Breach of Ethics Read online

  Harry drew in a graphic of a sofa. “Now draw the floor plan of Quinn’s office. Try to remember everything you can.”

  I drew a rectangle and sketched in the position of the door and a large window in the wall facing the mountains to the east. “That’s about it.”

  “You’re sure? You’ve been in that office any number of times, but you were focused on Quinn and whatever business brought you there. Close your eyes for a moment and tell me what you see.”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t think this is going to help. There’s nothing … wait.” My eyes popped open. “There’s an interior door toward the back of the room. I think I remember Cleo saying Quinn’s office has a private bathroom.”

  “Good, that’s excellent.” Harry pointed to his blueprint. “Which wall is it on?”

  I had to orient myself. Quinn’s window faced east, and the bathroom door was on the opposite wall. “It’s on the west wall, near the back corner.”

  Harry clicked a few keys and pointed at the screen. “Would Quinn’s bathroom be behind that alcove waiting area in the corridor?”

  I nodded slowly. “You know, I think it would. I guess you really are the genius in the family.”

  “No, that was actually pretty obvious. You said they removed an elevator there. That’s probably where they got the space for Quinn’s bathroom.”

  “Maybe a real genius could tell us how someone tampered with the cameras in a way that couldn’t be detected.”

  “Maybe,” Harry said, “but I’m going to save this blueprint. If you think of anything to add or change, let me know.”

  Saturday morning in Coyote Creek started early. Jack’s turkeys flew down from their roost at dawn. Then the llamas started foraging in the manger attached to the back of the barn, hoping to find leftover hay from their evening meal. The barnyard activity woke Amah’s cat, Fanny, who had done me the honor of sleeping on my bed. She wanted to be let outside, and when her insistent meowing didn’t rouse me, she poked at my face none too gently with her paw.

  If I didn’t get up and let her out, she would start grabbing mouthfuls of my hair and yanking hard enough to cause serious pain. I often wondered how someone as sweet and gentle as Amah ended up with such an intractable feline.

  Once Fanny was dispatched and coffee was brewing, my thoughts drifted back to the fist fight in the Ethics Committee meeting. It seemed to have kicked off a chain reaction, starting with the killing of Dr. Lowe. Then there was the intruder Lola Rampley had spotted looking through my desk in the library. My guess was that someone had been searching for keys to the locked file cabinet that held minutes to the ill-fated meeting. Quinn and Hector Korba had both asked about them, but it didn’t make sense that either would resort to something so sneaky when they could have gone over my head to Dr. Snyder. It occurred to me that she had not returned my Thursday morning call. I made myself a note to follow up with her on Monday. I didn’t want to go another round with Hector Korba about those minutes.

  More puzzling than the library intruder was Quinn throwing up a roadblock when asked if Harry could look around in his office. I couldn’t stop thinking about Lowe’s dead body lying in there and the security cameras showing no one had entered the administrative suite. I decided there might be something to do with a long, empty Saturday after all. I called Harry.

  “I’ll be teaching classes at the dojo from nine until noon.” Harry’s voice raised over background noise that sounded like a blender. “What’s up?”

  “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “No special plans.” The blending stopped. “Why, what do you have in mind?”

  “Want to come with me to TMC?” I asked.

  “The boss’s office? You want to risk that?”

  “No, I have another idea. I’ll see you at the dojo. I could use a workout.”

  With a couple of hours to kill, I put a load of laundry in Amah’s washing machine. While I waited. she and I volunteered to be Jack’s preview audience for a PowerPoint presentation he was preparing on wild turkey hunting. Back in my apartment, I gathered a few items I'd need if Harry agreed with my plan. By then, it was time to head to the dojo.

  As I drove into town, what kept nagging at me was Quinn’s gun. Why would the killer go down one floor and then hide the gun in a Housekeeping cart? Why hide it in the hospital at all? It would have been so easy to drive away from TMC and toss the gun into the river. I could think of only one reason. The killer wanted to frame Quinn.

