Chương 2
“Is he under arrest?” Eleanor asked.
“He’s being detained while we secure the scene and speak with him.”
“That was not my question.”
“No.”
The single word landed more heavily than Arthur’s protest had.
Eleanor glanced toward the door. “You heard the recording.”
“I did.”
“You have his phone.”
“We have a phone that was voluntarily surrendered to hospital security and then preserved by officers after he attempted to enter a locked medical office against staff instructions.”
“He killed her.”
Ortiz did not nod. She did not soften her face.
“We do not know that yet.”
Dr. Hayes rubbed one hand across his mouth. Maya remained beside the cabinet.
Eleanor looked down at the scans. The images showed sections of Audrey’s brain in pale grays and whites, intimate and unreadable. One page had several areas circled in blue ink.
“What do you know?” Eleanor asked.
Ortiz glanced at Hayes.
He drew a breath. “Audrey’s scans do not show the progression Arthur described to us. There are no structural changes that would explain the degree of confusion he reported during her last month.”
“But she was confused.”
“Yes.”
“Because of the medication.”
“Possibly because of the combination, the timing, or incorrect dosing. Her toxicology report showed elevated levels of two prescribed drugs, but not at concentrations that automatically establish deliberate poisoning. People metabolize medication differently. Mistakes happen.”
“Arthur did not make a mistake.”
Hayes’s eyes shifted to the recording device.
“No,” he said. “I no longer believe he did.”
The words cost him something. Eleanor could see it in the way he pressed his thumb into the edge of the desk.
She had known Robert Hayes for seven years. He had been the neurologist who gave Audrey a name for the episodes that began after the birth of her son: focal seizures complicated by migraines and periods of cognitive fog. He had been careful and reassuring without being sentimental. He had drawn diagrams on legal pads. He had answered Eleanor’s questions even when Audrey rolled her eyes and told her mother to stop interrogating the doctor.
At the funeral, he had stood in the back row beneath a black umbrella.
He had left before Eleanor could speak to him.
Now she understood why.
“When did you find this?” she asked.
Maya answered. “The device was inside a fabric pouch sewn into the lining of Audrey’s old medical tote. Her personal belongings were transferred here from the rehabilitation clinic after her death because some of them belonged to the hospital. I was inventorying everything this morning.”
“This morning?”
“Yes.”
“While we were burying her.”
Maya’s lips tightened. “I did not know the funeral was today.”
Hayes closed his eyes for a moment.
Ortiz opened her notebook. “The device contained several audio files. The one you heard appears to have been created eight days before Audrey’s death. We have not played all of them.”
“Why not?”
“Because the device may be evidence, and evidence needs to be handled correctly.”
“You played that one.”
“Maya heard part of it before she understood what she had. She stopped, contacted Dr. Hayes, and then called hospital counsel. Hospital counsel called us.”
Eleanor looked at Maya. “And someone called Arthur.”
“No,” Maya said.
“Then how did he know?”
No one answered immediately.
Rain tapped against the blinds. Somewhere in the building, an intercom requested a respiratory therapist.
Ortiz turned a page in her notebook. “That is one of the questions we intend to ask him.”
Eleanor opened her hand. A red mark crossed her palm where the edge of the drive had pressed into her skin.
“What exactly did I copy?”
“A working copy of the file,” Ortiz said. “Dr. Hayes should not have allowed it.”
Hayes looked at her. “Eleanor had already inserted the drive.”
“You could have stopped the transfer.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because the original remains secured, the copy process was logged, and I did not trust this hospital’s legal department to move faster than its fear.”
Maya stared at him.
It was the first thing Hayes had said that sounded less like a physician than a frightened man.
Ortiz’s face remained neutral, but she closed the notebook.
“Mrs. Vance, do not alter, distribute, or play that file for anyone. Your possession of a copy complicates the chain of custody.”
“My daughter made the recording.”
“That does not make the device yours.”
“She is dead.”
“I know.”
“No, Detective. You know the word. I know what it weighs.”
Ortiz accepted the rebuke without visible reaction. “Then you know grief can make people act before they understand the consequences.”
Eleanor nearly laughed. It came out as a dry breath.
“At my age,” she said, “people have been warning me about consequences for a very long time.”
Her phone vibrated inside her coat.
She did not need to look. The funeral reception had begun at her house without her. There would be neighbors carrying covered dishes through the side entrance, foundation board members standing beneath portraits of Eleanor’s late husband, and women from Audrey’s school years asking one another where the mother had gone.
Arthur had left the cemetery before Eleanor. He had said he needed to check on Sam.
Sam.
The name cut through the room.
“Where is my grandson?” Eleanor asked.
Ortiz hesitated, and that was enough to frighten her more than anything else had.
“Arthur told an officer that Sam is with his sister.”
“Claire lives in Pennsylvania.”
“She arrived for the funeral.”
“Did you confirm he is with her?”
“Another officer is doing that now.”
Eleanor took out her phone.
There were nineteen missed calls. Six from her housekeeper, three from the funeral director, four from people whose names she could not bear to read, two from the chairman of the Vance Foundation, and one from Claire Vance.
Three messages were from Sam.
The first had arrived forty-two minutes earlier.
Grandma where are you
The second:
Dad left and Aunt Claire won’t tell me why
May you like
The third:
Did I do something
