take a nap.
This time sleep came easily.
I awoke three hours later, stiff and groggy and not the least bit recharged. I actually felt worse than I had before the nap. There was fresh coffee in the pot, so I got up, poured myself a cup, and sat down at one of the tables, waiting for the caffeine to kick in and revive me.
The lounge was our sanctuary, and the doctors were responsible for taking care of it. So, naturally, it was a mess. A week's worth of newspapers were scattered over the tables and chairs. Dirty cups and plates filled the sink.
The garbage can was overflowing. I figured it was my turn to clean up.
I started to gather up the newspapers and was about to throw them out when a tiny news item caught my eye. It was on the back page of the Metro section. The story didn't amount to more than three paragraphs. It was about a car accident on Mulholland Highway, which wasn't really a highway at all but rather a narrow road that wound around the northern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains. According to the article, Muriel Thayer, age nineteen, of Hollywood, died when she lost control of her car on the narrow, winding, rain-slick road.
I felt that tickle, the same mental shiver I'd gotten when I smelled the bath oil on Sally Pruitt's corpse.
I began organizing the newspapers on the couch by day, beginning with the morning the storms rolled in a week ago. Once I had the old newspapers laid out in chronological order, I began going through the news sections column by column, paying particular attention to reports about the storm and people injured by the downpour. I took careful notes as I went along.
When I was done, I had a list of two dozen names. I circled the victims who were alone when they were killed, and then I organized those names by sex and age. Among those half dozen names were two single women in their late teens. One died in a fall down a flight of stairs. Another was electrocuted.
There was nothing in the articles to indicate that either woman's death was anything but an accident. Neither article mentioned whether they were nursing students or not.
I wondered again about Muriel Thayer's death.
Was I jumping to conclusions?
All my fears were based on the similarities between Muriel and Sally and the fact that both of their deaths appeared to be accidents related to the storm.
I hadn't stopped to find out if there actually was anything suspicious about Muriel's accident beyond my own feeling that something wasn't right.
There was one person I could ask—Dr. Jay Barbette, the county medical examiner. But how could I do it with out revealing to him that I was investigating Sally Pruitt's murder?
Then again, it was Dr. Barbette who'd called me a born detective. Would he be any more surprised by what I was doing than Katherine was?
Probably not.
But that didn't mean he would approve of what I was doing. If I called him, he might tell Harry Trumble about it, and then I'd be in big trouble.
It was a risk I had to take, especially if there was a killer out there who'd already struck twice and might murder again.
I gave Dr. Barbette a call from the doctors' lounge, but he wasn't in. His assistant told me he was out at a crime scene. I said I'd call back later and didn't leave a message. I didn't want to take a chance that Harry Trumble would hear that I'd called.
I put my investigation aside and went back to work in the ER.
Alice Blevins assisted me as I put a plaster cast on a man's broken leg. The man had fallen off his roof while trying to plug a leak during a brief lull in the rain.
"Do you do any teaching in the nursing program?" I asked her casually as we worked.
"I'm not on the faculty, if that's what you mean," she said. "But I'm frequently asked to answer questions for the students or tell war stories about my tour of duty in Korea."
"The morale must be pretty low over there," I said.
"Why?" she asked.
"I heard a couple students died in accidents over the last week or so," I
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