletries on the bench. The most lethal object in the pile was a Danielle Steel paperback. I emptied St. Germaine’s handbag, finding a worn wallet, a plastic pouch of cosmetics, a purple comb, an overdue phone bill, and a soft wool doll the size of my thumb.

The doll was crudely made of black yarn and colored plastic beads.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s for good luck, only.”

I sighed, dropped the doll back into St. Germaine’s handbag. “Ready to go, Ms. St. Germaine?” I said.

“I’m going home?”

As Jacobi and I drove to the Hall with St. Germaine in the backseat of the car, I started thinking ahead to the next forty-eight hours, wondering what Claire’s autopsy of young Jamie Sweet would show, hoping the killer had made a mistake, wondering if St. Germaine had a connection to Dennis Garza.

Most of all, I was hoping for a confession.

Hot damn. We’d finally gotten a break.

We had a suspect in custody.