Dead Certain

stab wound?” I asked against my better judgment. “Wouldn’t you normally expect to see some kind of struggle if she’d really surprised a burglar?”
    “Not if the burglar got lucky on the first try,” he replied. “Listen, I know you’re taking this kinda personal....”
    “I wanted to tell you that I realized something is missing from the apartment,” I said, fighting down my irritation.
    “What’s that?” he asked, sounding interested.
    “Claudia’s backpack.”
    “What did it look like?”
    “Just a purple canvas backpack, the kind that college students carry. Claudia used it instead of a purse. She spent so much time at the hospital, she used to keep a toothbrush in there and a change of underwear.”
    “What about her wallet?”
    “In the smaller zipper compartment, why?”
    “Because we didn’t find it in the apartment. We just assumed that she must have left it at the hospital. We’ve got someone over there right now taking a look through her locker.”
    “Will you let me know if you turn it up?” I asked. I didn’t feel like explaining the whole story of the patient charts and the summary chart that Claudia was working on to Kowalczyk. I frankly didn’t t hin k he’d be interested in hearing anything that didn’t fit into his theory of the case, which seemed to be that she’d surprised a burglar, albeit a lucky one.
    “If we find it, we’ll make sure that it gets turned over to her next of kin,” he replied. “In case you were wondering, that means her father.”
    “Thanks for clearing that up for me,” I said, han gin g up the phone.
    “Your mother?” demanded Elliott, surprising me from the doorway.
    “Worse,” I said, waving him in. “It was Blades’s partner.”
    “He may be a hard-ass, but he’s also a smart cop. He just doesn’t like uppity women.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.”
    “Are you okay?” he asked, sliding into the visitor’s chair. His jacket caught on the back of the chair, revealing the shoulder holster and wood-grained grip that protruded from it.
    “What’s that you’re carrying, cowboy?” I asked.
    “My backup piece. I hope you still have the one I gave you this morning.”
    “It’s in my purse. I promised that I’d keep it with me, and I’m as good as my word. Just tell me you’ll come and visit me at Menard after I drop my purse, the gun goes off, and I end up shooting an innocent bystander.”
    “Every Wednesday.”
    “Why Wednesday?”
    “Visiting day. Where’s Claudia’s dad? Did he get in all right?”
    “He’s talking to Blades. I took him to the apartment and met Agent Roth. She’s a pretty woman.”
    “Not to mention a crack shot. She finished seventh at the Nagano Olympics in sharpshooting.”
    “Cheryl said you had something you wanted to show me.”
    “Yeah, though now that you’re here, I might as well just tell you.”
    “Tell me what?”
    “I had one of my people do a Lexis-Nexis search on each of the fab four, and they turned up something interesting on McDermott.”
    “McDermott? What?”
    “When you and Dr. Gordon had your little chat about hospital killers, did she happen to mention a case at the Bloomington VA?”
    “No. What happened there?”
    “A nurse was accused of systematically murdering patients. It happened almost twenty-five years ago, but there were a couple of remarkable features of the case.“
    “Such as?”
    “The number of patients involved. We’re talking about twenty-six deaths over a fourteen-month period. Not only that, but the way they were killed was pretty interesting.“
    “Really? How did they die?”
    “Apparently the killer injected a drug called succinyl-choline into the patients’ IV solution.”
    “What’s succinylcholine?”
    “It’s some kind of anesthesia drug that causes muscle paralysis.”
    “Say that again?” I demanded sharply.
    “It causes muscle paralysis. That’s how they died. The drug stops the heart and lungs from working. But that’s not the really incredible part.”
    “No?”
    “No. It turns out that the person who was accused of putting the anesthesia drug into the IV lines was a nurse who’d worked at the hospital for ten years. But guess who figured out what she was up to and blew the whistle?”
    “I have no idea. Who?”
    “A surgical resident named Gavin McDermott.“
    “Gavin McDermott?” I echoed incredulously. “That is too weird. Twenty-five years ago he discovered a nurse killing off patients with a