  I helped Harry teach his brown-belt class, enjoying the workout. Afterward, we fixed salami sandwiches and tomato soup at Harry’s condo and sat down to eat in his kitchen.

  “Okay, tell me your idea,” Harry said. “Are we going to get you fired?”

  “I hope not.” I opened my tote bag and took out a case that held my blue contact lenses.

  He gave me a skeptical frown. “Since when do you wear contacts?”

  “They’re not real contacts. I wore these to a Halloween party back in New Haven a couple of years ago.”

  “Wait,” Harry said. “Librarians at a Halloween party? How does that work?”

  “We all dressed as literary characters we admired. I was Katniss Everdeen.”

  “The Hunger Games. Figures she’d be your hero. Or heroine. Back to our stealth mission at your hospital. Do you really think you need a disguise?”

  “Probably not. I’m rarely on the patient care floors in the main tower. The personnel who work there almost never come into the library. They email their requests and I send the articles back by return email. If they want something in print, I send it by the hospital’s in-house courier service.”

  Harry went to the stove and refilled his bowl with more soup. “Then why the disguise?”

  “Just playing it safe. After the way Quinn reacted when I asked if you could look at his office, I’d rather not be recognized snooping around the hospital with you.” I took a blond wig from my tote bag and pulled it on. I had used it a time or two before when I didn’t want to be recognized.

  “So what’s my disguise?” Harry asked. “Quinn knows what I look like.”

  “True, but the nurses don’t, and Quinn isn’t supposed to be there today. Now that he’s a murder suspect, the home office is only letting him work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sanjay’s acting administrator on Tuesday, Thursday, and weekends, and he’s never met you. There shouldn’t be anyone around who would recognize you.”

  “Good thing, ’cause I tossed my Batman costume about twenty years ago.”

  I stood and took my bowl and plate to Harry's sink. “Just wear a baseball cap and keep the brim pulled low while we’re in the building.”

  “Won’t I have to check in as a visitor?”

  With mixed emotions I thought about the recent reminder Quinn had circulated about checking for ID badges. Just this one day, I hoped no one looked too carefully.

  “Under normal circumstances, yes,” I said, “but I don’t want to call attention to our visit. We’ll use my master key to get into the building through a back entrance. With luck, we can get in and out without being seen.”

  Harry gave me a dubious look. “Do you have an excuse prepared in case we’re confronted?”

  “I do, but I don’t like it.” I handed him a fake visitor’s badge. “Put this in your pocket. It’s a dummy I rigged up in case we need it, but I’d feel guilty as the devil if we have to use it. Not to mention I could get fired.”

  “Damn,” Harry pushed his empty bowl aside. “Any kind of criminal could dummy up something like this and have the run of the hospital. That’s pretty scary.”

  “Tell me about it! I work there. Which reminds me, Quinn asked me to research some pretty sophisticated visitor management systems. As soon as this case is solved and he’s back to work fulltime, he wants to recommend that the board approve putting a system in place.”

  “If you don’t find something you like, let me know. I read up on them recently in a trade journal. He should co
nsider metal detectors, too. Seems like a no-brainer for a hospital.”

  “It is, but Quinn and the board have to convince home office to foot the bill.”

  I went back to struggling with the blue contacts.

  Harry picked up the fake ID badge, studying it for a moment. “Now tell me what you hope to accomplish on this covert mission.”

  I explained my theory that Quinn’s gun had been left hidden in the hospital to cast suspicion on him. I wanted to know how someone might have navigated from Quinn’s office on the fourth floor down to the third floor without being seen on any of the security cameras.

  “We keep coming back to those cameras,” Harry said.

  “I know. And Sanjay swears no one tampered with them.”

  He put the badge in his pocket. “So who’s to say he isn’t mixed up in this somehow?”

  “Ouch. Darn.” His question startled me and I poked myself in the eye. I blinked away the stinging tear. “Sanjay’s as innocent as a newborn calf.”

