Chapter 26
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El Paso
Before they left Houston, Scarlett had the armored SUV swept for listening devices. The sweep turned up nothing. She’d had the antennas shielded by more sophisticated means to block hackers as well. All of which meant they could talk freely inside the SUV.
She had called ahead from Houston, and the pathologist had agreed to see them.
The hospital was easy to locate. It sat on a rise on the east side of the city with the mountains brown and bare behind it.
Scarlett parked the SUV in the visitor lot and Patterson walked with her through the main entrance.
Dr. Vogler met them in a small office off the pathology lab. She was a heavyset woman with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair and a coffee mug she held with both hands. She had pulled the file and the DNA report before they arrived.
“I ran the DNA on the tissue samples you asked for,” Dr. Vogler said. “I have the DNA report. But you didn’t get this from me.”
“That was the agreement. If anyone gives you any grief about it, just let our mutual friend know,” Scarlett repeated the assurances she’d given her contact before she drove down here.
Dr. Vogler slid the folder across the desk. Scarlett opened it to confirm that raw data and the pathologist’s report on the tissue samples from the Nora Weiss autopsy were inside.
“It’s not likely anyone will object. As I understand it, Nora Weiss was an orphan.
No one has asked about her in the past thirteen years, except you.
It’s not likely anyone will turn up now,” Vogler said.
“But what do you intend to do with these results? As you know, they won’t tell you much on their own.
You’ll need something to compare them to. ”
“We have an open missing persons case in Houston we’re working on. I’m hoping this will help us confirm or disprove identity when we find her.” Scarlett closed the folder. “Did you know this young woman? Or have a chance to review her medical record?”
“I didn’t know her. But I took a look at the records, which were limited.
She wasn’t with us very long.” Dr. Vogler shook her head.
“She was cremated after the autopsy. I can confirm that we don’t have any other physical evidence.
These tissue samples were only retained because we kept samples to assist with trials if the dealers were ever charged. ”
“Was there a particular problem with drug dealers here back then?” Patterson asked.
“Unfortunately, yes. Drug overdoses were all too common. The local police and federal, too, were working traffickers from Mexico. We were cooperating by accumulating as much information as we could get,” Dr. Vogler replied.
“Did they charge anybody in this particular case?” Patterson asked.
“I don’t know, but there was nothing in our records about a trial,” Dr. Vogler replied.
“What more can you tell me about Nora Weiss?” Scarlett asked.
“Nothing you don’t already know.” Dr. Vogler opened another file on her desk. “There was nothing unusual about it that I saw. The same sad story we still see all too often.”
“Where was she buried?” Scarlett asked.
Dr. Vogler said, “According to the records, cremated at county expense and interred in the county plot for unclaimed dead. There’ll be a record of it under the name on the death certificate. Nora Weiss.”
“So the remains still exist and can be retrieved for further analysis,” Scarlett said, nodding.
“If you can get a court order, it’s not likely anyone would object,” Dr. Vogler replied. “But I don’t see what you’d learn from that when you already have the DNA.”
Patterson asked, “We know the cause of death was a drug overdose and you said there was a bigger drug problem than usual around that time. Do you have the name of the investigating officer in the medical record there?”
Dr. Vogler shook her head. “No names in our records, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a file at the county sheriff’s office. You might check there. But people move on. I’m the third person to hold this position since Ms. Weiss died.”
“There’s one more thing,” Scarlett said. “Another young woman named Nancy Bishop was a patient here around the same time. Can you confirm that for me?”
Dr. Vogler seemed prepared to object, but then she set down her coffee mug. She returned to the keyboard. “Yes. Nancy Bishop. One admission. Four days as an inpatient. She came in by ambulance. Reason for admission was drug overdose.”
“Discharged to where? Or did she list a contact?”
“That’s all I can say,” Dr. Vogler said, closing the screen as if Scarlett might see over her shoulder. “The rest of the chart is a living patient’s medical record. Get a court order and we’ll pull the rest from storage for you.”
