Authors: Shawn Grady
Daytime made the previous night’s events seem like the substance of a dream.
From my pillow I stared at the light edging around the drawn blinds.
All would continue to be as it had been. Right? The sun followed its predictable path. The days grew warmer. I could just forget about everything, quit Aprisa now and take a couple weeks’ vacation before starting med school.
The plan sounded outright plausible. A very practical and reasonable course of action. Why let myself get further caught up in something I had nothing to do with? I needed to attend to my future, my aspiration.
That shattered windshield flashed in my mind.
Angled shards surrounded a torso-sized opening. They protruded into the rain like clear flanges of an explosion frozen in time.
That memory was the whole reason I was going to become an emergency physician. To redeem lives. To snatch back Death’s spoils.
My duty lay to her. To that day.
But Simon had given the note to
me
. I bore the last message of a man condemned to death.
A stranger.
A lunatic?
Could I let him lay unnoticed in the grave?
I unclasped the pendant chain from around my neck and held it in my palm. The Hippocratic Oath, etched in tiny seriffed font, held all the joint and marrow separating conviction I needed.
Do no harm.
The clock flashed eight thirty. Naomi was working today.
It was my cross to bear. I rose and turned the blinds. Morning poured into the room.
Time had arrived to bring it all to light.
Reno’s aging police headquarters sat on Second Street, about a block east of the central fire station. Its cream-colored walls rose from the pavement in Art Deco defiance, its distinct lines a contrast to the modern skyscrapers just to the west. It seemed fitting, and made it feel as though I were walking into a color episode of
Dragnet
. I imagined hard-boiled detectives and the clang of manual typewriters. The story I was about to see was all true. Only the names had been changed to protect the innocent.
A woman in a badge uniform with brunette ponytailed hair greeted me from behind a thick glass window at the reception area. She asked if I needed a work permit or a report filed.
I hesitated, then gave her my name and told her that I needed to speak with a detective about two possible murders. She sized me up in one long still look and lifted a phone receiver. Her thumb and forefinger dialed a three-digit extension.
“Detective Humbolt, please.” She glanced at the desk and then to the side. “Yeah, Evan, there’s a gentleman here to see you about a double homicide.” She hung up and shifted a stack of papers. “There’s seating on the far wall.”
“Thank you.” I tapped the counter once and retreated to a slatted wood bench anchored to the far wall. A couple magazines lay in a steel-wire basket.
Good Housekeeping
, a copy of
Popular Mechanics
with a computer-generated image of Automobiles of the Future on the cover. I reached down to pick it up.
“Mr. Trestle?” A clean-cut man with a light brown Republican hairdo and a pressed black suit stood in an open doorway.
I rose, wondering how
he
knew my name.
He extended a hand. “I’m Detective Humbolt.” We shook firm and quick. “Please come on back.”
I followed him through a maze of narrow hallways. Cork bulletin boards held wanted posters and stolen-vehicle advisories. Two street cops sat talking around a small table in a break room. On the second floor a short hallway opened into a room filled with packed cubicles. Phones rang. Two men leaned on the gray fabric-lined wall at the mouth of one cube, stopping to nod at Humbolt, then tightening their expressions and evaluating my innocence in the five steps it took me to pass them.
We turned the corner at the end of the room, the smell of burnt coffee wafting down the path, and passed a water cooler with an empty cup holder alongside it. Humbolt had stretched the distance between us with my sightseeing, so I skip-jogged to catch up.
He stopped at the last cubicle. “Please, have a seat.”
A chrome-framed fabric chair lodged between an L-shaped oak laminate desk and the cubicle wall.
I sat with enough room for my knees to face forward, my shoulders squared so that my hands rested on the tops of my thighs.
Humbolt started to sit but paused. “Can I get you some coffee?”
I waved a hand. “No, thanks.”
He unbuttoned his coat and sat with a heavy breath, making quick examination of the fan of files spread across his desktop. The edge of the bottom one read
Crown Motel
. He shuffled them together and dropped the stack into a side drawer. The polished wood handle of a holstered sidearm flashed beneath his coat. It struck me as not unlike glimpsing a stagehand in the wings during a play. One knows that he’s there but has the sense that he’s not meant to be seen.
Humbolt folded his hands on the desk and tilted his head, staring at me. “Fourth Street, right?”
A vague memory formed in my mind of a suited detective mingling with the officers who’d taken my statement on the night I found Letell. “You were there.”
He nodded and picked up a white coffee mug. Taking a swig of the dregs, he grimaced, like it was hard liquor. “Gets cold fast.”
I swallowed, not sure how to break the ice.
He shifted in his chair. “So tell me what you got.”
I hadn’t noticed how tired his face looked. But now, under the fluorescent light and against a backdrop of muted cubicle drab, the spidery red showed at the corners of his eyes. Short silver strands emerged in his hair, tucked back in neatly combed rows.
“Another man has died. A friend of Simon Letell’s.” I expected him to say that he was already familiar with Martin’s case.
But he kept silent, elbow on armrest.
“Dr. Richard Martin,” I said. “The last thing I heard Letell say on the day he died was ‘Give this to Martin.’ ”
Humbolt’s eyebrows pinched. “Give what to Martin?”
I eased Letell’s original note from my pocket, folded once over in its airplane shape. Letell’s handwriting had dried in bled smears. I handed it to Humbolt, who took it by the corner between thumb and forefinger. He examined it, appearing unimpressed.