  “Hmm.” Harry’s face got what I call The Look, an expression of extreme cynicism. “You’re sure about that?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible, but you’re the one who wanted to check the floor plans and have a look in Quinn’s office." I gave him a significant look of my own. "You must have an idea that doesn’t involve the cameras.”

  “I might, Harry said, but I don’t want to get your hopes up. Let’s do this reconnaissance mission and see if it pans out.”

  Chapter 9

  Harry adjusted the bill of his baseball cap while I made sure my blond wig was on straight. Leaving his car in the TMC parking garage, we walked to a seldom-used employee’s entrance that opened near the hospital’s holding morgue. I wore a raincoat and bundled a scarf around my neck to hide the lower part of my face. Harry’s navy-blue down jacket had a puffy rolled collar at the neckline.

  I led Harry halfway down the first floor corridor until we reached the elevators. I wanted to get up to the penthouse without using them, so we took the adjacent stairwell to the third floor landing.

  “I’d rather we didn’t go out onto the floor unless you think it’s necessary,” I said. “I just wanted you to see for yourself that other than elevators, this stairwell is the only access between the fourth-floor administrative suite and the third floor where the woman with the laundry cart was working.”

  “Does anyone know where that Housekeeping cart was located when the gun was hidden in it?”

  “Not exactly. From what I heard, the woman had only worked the east end of the third floor before she had a full load of dirty linens. She didn’t spot the gun until she got all the way back to the Housekeeping Department and started emptying her cart. Housekeeping is in the building that shares space with the library and the Security Department.”

  “That’s all the way across the hospital complex, right?”

  “Right.”

  Harry gave the stairwell door a slight push, opening it a few inches so he could look up and down the third floor corridor.

  “What’s on this floor?” he whispered.

  “Pre- and post-op patient rooms are on the east end, and the surgery suites are on the west end.”

  He stepped back and let the door close softly. “Let’s go on up to the fourth floor.”

  We had just climbed the stairs to the landing halfway between the third and fourth floors when a rasping male voice echoed up the stairwell. I recognized it immediately as belonging to Dr. Sybil Snyder’s husband, Glen Capshaw.

  “Bullshit, Sybil. You’re not as good a liar as you think you are with your fictional committee meetings.”

  I shushed Harry with a finger to my lips and gestured him to follow me up the remaining stairs.

  “Glen, you’re imagining things as usual. And your incessant jealousy is not only boring, it’s extremely unattractive.”

  I heard no sound of footsteps coming up toward us. Apparently they had stepped into the stairwell down on the second floor to argue in private.

  “You must think I’m blind and stupid. You’re my wife, dammit, and you were making me look like a fool. I saw you and that bastard exchanging lovesick glances.”

  “There’s nothing going on, dear husband, except what’s happening in your overactive imagination.”

  “It’s a good thing, sweetheart, because if you were thinking of leaving me, you have no idea what kind of price you’d pay.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Snyder said, “I’ve had enough of this. We both have patients to see. Natasha Korba is far from out of the woods, and I should be in the Pediatric ICU right now, not standing here defending myself against your ridiculous accusations.”

  A door opened and closed. Snyder and Capshaw had apparently headed into the second floor corridor. Harry and I stood in the stairwell just inside the door to the fourth floor.

  “Do you know those people?” Harry whispered.

  “They’re doctors. A husband and wife who work together in an Internal Medicine practice.”

  “Not exactly a loving couple, are they?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it. Up until now, I didn’t know anything about their personal life. He doesn’t do much in the way of committee work. From what I’ve heard, he’s pretty much stopped admitting patients here. Snyder’s the opposite. Admits here regularly and chairs the Ethics Committee.”

  “Isn’t that the committee where the fight broke out?” Harry asked.

  “It is.”

  “Is she hot?”

  “What?”

  “Her husband thinks she’s having an affair. She must be hot, or why would he think she’s cheating?”

