Murders of a Feather, page 7
She stopped fussing for a moment. “Trying to befriend the temporary employee, are we?”
I lifted my cup to her. “I like to know the person I’m working with.”
Babs smiled at that and pulled out a chair near me. “Same here. Although I don’t expect to learn that much in a few days.”
“True,” I agreed. “And Cindy is never sick. Mari and I swear she’s bionic.”
She laughed. “I worked with Cindy and Doc Anderson about five years ago for almost six weeks, after one of their vet techs was in a car accident.”
My eyebrows went up at the surprising information.
“I’m a licensed veterinary technician as well as a receptionist and office manager,” she confided. “These days I’m not sure which pays more.”
Babs continued to impress me. “How many years have you worked in vet medicine?”
Her eyes drifted to the ceiling and her lips mumbled some numbers. “It must be thirty-five years or so by now. Old enough to remember when most vets were men.”
I nodded. Many people don’t realize today’s veterinary school graduates are over 60 percent women. In fact, my team consisted of only women.
“Thirty-five years,” she repeated. “A long time. I started volunteering at the local animal hospital in high school, then worked weekends while I took classes at the community college.”
“That’s a coincidence. So did I. What was your major?”
“Biology and zoology. I wanted to go to veterinary school, but it wasn’t in the cards. Had to drop out of school to take care of my father after his heart attack. He became bedridden and required more and more professional care. Then my mom passed suddenly, and I was the only one he had left. Eventually, I had no time or money for anything else.”
Her explanation sounded matter-of-fact, her voice unemotional.
“Would you have gone into small- or large-animal work?” I asked, curious now about our temporary receptionist.
“Neither,” she said. “Exotics, or wildlife perhaps. Maybe research. I’ve got an analytical mind.”
So I was finding out. “That’s interesting.”
“I still take nonmatriculating classes online,” she continued. “There are so many innovations in genetics and gene-splicing, advancements I never thought I’d witness in my lifetime.” She folded her hands together and rested them primly on the table.
“That’s so true,” I said. “Even since I graduated, the field of neurobiology and production of vaccines have become more sophisticated.”
“Yes. It truly is a brave new world we live in.” She took a sip of coffee and looked across at Mr. Katt looming over us from his perch on top of the cages. “I understand you are a bit of a detective.”
Embarrassed by her comment, I answered, “Yes. I guess so. I like seeing victims get justice.”
She persisted. “Some friends told me you are very good at finding murderers.”
“I’ve been lucky,” I told her, taking another sip of coffee.
“You make your own luck,” she answered. “Do you think José killed Alicia?”
Alarmed by the suggestion, I said, “What else could it be?”
“Alicia loved him very much. She wanted to marry him.” Again she stared with those pale eyes. “The coroner hasn’t released cause of death yet, and with the chief on vacation in Florida, I suppose we’ll have to wait to find out.”
Was she questioning the murder-suicide? I remembered that Alicia had been her friend.
Finished with her coffee, Babs walked over to the coffee station, washed out her cup, and put it away. “You know. If someone was about to kill me, I’d try to leave as many clues as possible.”
“Me, too. That’s if I had time,” I stipulated. “I suppose we do have some things in common.”
“I think we do.”
While I watched, she cleaned behind the coffee machine, moving everything out then putting each item back in its place.
“Do you enjoy working part-time?” I wondered what her answer would be.
“Yes, I do. It keeps me current, and I get to meet new people,” she said, “as well as keep in touch with the ones I know. Thanks to some lucky investments, I don’t have to work, but I enjoy staying busy. Oak Falls suits me. I play bridge. I’ve joined the Hudson Valley Garden Club. I’m in a bowling league. It’s a very satisfying life.”
Strange. I’d made a cursory judgment and assumed Babs to be a lonely older woman, one a bit standoffish among strangers.
On an impulse, I asked what she was doing on Valentine’s Day. Her answer surprised me.
“Well,” she began a bit hesitantly, “I’ve got a secret admirer.”
“What?” She might as well have confessed to being a serial killer.
“Not exactly a secret,” Babs replied. “Just unexpected at this point in my life. I think he’s reaching out more from loneliness than anything else. You see…”
“Hi, guys.” Mari appeared at the door, her puffy coat filling the doorframe. “You’re both here bright and early. Especially you, Kate.”
“True. Babs and I are comparing our lives in veterinary medicine.”
“Let’s see,” Mari began as she hung her coat up and put away her things. “I started cleaning kennels at sixteen. I told them I was seventeen and never got caught. Washed show dogs and groomed for a while, too.” She walked over to the coffee maker, picked up her cup decorated with her two dogs’ pictures, and poured herself some coffee. After taking a tentative sip, she said, “Hey. This is nice. That must be your doing, Babs.”
“Guilty,” she said.
“You won’t believe how much veterinary experience she has,” I told Mari.
Babs leaned back and looked over my shoulder toward the far wall. “Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve been working with vets for closer to forty years,” she volunteered. “I remember taking X-rays without a radiation badge on and developing them in a darkroom with wet tanks. Chemicals dripping on your shoes. That’s something I don’t miss.” She laughed at the memory. “For the most part, veterinary medicine has improved,” she added. “But I think you younger vets should ask more questions because there’s a lot to learn from a good history. At least that’s what I’ve been told.”