Scarlett thanked her and they left. In the parking lot the heat rose off the pavement and the mountains behind the hospital shimmered with it.
“Was that helpful?” Patterson asked. “Didn’t sound like it to me.”
“It’s a loose end. We might use it later,” Scarlett replied. “And now we know for sure that Nancy Bishop Keane was once in El Paso. That helps.”
“Helluva coincidence that Nancy was a patient in this hospital along with the dead woman, Nora Weiss. Nicely played,” Patterson said as they walked to the SUV. “Chicken or egg, though?”
“Contacts helped me confirm that Nancy Bishop had been a patient here. I knew her admission and discharge dates. So I looked for a death in the same time frame and found Nora Weiss,” Scarlett replied with a half-truth.
The statement was true as far as it went.
“I knew about the drug overdoses in this area around that time. It was a huge multi-task force situation that went on for a few years. Drug users were falling like flies due to fentanyl.”
“Like my nephew,” Patterson said quietly. They had reached the SUV and Scarlett unlocked the doors.
She slid into the SUV and started the engine and the air-conditioning. Patterson settled into the passenger seat.
She didn’t pull out of the space. She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked through the windshield at nothing.
“Want to check the sheriff’s office while we’re here? Try to get more?” Patterson asked.
“Maybe. We’ve got one more lead to check first. I asked Oakley how she found me,” Scarlett said, backing out of the parking slot. “She met a woman in a bar here who told her to contact me for help.”
“Did she give you the woman’s name or any contact info?” Patterson asked.
“She said dark hair, about her own age.” Scarlett rolled the SUV onto the main road.
“You believed her?”
“People who lie well build those lies on top of truth. Oakley said she was in El Paso at a bar. That part I believe. The rest of it? Dunno.” Scarlett shrugged.
She sent two photos to Patterson’s phone. The message chimed in his pocket.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A photo I took of Oakley at the safe house. And another of Nancy Keane from the digital photo frame you collected.” Scarlett said. “Oakley told me a woman in an El Paso bar told her to find me. We need to find that bar.”
Patterson looked out at the city through the windshield. “There have to be three or four hundred bars in El Paso. We can’t walk into all of them. And we don’t even know that anything she told you is true.”
“We don’t. That’s the point. We can confirm her story.
Or not. Either way, it tells us something we don’t know now.
” Scarlett maneuvered the SUV through heavy traffic.
“I cut the list down before we left Houston, starting with her claim that she was hitchhiking. She had no money, no car, no place to live, nobody to vouch for her. A woman like that wouldn’t fill out an application and wait for a callback. She’d need instant cash.”
“Maybe she should rob the bar,” Patterson joked, but Scarlett didn’t laugh. “So she finds a place that’ll put her to work the same day and pay her out of the register, preferably off the books.”
“Right. Which means not a franchise chain place. Nowhere with a real payroll or runs its people through an employment service. Ideally, not one that asks for a valid Social Security number,” Scarlett said, laying out her process.
“That’s most of the options. Rules out any place on the west side and the new development out by the loop. ”
“What’s left?”
“Not much. Downtown and the old barrios south of it. Segundo Barrio. Small places where the owner works his own bar and the same few dozen regulars come in every week,” Scarlett said, casting a quick glance across the console to be sure he was following her reasoning.
“The kind of place where a new face behind the counter sticks in your memory.” Patterson nodded slowly. He’d been a cop for twenty-seven years and he had run people to ground plenty of times before. “How many bars fit your criteria?”
“Six. She couldn’t have stayed more than three or four weeks, given the timeline. That left me with six possibles we can check now,” she replied.
“Makes sense. Good places to start, anyway.” Patterson pulled the map up on his phone.
“You ask the questions when we go in together. I’ll work the room.
Twenty-seven years, you learn to read a bartender’s face while he’s deciding whether to lie to you.
If one of these people recognizes her, I’ll know it. ”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”