Dead Certain

Claudia that Carlos had taken when she and the paramedic had gone to Galena for the weekend. In them Claudia had looked happy.
    I watched from the doorway for a long time, but Claudia’s father never looked up, and I couldn’t bring myself to disturb him. Instead I went back into my bedroom and packed up some of my own things that I’d be needing over the next few days.
    I took my suitcase and the clothes that I needed that were still on hangers from the dry cleaner and put them in the front hall by the door. Agent Roth still hadn’t returned, so I took some time to say my own good-byes. Not to Claudia—the time for that would come later— but to the place where we’d lived for so many years. I walked slowly from room to room, remembering. There was really nothing I wanted to take with me. The stereo belonged to Claudia. I’d send it and her CDs to her parents when I packed up the rest of her things. Everything else I would just get rid of.
    I walked into the dining room and wondered if anyone would ever want our beat-up table. Maybe I should just leave it for the next tenants—let the tradition continue. I wondered whether Milos, our landlord, would tell whoever rented it about what had happened here. He probably wouldn’t have to. The neighbors would be dying to tell them the news.
    I sat down at the head of the table in the chair where Claudia had been sitting the last time she and I were together. She’d been poring through the charts of all of the Prescott Memorial patients who had died, looking for a way to save her career, not knowing that it was her life that she was going to end up losing. She’d been looking through the records hoping to find some variable, some thread that linked them together. She had been meticulously listing their attributes on a hand-drawn chart in the hopes of finding a clue to how they’d died. But when I looked at the dining room table, I saw that it was empty. The chart had been there when I’d picked up the box of files yesterday morning to be copied. I remembered seeing it there.
    With a growing sense of urgency I began systematically looking through the apartment. I checked on the desk by the telephone in the front hall, thinking perhaps that she’d had it in her hand when she’d called her father. I checked the trash cans to see if by any chance she’d thrown it away. There was nothing.
    Reluctantly I made my way back to my roommate’s bedroom. I didn’t want to disturb her father, but I was convinced that her notes would be there, if anywhere. Besides, I had to know. Something more than instinct, a kind of primal humming in my chest, told me that it was important.
    I found Professor Stein neatly folding up Claudia’s clothes and putting them into his black duffel. “I think I am ready to go to the police,” he said.
    “While you were looking through Claudia’s things, did you happen to come across some notes that she had written on a yellow sheet of legal paper?” I asked.
    “No. I haven’t seen anything like that.”
    “Do you mind if I look around her room? It was something she was working on that related to the malpractice case. I’m just wondering what’s happened to it.”
    Morton Stein shrugged his shoulders and went back to his grim packing. Claudia’s room was so tidy it took only a minute to look through it. There was nothing there that pertained in any way to the patients at Prescott Memorial. Suddenly I thought of something.
    “Have you seen her backpack?” I asked.
    “Her what?”
    “Her purple backpack. She carried it instead of a purse. It was the kind I’m sure all your students carry. There was nothing special about hers except that she had a key chain of a skeleton hanging from the zipper.”
    “I didn’t come across it,” he said, closing up the bag and hoisting it onto his shoulder, ready to go.
    Suddenly I was glad that we were on our way to see Joe Blades. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, when he’d asked me if there was anything missing from the apartment, I hadn’t given him the correct answer.
     
    I brought Claudia’s father to the sixth district police station. It was a battle-scarred edifice that looked like a cross between an office building and a bunker. Inside, the desk sergeant dealt with the public through two inches of bulletproof glass, and the cramped waiting room was furnished with wooden benches chained to the wall. The whole place smelled like the Prescott Memorial emergency room, only