She Was Their Target, page 10
“Are you finished in here?”
Zachary looked slowly around the bedroom for anything he might have missed. He hadn’t checked all of the usual hiding places. Under the mattress, behind drawers, behind the posters. But Jennifer was eager for him to be out of there, and he had found a few things that might be helpful. “Can I take her computer and phone?”
“What do you think you’re going to find on them?”
He tried to be patient, even though he had already gone over it several times. Jennifer wasn’t stupid. He remembered her as being much smarter than he was. But she was emotionally distraught. She couldn’t accept that Kristin might have done something that had contributed to her death. As far as Jennifer was concerned, it could only be one of the doctors. Negligence during the surgery for one reason or another. A mistake made. Something that explained what had happened to Kristin and yet didn’t reflect on anything Kristin or Jennifer had done or could have done to prevent it.
“I would just like to be sure that there was nothing going on that you don’t know of. Anything that might have caused a problem.”
“But there wasn’t. How could there be? This wasn’t something that another kid did. It wasn’t suicide. She didn’t even die in her bed at night. She died in a doctor’s office. In a surgery. That’s what killed her.”
“I know. I’m just looking for any contributing factors.”
Zachary picked up Kristin’s laptop. He slid the logbook under it, trying to keep it out of sight. “Do you have her phone?”
“I don’t want you to… it has all her pictures on it. I need those.”
“I won’t delete anything. I won’t mess around with anything at all. I just want to look through her social networks, make sure there isn’t any spyware on the phone, and take a little look around to see what else might have been happening in her life. That’s all.”
Jennifer sighed heavily and patted her pockets. “Okay, but only for a few hours. I want it back today.”
That was going to make things difficult. But Zachary could probably negotiate once he had it in his possession. Let her know that he needed it for just a bit longer so that he could finish examining it. Or clone it onto his hard drive and use an emulator program to explore the data. Once it was in his possession, he had the choice.
Jennifer handed the slim phone to Zachary. The case was faded in places, rubbed by Kristin’s fingers for hundreds of hours until the color had started to wear away. Like with most kids, it was not just a communication tool. It was her life, her friend, her confidante, her entertainment. And for Zachary, it would be a window to that life. A way to reconstruct her last few days.
“Do you know her passcode?”
Jennifer gave him a six-digit number. He tapped them on the screen and it unlocked. “Great, thanks.”
So Kristin had trusted her mother enough to give her the unlock code. That either meant that she trusted her mother not to go snooping where she wasn’t wanted—which was doubtful—or she had hidden the apps, conversations, and data she had not wanted her mother to see.
“What’s that?” Jennifer demanded, as Zachary shifted everything to slide them into his laptop bag. “What’s that book?”
Zachary pressed his lips together. He had been hoping to get out of there without Jennifer noticing it. He displayed the hardcover notebook to her. “It seems to be a weight loss log. I wanted to review it for any information relevant to her… physical condition.”
Jennifer stared at it. “She was keeping a journal?”
Zachary opened the book to display one of the spreads. Date down the left column, groups of digits and words in the line following. Jennifer leaned in closer for a look. “What is all of this?”
“I know a doctor. I’ll work with her to determine what each number represents. I don’t think it will be too hard to figure out. It isn’t code, just shorthand.”
Jennifer’s eyes worked across the page and then down it. She shook her head slowly, blinking, bright reflections from tears in her eyes once again. “That’s… I didn’t realize she’d lost so much. She was looking better. But I didn’t know how much.”
“She didn’t tell you. And she was probably wearing the same clothes. Hiding her weight loss so it wasn’t so obvious.”
“You think she had an eating disorder? That she was anorexic?”
“No. I think she just didn’t want to be asked about it. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing or why she was losing weight. If people started commenting on the huge amount of weight that she had lost, it would just make her feel bad. Like she was so awful before.”
Jennifer seemed to accept this. It was more palatable than the idea that Kristin was intentionally keeping things from her mother or suffering from an eating disorder that had weakened her heart and contributed to her death.
