Dead Certain

job lined up at Columbia’s medical school in the fall. She wanted to come back to New York so that she could be closer to us. It’s what she’d worked her whole life for. She was worried that the people at Prescott Memorial were out to destroy her.”
     
    I took Professor Stein into the butler’s pantry just to get it over with. The blood was all still there, though now it mostly looked just dark and brown. He spent a long time standing there, staring at it. It was the last place that I wanted to be, but I didn’t feel as though I could just leave him there. The trouble is that there are some things that you can never unsee. I couldn’t erase the image of Claudia’s body. It was as though it had been burned into my retina. Even if I went blind and lived for a thousand years, there was no way I was ever going to forget it.
    And yet the longer I looked, the more I saw what Joe Blades had seen. It was actually a very simple picture— the dark lake of blood, smooth edged and now drying, and the chalk outline of her body on the dirty floor where she had died. Most of the glass-fronted cabinets in the pantry were empty. Detective Kowalczyk had been right. The knife block, the handful of champagne glasses, the few plates and cups and glasses that Claudia and I had between us were all anomalies in an otherwise empty kitchen.
    Professor Stein even gave voice to it. With tears leaking from behind the steel frames of his glasses, he turned away from the chalk outline on the floor. “At least she didn’t struggle,” he said quietly. Then he started down the hallway to his daughter’s room.
    She didn’t struggle.
    I remembered the whiteness of her body and the coldness of her skin. There were no bruises, no cuts, no defensive wounds. Wouldn’t she have reached for the knife or even—I hated to think about it—writhed in pain as she bled to death on the floor? Anything that would have disturbed the neat puddle of the blood on the linoleum floor.
    Even though Claudia had been tiny, certainly she would have done something to defend herself. Or had she just been paralyzed by fear? I really didn’t know about such things, but it almost looked as if Claudia had lain still and allowed herself to be slaughtered.
    Lain still.
    I reached for the phone on the wall in the kitchen. Then I dialed Julia Gordon’s number at the medical examiner’s office.
     

CHAPTER 24
     
    “Oh, my god, Kate!” exclaimed Dr. Gordon as soon as I got her on the phone. “I can’t believe it about Claudia. Someone told me about a stabbing when I stopped at Starbucks this morning, but I had no idea that it was Claudia until I got in this morning and saw her name on the day’s case log.”
    “Will you be performing the autopsy?” I asked, trying to push down the thought of Dr. Gordon practicing her grisly avocation on my roommate.
    “No, Dr. Sylvestri will be doing her case. As a rule we don’t do autopsies on people we know. Of course, Detective Blades was here first thing this morning pushing to have it done right away.”
    “Have they started?”
    “They’re downstairs right now. Believe me, Kate, nobody wants to see this one slip through the cracks. Detective Blades says that he’s already gotten calls from the University of Chicago—you know how sensitive they are when anything happens in Hyde Park—and the people at Northwestern Medical School because she was one of their fellows, all putting on the pressure.”
    “Would you be willing to do me a favor?” I asked. “That would depend on what it is.”
    “Do you remember what we talked about the other day in your office? Those cases where caregivers were going around deliberately murdering patients?”
    “Yes,” she replied, a note of caution entering her voice. “Do you think that they could have something to do with Claudia’s death?”
    “Please, Julia,” I said, “just ask them to test for any kind of drug that can cause paralysis.”
    “When are you going to tell me what all of this is about?” she demanded.
    “Just ask them to do the tests. If any of them come back positive, I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”
     
    After I hung up the phone, I went looking for Claudia’s father. I found him in her room. He was sitting on the end of her bed. Beside him was the outfit that he’d chosen for her to be buried in, a red wool dress with a black velvet collar that I’d helped her pick out for her interview at Columbia. In his hands were some snapshots of