“Being able to take a detailed history is essential,” I agreed. “It can narrow the focus and save some time.”
“Or not,” Mari commented, taking another sip of coffee. “There’s always the owner who really doesn’t notice much.”
“I think I’ve met every kind of owner and veterinarian there is on the planet,” Babs said, her words directed at me. “As long as someone stays on the straight and narrow, we’ll be okay. If not…”
In an abrupt move, Babs gestured with her finger pantomiming a knife slitting her throat.
Chapter Eleven
It was Friday afternoon, the end of a long work week, and we were winding up our house call appointments. Mari sat next to me in the hospital truck, her fingers clicking away on our office laptop in frustration. “I can’t believe this. Babs sent us on a wild-goose chase, and we’re the geese.”
We’d been parked at the side of the road overlooking a large field for about ten minutes, trying to decipher the last message Babs texted to my phone. We’d spent the morning at the hospital seeing appointments and the whole afternoon on house calls. So far this was the only mix-up.
“Why doesn’t she pick up?” Mari asked me, waving her cell in the air. A town dump truck swooshed by, our truck buffeted by a push of displaced air. I weighed the odds of us being hit while waiting on the side of the road and decided to find a store parking lot to pull into. Meanwhile, Mari kept talking to her computer and phone.
“Maybe she transposed the address numbers?” Many people have mild dyslexia and mix up numbers or letters in written messages.
“She sent us to an empty field.” Mari’s fingers tapped a staccato pattern on her passenger window. “What are you supposed to examine? Rocks?”
“There’s a farmhouse over there,” I said, pointing to a nearby driveway. “Perhaps that’s our destination?”
“Who knows? We can’t just show up at some random house,” she said. “Babs better have a good explanation for all this.” Mari sounded angry, an infrequent state of affairs and one to be avoided.
After a truck full of firewood passed, leaving a shower of wood chips behind it, I eased onto the road and made a course back to the animal hospital.
By the time we returned to the office, Mari had called the hospital landline and called and texted Babs’s cell phone number multiple times, with no answer. Twenty minutes had passed, and her anger morphed into concern, as did mine. Had our receptionist slipped and injured herself? Suffered a heart attack or stroke? Approaching our parking lot, I saw her car parked in its usual place near the hospital’s main entrance.
As soon as I put the truck into park, Mari jumped out of the passenger seat, pulled out her keys, opened the front office door, and ran inside. I followed right behind her, calling out for Babs to answer us.
Reception was empty.
The employee lounge was empty.
The animal hospital was empty.
Babs had vanished.
Mari and I stared at each other in disbelief. “Maybe something is wrong with her car?” my assistant ventured.
“Then why isn’t she answering our texts?” I asked.
Mari stared out the reception area picture window as if the answer lay somewhere in the gravel of our parking lot.
The office line rang and startled us both. After two rings, we heard it routed to our answering service. “She put the answering service on,” I said. “Maybe she fell ill and took an Uber home instead of driving. Or went to the emergency room. I don’t think you’re supposed to use your cell phone inside the ER.”
“I guess that’s possible.” Mari stared out the window again. “What would Cindy do if she were here?”
Immediately, I realized we had skipped the obvious. “She’d check the controlled drug log.” Like most veterinary hospitals, we kept any potentially addictive drugs and anesthesia meds under lock and key. Any time they were used, the exact amount was written in the drug log. Babs knew exactly where it was.
“Come on.” I took off down the hallway, my boots slipping on the floor. Past the exam rooms, through the treatment room, stopping at the double doors marked SURGERY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
I pushed open the doors.
Babs lay on the surgery table, an anesthesia mask over her blue-gray face, hands folded daintily at her waist.
Mari and I immediately went into emergency mode. My veterinary assistant quickly turned off the blue nitrous gas tank as I pulled the mask away from her nose.
“There’s no oxygen on,” Mari said. “Only nitrous.”
I started chest compressions, bringing room air into her oxygen-deprived lungs while Mari called 911. She tossed me my stethoscope and took over while I listened for a heartbeat. No heartbeat. As Mari performed CPR, Babs’s arms slipped down, dangling over the table. I pressed her darkened nail bed to search for any capillary refill. None.
“Anything?” Mari asked.
“No,” I answered.
The body that had been Babs lay on the cold stainless-steel table. We covered her with a warming blanket and kept doing CPR. Within minutes, sirens sounded in the distance.
We stood aside when the EMTs arrived and assessed their patient. After a flurry of activity, they whisked her away, but not before one of them looked at me and shook his head.
Mari and I stood in our quiet surgery suite staring at each other in disbelief. Scattered on the floor around us lay medical debris left by the EMT team.
“How did that nitrous tank get hooked up?” I wondered.
“No idea. It was stored in the surgery closet behind the extra oxygen tanks,” Mari said. She walked away toward the employee lounge, sat down in a chair, and pressed her forehead against the table.
I followed. I didn’t want to stay in that room that smelled of death.
