Chapter 13 Maggie
Maggie
Wednesday
Dead woman walking. That’s what she felt like as she faced the two masked doctors who stood at the foot of her bed while a phlebotomist drew Maggie’s blood.
In the past few days, a parade of medical specialists from Maine CDC had trooped through her room, and now this new pair of doctors had arrived from Atlanta.
Neither one would touch her with their bare hands.
Nor did they want her breathing on them, and they hid behind their plastic face shields and Tyvek suits as if they knew death was incubating somewhere in her body, like a monster waiting to spring out to attack them.
They watched, expressionless, as a similarly garbed phlebotomist swabbed Maggie’s skin with alcohol and wrapped a tourniquet around her arm.
“And you have no discomfort at all?” the male doctor asked. His Tyvek suit covered his name tag, but he’d introduced himself as Dr. Dikeledi. An African surname. Through his face shield, she could see ebony-colored skin and extravagant lashes that any woman would envy.
“I feel perfectly fine,” Maggie said, and winced as the phlebotomist’s needle pierced her vein. “Except for all these blood draws. This is the third time today.”
“All done,” said the phlebotomist, removing the tourniquet with an elastic snap. She’d drawn four tubes of blood this time, each with a different-colored stopper, and she slipped them into a plastic bag emblazoned with the alarming red symbol for biohazard.
“We need the blood for a new round of tests,” the woman doctor said. “And we’ll need urine as well.”
“Again? It was normal the last time you checked.”
“This is for a different test. And now I have a question for you. I don’t know if anyone’s asked you this before, but when you were in Dr. Maslov’s room, did you happen to notice if there was any food there?
A leftover meal tray, maybe. Or any indication that he’d had something to eat or drink in the room? ”
“Do you think he had food poisoning?”
“We’re just trying to collect a more thorough history.
After he was brought to the hospital, the linens and other items from his room were considered a biohazard, and everything was disposed of or incinerated.
So we don’t know what was in the room at the time he fell ill. We’re hoping you can fill us in.”
Maggie tried to recall those frantic moments in Maslov’s hotel room.
She remembered the stench of sickness and sweat, the rumpled bed, the open suitcase.
She remembered yanking on a corner of the bedsheet to wipe the sweat and saliva from his face.
“I’m sorry. I was so busy trying to resuscitate him, I didn’t pay much attention to anything else. But I don’t remember seeing any food.”
“Maybe just a coffee cup? Or a drink from the minibar? Any sign that he’d had anything to eat or drink?”
“I think there was a water glass on his nightstand, that’s all.”
“And did you drink any water in his room?”
Maggie gave a disbelieving laugh. “Of course not! I was too busy trying to keep him alive.”
The woman nodded. “We just had to ask. Now, if you have any symptoms at all, if you feel like anything’s not quite right, please let the nurses know immediately.”
Not quite right. What did that mean?
After the doctors left, Maggie paced the room, trying to decide if she really did feel perfectly fine.
Was that a scratchy throat coming on, a headache beginning to throb?
Did the lunch she’d eaten—a tuna sandwich and fruit—leave her just a tiny bit queasy?
No, no, and no. She was fine. She wasn’t coming down with Ebola.
Yet that possibility hung over her like a guillotine blade ready to drop on her neck.
Mind over matter. She was not going to get sick.
She refused to die while hooked up to machines, with a tube down her throat.
Her cell phone dinged with a new email. It was a much-needed diversion from thoughts of sickness and death.
The message was from Declan. FYI. To keep you in the loop.
She opened the first attached file and flinched at the appalling image that filled her screen.
It was Karen O’Brien’s morgue photo, showing the handle of the stiletto protruding from the woman’s eye socket.
Thank you, Declan. Most amusing. Either Jo had agreed to share these photos with their circle, or Lloyd had somehow burrowed into the ME’s files.
Maggie clicked on the next attachments. The first was a close-up of the removed weapon, lying beside a ruler to establish its dimensions, followed by a series of close-ups taken at various angles.
Maggie clicked on the image of the symbol engraved on the handle. A circle with a dot inside.
She called Declan.
“I got your little love note,” she said. “You send me the most heartwarming images.”