“I don’t like you taking it away. Taking any of this stuff away. Can’t you just look at it here? It will only take a few minutes.”
“It will take longer than that. I’ll want to do a pretty deep dive. And that’s easiest to do at home, where I have all the proper equipment.”
He would probably have to just copy everything and return the equipment and notebook to her.
“I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can. But you want me to do everything possible. You want as much information as you can get, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Yes, of course.” But her initial answer was probably the more accurate. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to discover. She probably didn’t want to know about everything that was going on in her daughter’s life, all of her thoughts and feelings and secret shames. Jennifer just wanted to know the good stuff. To have happy, innocent memories of her daughter and know she had done everything she could to protect her.
23
Zachary considered the information he had found so far while cloning the hard drive on Kristin’s laptop. Usually, he got his computer guy, Gerry, to do such tasks, but Gerry had walked him through it a couple of times, and everything seemed to be working as it should. He looked at the prescription receipt and shook his head. He had a feeling that it wasn’t an antiviral or antifungal, and Jennifer had already said that she didn’t think it was the steroid prescription Kristin had been given. And it wasn’t her inhaler.
He considered for a few minutes, then decided to try Kenzie. If she were too busy to talk to him, he’d ask her in the evening. But it was nice to talk to her partway through the day, and he didn’t want just to sit there staring at the computer while the data was transferred. He should be making progress on other fronts at the same time.
“Medical Examiner’s Office,” Kenzie answered briskly, then saw who was calling. “Zachary. Hi.” Her tone was cautious, as if she thought he was calling about something negative.
“I just wanted to run some ideas past you,” Zachary said. “But if you’re too busy, it can wait.”
“Some ideas about your case? Sure. Have you received the medical examiner’s report?”
“Not yet. Hopefully tomorrow.”
“What did you find out, then?”
“I wondered about the possible side effects of birth control pills. I’ve heard that there are risks in taking them.”
“Sure. Quite a number of possible side effects, some of them pretty dangerous.”
Zachary thumped the table in front of him. “Hah. I thought so. So if she was taking birth control pills and didn’t tell her mother or the dental surgeon, is it possible that a side effect from that prescription could have resulted in her death?”
“I don’t know if it creates any additional risks during surgery, but for sure they can cause clots, strokes, heart attacks. And a lot of less serious side effects.”
“Birth control pills could give her a heart attack?”
“Or put her at a higher risk for a heart attack. Yes.”
“What about some of the other things she was having? Migraines, stomach problems, difficulty concentrating?”
“Any of those, sure. They’re hormones. Headaches are common. They can cause all kinds of mental issues. Problems with concentration or memory, depression and other mood issues. Think about the issues that women have with PMS or pregnancy. All of those areas can be affected.”
“I’ll bet that’s what Kristin was on.”
“Do you know for sure? What did her mother say?”
“Her mother said that it was a prescription for an infection. She thinks. She can’t remember for sure. I think that Kristin probably went out and got them prescribed without her mother knowing about it. Suddenly she’s having all of these issues…”
“And weight loss.”
“Right. Could contraceptives have caused that too?”
“No… the opposite. They tend to cause weight gain. One of the things that women hate about them the most.”
Zachary thought the other side effects should have been hated at least as much. But he wasn’t plugged in to the women’s network. Who knew what things were talked about when no men were around?
“What does the prescription say?” Kenzie asked. “Is it a brand name? Progesterone?”
“No.” Zachary studied the multi-syllabic word on the printed receipt and did his best to read it to Kenzie.
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you still there? Did you get that? I’m probably massacring the word. Do you want me to text it to you?”
“That’s not a birth control prescription.”
“It’s not?” Zachary blew out his breath. “Here I thought I had it all figured out. She has a new boyfriend her mother doesn’t know about, a prescription she doesn’t know about…”
“It’s a good guess,” Kenzie admitted. “I might have gone there too. But that isn’t a contraceptive.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not something I’m familiar with.”
“I probably didn’t pronounce it right. Do you want me to message it to you?”
“I’d better get back to my work here. You can show it to me when I get home. I won’t be too much longer, I just need to tie up a few loose ends.”