  “She’s got to be over fifty. Would you call Diane Sawyer or Meryl Streep hot? Seems kind of insulting.”

  “So she’s classy-looking?”

  “I guess. I never really thought about it.”

  “What does her husband look like?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “He thinks she’s cheating. Maybe he’s insecure. His voice sounded kind of scratchy, like an older man’s. Is he a lot older than his wife?”

  “Not really. They seem about the same age. He’s pretty average-looking except for red hair and a ruddy complexion. And a bushy red moustache.”

  “What about her body?”

  “She seems fit, but I don’t spend a lot of time checking out women’s bodies. Now can we drop this and get back to what we came for?” I pointed to the door that opened onto the fourth floor. “If you peek out, you’ll see the entrance to the administrative suite to your right. The rest of the floor to the left houses the boardroom, two more conference rooms and the IT Department.”

  Harry pushed the door open and looked both ways, as he had on the floor below. “This isn’t helping me much more than the floor plan we worked up in my condo.” He let the door close. “Can you think of any other way to gain access to the fourth floor?”

  “No. Just elevators and this stairwell.”

  We stood there listening for a moment to be sure there was no foot traffic in the stairwell.

  Harry looked around and shook his head. “Then unless there’s something we don’t know about your administrator’s office, it looks like the security cameras lied.”

  “The only people who’ve seen them are Sanjay D’Costa and the police.”

  “Maybe we should find out who saw them first and whether there was tampering.”

  I had a hard time wrapping my mind around Sanjay as a suspect, but Harry had a point. Either the camera data was rigged, or a ghost had shot and killed Gavin Lowe.

  “How would we go about that?”

  “Let me think about it. For now, let’s get out of this cave. I don’t want to get stuck in here if that unhappy couple decides to start round two of their domestic dispute.”

  We made our way out to the parking garage and headed back to Harry’s place in his Jag. I pulled off the wig and heavy scarf. “Whew, much better. That wig is hot.”

  �
�Looks like you didn’t need the disguise after all. We didn’t see anyone the whole time we were there,” Harry said. “And I didn’t need the badge, so your conscience is clear.”

  “Thank God. Quinn was so adamant about keeping you out of his office that I didn’t want to risk being caught with you anywhere near there.”

  Harry looked doubtful. “You really think he’d fire you over something like that?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so until yesterday when I saw a side of him I never would have expected.”

  Harry parked in the single car garage at his condo. “Are you coming in or going home?”

  “In, but just for a few minutes. I have a couple of questions.” We went inside to his kitchen, where he nuked two mugs filled with chocolate milk and dumped a few assorted cookies on a plate. We sat at his dinette table fortifying ourselves with the sugary snacks.

  “What are your questions?” Harry asked.

  “What did you mean back there about there being something we don’t know about Quinn’s office? We’ve already looked at the floor plan. I described it as well as I could.”

  “You did fine. But I can’t be sure what’s really there unless I can see the physical space and inspect every inch of it.”

  “Could you tell me what to look for?”

  “It’s not that simple. And even if I could, you don’t want Quinn to get suspicious. If he thought you were casing his office, your job could well be in jeopardy, but if he’s hiding something criminal, being unemployed might be the least of your problems.”

  “I can’t believe Quinn’s a killer, but you’re right. His reaction when I asked about his office was so unreasonable it bordered on paranoia. We’ll have to let it go for now.”

  “For now.” Harry picked up an Oreo and stared at it. “Keep it in mind, though. You said Quinn’s only there three days a week. Does that mean his office is empty the other four days?”

  I shrugged. “As far as I know. Sanjay works out of his own office. But there are the cameras, and other people working on the fourth floor.”

  “Just keep it in mind. Maybe an opportunity will come up.” He took out his phone and checked his messages, reminding me that we had both turned off our phones while we were at the hospital. “Looks like you and Nick are getting together tonight. Check your messages. You’ll probably want to get home and do something about your hair. That wig didn’t do you any favors.”