This wasn’t going to be easy. I realized how foolish it must look to him. Here I was claiming that two murders had taken place, and as my first piece of gripping evidence I produced a water-damaged and crinkled paper airplane.
Humbolt cleared his throat. “So Letell hands you this note and says, ‘Give this to Martin’?”
“Yes.”
“And was that at the motel?”
He should’ve known from my written police statement that I’d found Letell dead at the motel. He was testing me, probing. “No. It was after we’d shocked him out of v-fib.”
“After what?”
“Defibrillated him. Downtown. That was the first time I saw him. He was in cardiac arrest on the sidewalk, and a bystander was doing CPR. We shocked his heart out of a lethal rhythm, and he regained consciousness.”
Humbolt looked like he was reading a timeline that floated in the air above my head. “And that was all he said?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing about being attacked or threatened?”
“No. No, that was it.”
“And at the motel, later, did he say anything else then?”
“No, I . . .” What was his angle? “It’s in my report. I found him dead at the motel. He didn’t say anything. He was dead.”
Humbolt leaned on an arm of the chair, thumb on his chin, forefinger across his lips. “And were you able to revive him that time?”
“There was no reviving him.”
“Why’s that?”
“Rigor mortis was already setting in. Dependent lividity. Signs of irreversible death.”
“How long had he been like that?”
“Couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
“Why’s that?”
I folded my arms across my chest. He knew the answers to his questions. I was feeling less like a witness and more like a suspect by the second. But my body language was bad timing. It showed him that I felt uncomfortable.
I brought my hands back to my lap. “He had been at the hospital we took him to earlier.”
“How’d you find Letell at the motel?”
“A nurse gave me his key to return to him. He left it at Saint Mary’s. Look, I put all this in my report.”
Humbolt put a hand in the air. “Of course, of course. Forgive me. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it.”
Whatever.
I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake coming in.
He read my unsettledness and quipped, “What is it they say?
Only two things are certain, death and . . . memory loss?”
“Taxes,” I said, unhumored.
He fished a legal pad from the thin drawer of his desk and wrote down the facts. “Okay. What else?”
“The coroner is an academic mentor of mine. I asked him about Letell’s cause of death, and – ”
“Poisoning.”
“Right. You must – ”
“Have a copy of the coroner’s report. It comes to me with any suspicious death.”
“So you suspect foul play?”
He blinked. I could tell for a second that he’d said more than he wanted. He wrote something random on the legal pad. “Just standard procedure. Cover the bases.” A quick, dismissive smile said the conversation was now moving on.
I rubbed my ear, considered leaving, but couldn’t think of where to go from there. I didn’t know if I could trust Humbolt, but what other avenue did I have?
“What else?” he said.
“I searched out this guy Martin.”
“To give him the note?”
“To give him the note.”
“And let me guess. You found him – ”
“Dead. Yes.”
“At the university.”
“Right.”
“And where had you been the hours preceding Martin’s death?”
I stood. My voice came out louder than I expected. “A man came back from the dead to tell me to give that” – I pointed at the note – “to Martin. That night I found him dead at a motel, and when I tracked down Martin, he was dead too. Letell was poisoned, and now Martin’s body is missing from the morgue.”
Humbolt studied me. Like a disinterested kid on a field trip watching a caged monkey rage at his onlookers.
He didn’t acknowledge that I was standing, didn’t regard my heaving breathing or that I’d raised my voice. He picked up Letell’s note and pointed at a row of numbers with the back of his fingers. “So what are these?”
“Dates.” I ran the back of my hand beneath my nose and looked away. “Run times.”
“Run times for what?”
“Ambulances.”
He sat back and motioned to the seat I’d been in. “Please.”
I was tired of being led along. I leaned both hands on his desk and lowered my voice. “Every one of those times and dates coincides with ambulance runs to Letell’s former residence. The times in Aprisa’s database don’t corroborate what is here. Letell’s beef was that the ambulances had been taking too long to get to his house and that, ultimately, his mother died because of it. But according to Aprisa’s stats, the ambulances arrived at his house every time within the six-minute time standard set forth in their contract with the county.”
Humbolt intertwined his fingers and pushed his lips together. “How convenient for them.”
“Exactly.”
“But who’s to say they’re wrong and he isn’t?”
I pointed to my chest. “I am. I’ve been out there. Especially on night shift I’ve seen it. Fewer ambulances. Longer response times.”
“Significantly longer?”
“Yes.”
He cocked his head. “Say you’re right. If response times aren’t being made, who records that?”
“Dispatch makes a computer entry when a call comes in, when they dispatch it, and when we radio on scene.”
“So Aprisa is accountable only to itself.”
“In a sense. Representatives from the County Board of Health do periodic audits.”
He twirled a pen between his fingers. “And what standard is Aprisa held to? How often do they need to make this six-minute mark?”
“Ninety percent of the time.”
“What happens if they don’t?”
“Fines. Eventually revocation of their contract for service.”
“Their exclusive contract?”
“Yes.”
Humbolt leaned back in his chair. “Meaning another ambulance company could come in.”
“Right, and corner a monopoly on the transport cash cow. The problem though for any private ambulance company would be offsetting the costs. There’s the employees, equipment, dispatch, billing personnel. Collection is difficult. If they get payment from even half the people transported, that’s doing pretty good.”