“Okay. Talk to you later, then.”
Kenzie hung up. Zachary looked at the computer to see how the data transfer was progressing. He considered whether to search the name of the prescription to find out what it was on his own, but decided against it. He had plenty of other tasks that he should be doing, and discussing the medical aspects of his cases was one of the things that he and Kenzie enjoyed doing together. If he looked it up before she came home, there would be no point in her looking at it. He could search what it was for and what the side effects were, but that would ruin their fun.
He unlocked Kristin’s phone and looked through it for hidden apps. There was no point in going to her readily apparent social apps with their plain vanilla messages if she were using something else to communicate with people and the mainstream stuff was just for her mother’s benefit.
He was distracted by the beep of his computer, indicating that he had mail from Heather. He had been falling down on a number of tasks that Heather had already reminded him about more than once. He needed to focus and get a few of them done.
When Kenzie got home, Zachary looked around at the equipment and papers scattered around him on the couch, laptop desk, and carpet. It was disorganized and distracting. He would just keep jumping from one unfinished task to another if he didn’t corral it and take control.
“You okay?” Kenzie asked with a laugh.
“Yeah. I just didn’t realize I’d gotten snowed under…”
“That looks like quite the project.”
“Yeah.” Zachary shook his head, embarrassed by his ability to generate a mess in such a short time. A talent that more than one foster mother had not appreciated. “Just give me a minute and I’ll get this picked up.”
The laptop hard drive was finished cloning. The phone was nearly dead and would have to be charged before he could do anything more. There were at least a dozen more emails in his inbox than the last time he checked. Kristin’s logbook, Zachary’s notes, and other materials he had meant to scan or file were jumbled together. The prescription receipt was buried somewhere.
Zachary worked through the piles of paper in an effort to get everything organized. His own work was as disorganized as Kristin’s schoolwork in her desk drawer, everything just thrown together in a jumble. For Zachary, that was the normal state of affairs and he needed to work at it to keep things organized better. Or get help from someone who was naturally organized. But it was evident from Kristin’s previous term’s work and neatly labeled file folders that it was not normal for her. Something had happened in the past few weeks or months that had caused that to change. If not the brain fog from a hormonal contraceptive, then what?
Zachary took some of the papers into the home office where they were supposed to be filed and grabbed a box to corral everything to do with Jennifer’s case. Kenzie looked out through the kitchen doorway as he finished putting everything away.
“That looks better.”
Zachary joined her. “You’d think someone had set off a bomb in there. I don’t know how I can manage to create that much of a mess in such a short time.”
“Neither do I, to tell the truth,” she told him with a laugh. “Did you make any headway after we talked?”
“Well… I got a few things done. Or partway done. But I didn’t really move the case forward. But I did save the medical stuff to discuss with you.”
“Oh, good.” Kenzie’s tone was genuinely pleased, not sarcastic. Zachary might expect her to be tired of dealing with death and the medical field after spending hours on it every day, but she was always happy to discuss whatever questions he brought to her.
She already knew about the prescription, and Zachary filled her in on the weight loss log as they worked together on dinner preparations.
“Now, are you sure it is a weight loss log,” Kenzie asked with a teasing smile, “and not something else? There are a lot of different things that she might have been tracking.”
“You’ll have to take a look at it. I’m… ninety-five percent sure, and that’s what her mother seemed to think too. But we could both be wrong.”
“We’ll see!”
24
Kenzie looked at the notebook when she sat down at the table before starting to dish up. While they liked to discuss files over dinner, it was best not to have too much paper at the table where it could be damaged by spills. Zachary intended to return everything to Jennifer in the same condition he had received it.
Kenzie’s eyes ran across the entries. “Date, weight, it looks like some symptoms she was tracking, dosages, heart rate and blood pressure.” Kenzie sipped her water, gazing at it and seeing whether she could squeeze any more information out of the records. “This one looks like a running total of her weight loss. Over fifty pounds, that’s nothing to sneeze at. She was doing really well.”