“Trying to keep the romance alive.”
“Do you think the symbol on the grip is significant?”
“We don’t know. Jo sent us those photos yesterday, and we didn’t want you to be left in the dark. Ingrid thinks that we might be able to identify where it was manufactured, based on some imperfections on the blade.”
“You mean the way they use ballistics striations?”
“Exactly. Ingrid’s sent Lloyd down to New York, to consult with a manufacturer she knows. He might be able to enlighten us.”
“So now we’re diving into the secrets of metallurgy. May the thrills never end.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Just dandy. Except for being a human pincushion. I’m like a bug under their microscope. It’s obvious they still don’t know what made Dr. Maslov sick. All his viral and tox screens are negative. And now there are two new doctors here from Atlanta, poking and prodding me.”
“Stay healthy. That’s all I ask.”
“I could use a distraction. Tell me what’s going on with the murder investigation.”
“We’ve hit dead ends everywhere, so there’s not much to report.
Lloyd did a background on Karen O’Brien.
She was born and raised in Bangor, no criminal record, only a few traffic tickets.
Her husband died last year of a heart attack.
She has one daughter in Vermont, but they’re estranged.
Karen moved through a series of service jobs in hotels and restaurants up and down the coast, and this is her first time working at the Cod Cove Resort.
It doesn’t seem like she had a boyfriend or any enemies.
In every way, she seemed like an utterly ordinary woman. ”
“Who was killed in a rather extraordinary way.”
“But there is one interesting detail we found out from Jo, about Karen’s final shift at the restaurant. The last thing she did at work was to deliver a room service meal to Room 220. A female guest in her seventies. That was about ten fifteen p.m.”
“Room 220. That’s only a few doors down from Maslov’s room.”
“It makes you think, doesn’t it? Who she might have run into on the second floor. Maybe another guest, visiting Maslov’s room.”
“Or someone on the hotel staff. Do we have their shift schedules?”
“Already in hand.”
“The morning I found Maslov, there was a housekeeper on the second floor. Hannah something.”
“The housekeeping staff all clocks out at six p.m., so she would have been gone. But there were other employees on shift at ten thirty. Unfortunately, there’s no CCTV to tell us who visited the second floor.”
“Do we know yet why their security system crashed? Was it sabotage?”
“Ben says yes. We’re at the resort now, and it looks like someone tampered with the electrical circuit feeding the second-floor camera, as well as the camera in the parking lot.”
Maggie paced over to the window and stood thinking about all the footage those cameras might have captured.
Hotel guests and their visitors arriving and departing.
Room service meals being delivered, empty trays being retrieved.
And maybe someone who should not have been in that second-floor hallway. Someone who did not want to be seen.
“Were there any reported thefts that night in the hotel?” she asked. “Any valuables missing from the guest rooms?”
“Jo already considered that possibility, that maybe the cameras were disabled to cover up a robbery. But no one reported anything stolen.”
Maggie focused on the parking lot below her window. A black SUV had just zoomed up to the hospital entrance, and a man she recognized stepped out. It was state police detective Robert Alfond, who was now the lead in the Karen O’Brien investigation. She watched him stride briskly into the building.
“Declan, is Ingrid monitoring the police radio?”
“She should be. Why?”
“Detective Alfond just arrived at the hospital, and he looks like he means business. Something’s going on.”
“Something’s going on here too,” he said.
Over the phone, she heard a noisy rumble, growing louder. “What’s that noise?” she asked. “It sounds like a chopper.”
No answer. The rumble grew louder.
“Declan?”
The noise of the helicopter drowned out most of his sentence, but she could make out a few of his words: Just landed . . . golf course . . . multiple passengers . . .
She focused again on the hospital parking lot, where a large white van had just pulled up to the building.
It had no official markings, nothing to ID whose van it was, but the large satellite dish perched on the top made her think this must be a news crew from some local TV station.
Then the side door slid open and four people emerged, all of them garbed in white Tyvek suits.
They moved with almost military precision as they began unloading equipment, backpacks.
“Declan,” she said. “We have a situation here.”
Through the rumble of the helicopter, she could just make out his answer: “So do we.”