Corpse Suzette

vomiting at the
scene. No food or drink either.”
    “Could he have breathed in
something?” Savannah said, thinking of Kenny Bates’s toxic breath.
    “The nasal passages,
bronchial tubes, and lungs were unremarkable. I doubt it. The only thing I
noticed was a reasonably fresh injection site on his outer right thigh, about
here....” She pointed to a spot on her own leg, several inches above the knee.
“And there were a couple of old, healed needle marks there, as well.”
    “The guy was a junkie?”
Dirk asked.
    “I doubt it, although we’ll
know better when the lab results are in. I saw none of the other signs of drug
addiction, and his veins were healthy. All he had were the intramuscular
injection sites. Not like a chronic, intravenous drug abuser.”
    “Maybe somebody held him
down and forced something on him,” Savannah suggested.
    “No bruising of any kind,”
Dr. Liu said. “If he’d been forced, surely there would have been some
contusions or defensive wounds.”
    “You’d sure have to bruise
me to get a needle in my leg,” Dirk said. “I think he shot up with
something bad, chronic or not.”
    “Then we should have found
a kit at the scene,” Savannah told him. “At least a syringe or something.”
    “It’s a medical clinic,”
Dr. Liu said. “There are needles and vials of all sorts of things all over the
place. You probably wouldn’t have noticed, even if there had been something
there.”
    “That’s true,” Savannah
agreed. To Dirk she said, “We ought to go back over there and look around...
now that we have some idea what to look for.”
    Dirk sniffed. “A needle and
a syringe... at a medical clinic. Oh joy. That’ll be sorta like looking for a
piece of hay in a haystack.”
     
    Savannah felt the residue
of communal sadness the moment she stepped across the threshold into Emerge’s
lobby. At the front desk, Myrna sat with her head in her hands, softly crying.
    A sobbing Devon stood by
the atrium window, her arms around Jeremy, who looked as though he, too, had
been weeping. The only one who wasn’t crying was a young, dark-haired woman in
a white nurse’s uniform, who stood behind Myrna, rubbing the receptionist’s
shoulders.
    Myrna looked up when
Savannah and Dirk approached, her eyes red and swollen. “Hello, Sargent
Coulter,” she said. “Hi, Savannah. I guess you’ve heard about our bad news.”
    Savannah was a little
surprised at the apparent depth of Myrna’s grief. While having a drink with the
woman, she had gotten the idea that Myrna wasn’t all that crazy about Sergio.
Resented and disliked him, in fact.
    But Savannah knew from
personal experience that, even if you couldn’t stand someone, it was sobering
and shocking if they died unexpectedly.
    If nothing else, it
reminded you of your own mortality, and that alone was enough to ruin your day.
    “Yes, I heard,” Savannah
said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
    “Yeah, me, too,” Dirk added
with a bit less of a sympathetic tone. “What are you guys doing here? There was
crime tape across the front door. Nobody was supposed to be in here.” Devon and
Jeremy had left their places by the atrium and strolled over toward the desk
area. Jeremy spoke up. “The medical examiner’s people removed the tape over the
front door just a while ago,” he said. “And they said we could be here in the
lobby and in some of the rooms on the west side of the building. They left the
tape across the hallway there, blocking our way into the east side where
Sergio... where the body was found. And they told us to stay out of there until
you released it.”
    “Good.” Dirk headed toward
the cordoned off area with Savannah behind him.
    “How come she gets
to go in there and we don’t?” Devon objected as Savannah walked past
her.
    “Because she’s with me ,”
Dirk shot back. “Any more dumb questions?”
    Then he paused and looked
back over his shoulder at the young woman in the nurse’s uniform. “Who are
you?” he asked. “Bridget O’Reilly,” she replied.
    “You a nurse here?”
    She nodded.
    “Then you come with us.”
    As the three of them walked
down the hallway toward the recently departed Sergio’s office, Dirk asked Nurse
Bridget, “What is it you do here, exactly?”
    “Everything,” she replied.
“I draw blood, give shots, dispense meds, assist in the surgeries.”
    “How long have you worked
here?”
    “Only about six months.”
    “Did you like the doctor?”
Savannah asked.