“Her mom said that she was walking a lot. She didn’t know anything else. Even that Kristin was keeping this log.”
“Well, I would expect her to have noticed this. Kristin was a big girl, but fifty pounds shows, even off of someone who is grossly obese.”
“She did notice… but she didn’t know it was that much. And she thought that Kristin was doing it healthily.”
“Considering the fact that she died… I wouldn’t count on it. Dieters can be really hard on their bodies. If she was also purging or severely restricting calories or taking drugs that were harmful to her system, her heart and other organs would be at risk. Something like anesthetic could cause a problem.”
“Because of what she was doing, not because she was allergic to it?”
“An allergy is always possible too, even if she’d had the same anesthetic without incident before. Sometimes allergies can develop quite suddenly. There’s no way to know without more information.”
“If the doctors had known what she was doing, would they have done anything differently?”
“No guarantees. I assume they monitored her heart rhythm and blood pressure while administering the anesthetic. But subtle shifts in rhythm can be missed. Or her heart might have just stopped without any warning.”
“But they wouldn’t have said it was too risky to do the surgery?”
Kenzie considered. “No, I don’t think so. There were risks, but unless they knew she was taking something that had a known conflict with the anesthetic, I don’t think they would have been that concerned.”
She handed Zachary the logbook and he took it back into the living room to put it with the rest of the items related to the investigation.
“And what was the prescription?” Kenzie asked. “Do you have that out there too?”
“Oh, yeah.” Zachary pulled out the receipt and handed it to her when he returned to the table.
Kenzie looked at the name of the drug for a minute and shook her head. “I’m not familiar with this.”
She pulled out her phone and carefully tapped out the drug’s name. She scrolled through the results with her thumb.
“It is a weight loss drug. Prescribed for people with type 2 diabetes, to help stabilize blood sugar, delay stomach emptying, and suppress appetite.” She nodded slowly. “Was Kristin diagnosed with diabetes?”
“Not that Jennifer said, no. But then… she has downplayed a few things. Kristin’s weight loss. Her poor marks at school this term. The severity of her asthma.”
“Maybe Kristin was diagnosed, but Jennifer didn’t want to tell you because she was afraid that would be the end of your investigation. You would just tell her it was a complication of Kristin’s diabetes. Or because she had not told the surgeon that Kristin was diabetic.”
“It’s possible,” Zachary admitted. There was a knot in his stomach at the thought of Jennifer lying to him. That was going beyond forgetting to give him information or shading the truth. He had shown her the prescription, and she had brushed it off as being an antibiotic. But she must have known the truth. “Kristin wouldn’t have been able to get the prescription without a parent, would she? She’s a minor.”
Zachary looked slowly around the bedroom for anything he might have missed. He hadn’t checked all of the usual hiding places. Under the mattress, behind drawers, behind the posters. But Jennifer was eager for him to be out of there, and he had found a few things that might be helpful. “Can I take her computer and phone?”
“What do you think you’re going to find on them?”
He tried to be patient, even though he had already gone over it several times. Jennifer wasn’t stupid. He remembered her as being much smarter than he was. But she was emotionally distraught. She couldn’t accept that Kristin might have done something that had contributed to her death. As far as Jennifer was concerned, it could only be one of the doctors. Negligence during the surgery for one reason or another. A mistake made. Something that explained what had happened to Kristin and yet didn’t reflect on anything Kristin or Jennifer had done or could have done to prevent it.
“I would just like to be sure that there was nothing going on that you don’t know of. Anything that might have caused a problem.”
“But there wasn’t. How could there be? This wasn’t something that another kid did. It wasn’t suicide. She didn’t even die in her bed at night. She died in a doctor’s office. In a surgery. That’s what killed her.”
“I know. I’m just looking for any contributing factors.”
Zachary picked up Kristin’s laptop. He slid the logbook under it, trying to keep it out of sight. “Do you have her phone?”
“I don’t want you to… it has all her pictures on it. I need those.”
“I won’t delete anything. I won’t mess around with anything at all. I just want to look through her social networks, make sure there isn’t any spyware on the phone, and take a little look around to see what else might have been happening in her life. That’s all.”