Seeing the nitrous hooked up made me think. In modern veterinary medicine, we rarely used nitrous, or laughing gas as people called it, anymore. That old blue tank had been buried behind the green oxygen tanks for as long as I’d been here. But something else felt wrong. Veterinarians deliver gas anesthesia to dogs and cats by endotracheal tube after intravenous induction. Safety procedures around gas anesthesia for human staff as well as our animal patients were extremely important. The older-style human masks often leaked around the rubber seal, potentially exposing everyone in the room. Modern two-step anesthesia reduced that.
I fought to clearly process what we’d just witnessed.
The emergency team had instructed us to wait. After a few minutes, I bounced back up and started taking pictures of the surgery room with my cell phone. Still attached to the anesthesia machine by a plastic hose was the mask that had covered Babs’s nose and mouth. I’d never seen it before.
Where had that human anesthesia mask come from?
Chapter Twelve
Overdoses and even deaths of employees from drugs are not unheard of in the medical world. Dentists, veterinarians, and medical doctors can unwittingly hire persons with addictive personalities or habits. Injectable medications were stolen at a practice I once worked at, and in veterinary school, a technician was fired for using ketamine, which she insisted was harmless.
There had been no oxygen flowing along with the nitrous oxide into Babs’s lungs. She most likely died of anoxia, lack of oxygen, pure and simple, but the medical examiner would reveal the whole story. Perhaps she’d taken other medications or drugs? Had our formidable temporary receptionist been an addict?
When I pointed out the human mask to Mari, she shrugged and said maybe Babs brought it with her. When I looked in the reception desk drawer where Cindy usually kept her purse, I saw a smallish designer bag lying on its side.
For the second time in little over a week, Mari and I were embroiled through no fault of our own in a police investigation. The police officer who arrived to take our statements was a stranger to both of us. He seemed particularly young and nervous.
“Where’s Chief Garcia?” Mari asked him.
“On vacation in Florida with family,” the officer reminded her. “We’re under orders not to disturb him. I’ll be handling this investigation. Did the victim seem depressed or suicidal to you?”
“Suicide?” Mari repeated.
“Hold up,” I said. “Who said it was suicide?”
He looked at me as though I was incredibly stupid. “This kind of thing happens all the time,” he said. “Someone decides to have a little fun and accidentally overdoses. Or they’re depressed and figure this is a painless way to die. We’re taught in the police academy about the dangers of anesthetic drugs.”
As he spoke with us, a forensic team passed by in booties. Our surgery area was cordoned off with tape. One of them glared at us.
“Should we move to my office?” I asked. “It’s more private.”
“Fine,” he told me. “But don’t touch anything.”
There were several things that didn’t add up here, but I didn’t feel like arguing. Mari looked exhausted, her face pale and tight. For once I missed Chief Garcia.
One thing needed to be discussed, however. “Officer. You might want to recover our alarm system camera images from today. The system is completely digital and is hooked up to a Wi-Fi system. The outside cameras are motion activated.”
“Good idea,” he told me. “I’ll tell the detective.”
Mari and I obediently bobbed our heads in agreement.
There wasn’t much we didn’t know about the animal hospital building, like which windowpane rattled in storms, how to unclog the tub table, and, more important in this case, the setup and peculiarities of the alarm system. Cameras had been placed both inside and outside the hospital. From my office desk, I could watch my patients in their cages in the treatment room. I could even access that specific feed from my phone if necessary. There was a camera over the reception desk and in the waiting room. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember any cameras in surgery. There were no motion detectors in the treatment area and the rest of the hospital because of Mr. Katt, who often dive-bombed people or raced around the hospital for no reason. Cindy usually turned the system off in the morning, and I activated the system at night. Would Babs have turned the outside cameras on when sitting alone in the hospital?
As soon as we were released, Mari headed home.
“Sorry, Kate,” she said as I walked her to her SUV. “This is too much to deal with. I’d invite you to come home with me, but it’s gaming night with my friends. I know you’re not a big fan.”
“I’ll be okay,” I told her. My brain felt like mush. We’d worked with Babs for only five days and now…
“I told you bad things happen in three’s,” Mari said. She opened her driver’s side door, threw her stuff on the passenger seat, and then leaned down to give me a hug.
“You alright?” she asked again.
“I’ll survive.”
“Talk to Gramps. He’ll make you feel better.” She climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the SUV’s door closed.
As I watched her drive away, I knew I couldn’t talk to Gramps yet. He’d insist I stay somewhere else tonight. I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere. All I wanted was to not think for a while. That sense of isolation enveloped me again. Cindy would be back from Florida late Saturday night. Maybe she had better insight into the mystery that had been Babs. As for me—I felt numb.
Buddy followed me as I paced back and forth in my apartment thinking it was some kind of new game. I went over and over the horrible scene in our surgery suite. I knew the room intimately, having cleaned every inch of it, stocked it at night, and basically worked in it almost every day. I also knew the contents of each drawer by heart. There were no human anesthesia masks.
Something felt wrong. Something set off alarms in my brain, but I couldn’t figure out what. It lay just beyond my conscious mind, tantalizingly close.
