Face of Murder

“Well, Dr. North was a specialist, right? A neurosurgeon? Sometimes they will be on staff at a couple of different places in the same area, so that the skills are on hand wherever they’re needed.”

“Call the hospital and find out where else he worked,” Zoe said, her eyes widening as she grasped what Shelley was saying. “I will try to find a judge who might let us have a warrant so they will release the information.”

As it turned out, she need not have bothered. Zoe had just finished checking schedules and figuring out that Judge Lopez was going to be in court in the morning, but didn’t have a trial until a little later on, when Shelley burst back into their little investigation room from the corridor where she had been making her call.

“They’re faxing us through the patient records,” Shelley said. Despite the late hour and her lack of sleep, she was grinning. “I gave them Matthias Kranz and they were able to pick up his records at a hospital on the north side of the city. I told the administrator there it was a matter of life or death, told him this was Dr. North’s killer, and he was happy to bend the rules. Matthias saw last Dr. North two months ago. Even better—he was scheduled for follow-up appointments that he never attended. It sounds like he could have gone rogue. We’ll know more when they send his full records through.”

Zoe could hardly wait for the antiquated machine to stop printing. She counted how many lines had already come through and calculated the per-page printing speed, feeling despair each time it started on a new page and utter relief when it finally spat out half a page at the end.

She almost tore them in her haste to snatch them up and start leafing through them, searching for something that would make sense.

“Anything?” Shelley asked, almost crowding into her and backing off when Zoe made an impatient gesture.

“Give me a chance to read it. Hold on…” Zoe skimmed the words, flipping pages to his most recent records. “Here. TBI—traumatic brain injury from a car accident sustained two months and twenty-four days ago. Matthias was a passenger and his head hit the dashboard during the crash, after the car’s airbags failed to deflate.”

“Probably an old model. Students aren’t known for being able to afford particularly road-worthy vehicles,” Shelley commented.

“He suffered cuts and bruises, but nothing else until he started complaining of headaches and confusion. He was put through a number of tests—CT scan, blood tests, X-ray, MRI, PET… then visual, audio, everything Dr. North could think of. Finally he was diagnosed one month and thirty days ago. Aphasia and dyslexia as an ongoing result of the TBI, with no suggestions for treatment other than managing the symptoms.”

“It’s permanent?”

“The doctor recommended that Matthias attend counselling sessions as well as a class for improved cognitive development, but it says here that he never attended. He did not cancel, just did not show up.”

“This is definitely him, isn’t it?” Shelley grinned.

“It is just what I was looking for,” Zoe confirmed, flipping back to the first page of the records. “We have his address and contact number here. It looks like he lives just off campus.”

“Then let’s hope he’s there,” Shelley said, grabbing her jacket from the back of a chair. “We need to bring him in, now.”

They drove out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building parking lot into the startling blue of an extremely early morning, the sun newly risen. It was still hidden behind the tall architecture around them, and Zoe and Shelley were in shadow as they picked up speed in the direction of the Georgetown campus.

It didn’t matter, Zoe thought. They were going to be out in the light soon.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

James Wardenford cursed and rubbed his eyes, wishing he had been able to get back to sleep. After spending that time with the FBI and going through the withdrawal process from his precious alcohol, he had figured, what the hell? Why not try and go through with it this time?

It wouldn’t be the first time he had tried to quit, and he was quietly not very confident in himself that it would be the last. Mornings like this were to blame. He had come to rely on alcohol to get him to sleep, and without it he was half-insomniac. Staying up all night feverish and itchy, finally nodding off only to wake up before dawn. His body felt like it was eating itself. Still, that was supposed to stop soon, right?

Wardenford dressed slowly, cursing again at the aching in his limbs. Life wasn’t supposed to be this hard. He wasn’t an old man yet. He’d played a tough hand for his body to take, though, and it was letting its complaints be known now that he didn’t have a good whiskey to smooth the pain away.

He was dressed and sitting at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee, trying to pretend to himself that it was Irish, when someone rang his buzzer.