Jennifer sighed heavily and patted her pockets. “Okay, but only for a few hours. I want it back today.”
That was going to make things difficult. But Zachary could probably negotiate once he had it in his possession. Let her know that he needed it for just a bit longer so that he could finish examining it. Or clone it onto his hard drive and use an emulator program to explore the data. Once it was in his possession, he had the choice.
Jennifer handed the slim phone to Zachary. The case was faded in places, rubbed by Kristin’s fingers for hundreds of hours until the color had started to wear away. Like with most kids, it was not just a communication tool. It was her life, her friend, her confidante, her entertainment. And for Zachary, it would be a window to that life. A way to reconstruct her last few days.
“Do you know her passcode?”
Jennifer gave him a six-digit number. He tapped them on the screen and it unlocked. “Great, thanks.”
So Kristin had trusted her mother enough to give her the unlock code. That either meant that she trusted her mother not to go snooping where she wasn’t wanted—which was doubtful—or she had hidden the apps, conversations, and data she had not wanted her mother to see.
“What’s that?” Jennifer demanded, as Zachary shifted everything to slide them into his laptop bag. “What’s that book?”
Zachary pressed his lips together. He had been hoping to get out of there without Jennifer noticing it. He displayed the hardcover notebook to her. “It seems to be a weight loss log. I wanted to review it for any information relevant to her… physical condition.”
Jennifer stared at it. “She was keeping a journal?”
Zachary opened the book to display one of the spreads. Date down the left column, groups of digits and words in the line following. Jennifer leaned in closer for a look. “What is all of this?”
“I know a doctor. I’ll work with her to determine what each number represents. I don’t think it will be too hard to figure out. It isn’t code, just shorthand.”
Jennifer’s eyes worked across the page and then down it. She shook her head slowly, blinking, bright reflections from tears in her eyes once again. “That’s… I didn’t realize she’d lost so much. She was looking better. But I didn’t know how much.”
“She didn’t tell you. And she was probably wearing the same clothes. Hiding her weight loss so it wasn’t so obvious.”
“You think she had an eating disorder? That she was anorexic?”
“No. I think she just didn’t want to be asked about it. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing or why she was losing weight. If people started commenting on the huge amount of weight that she had lost, it would just make her feel bad. Like she was so awful before.”
Jennifer seemed to accept this. It was more palatable than the idea that Kristin was intentionally keeping things from her mother or suffering from an eating disorder that had weakened her heart and contributed to her death.
“I don’t like you taking it away. Taking any of this stuff away. Can’t you just look at it here? It will only take a few minutes.”
“It will take longer than that. I’ll want to do a pretty deep dive. And that’s easiest to do at home, where I have all the proper equipment.”
He would probably have to just copy everything and return the equipment and notebook to her.
“I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can. But you want me to do everything possible. You want as much information as you can get, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Yes, of course.” But her initial answer was probably the more accurate. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to discover. She probably didn’t want to know about everything that was going on in her daughter’s life, all of her thoughts and feelings and secret shames. Jennifer just wanted to know the good stuff. To have happy, innocent memories of her daughter and know she had done everything she could to protect her.
23
Zachary considered the information he had found so far while cloning the hard drive on Kristin’s laptop. Usually, he got his computer guy, Gerry, to do such tasks, but Gerry had walked him through it a couple of times, and everything seemed to be working as it should. He looked at the prescription receipt and shook his head. He had a feeling that it wasn’t an antiviral or antifungal, and Jennifer had already said that she didn’t think it was the steroid prescription Kristin had been given. And it wasn’t her inhaler.
He considered for a few minutes, then decided to try Kenzie. If she were too busy to talk to him, he’d ask her in the evening. But it was nice to talk to her partway through the day, and he didn’t want just to sit there staring at the computer while the data was transferred. He should be making progress on other fronts at the same time.
“Medical Examiner’s Office,” Kenzie answered briskly, then saw who was calling. “Zachary. Hi.” Her tone was cautious, as if she thought he was calling about something negative.
“I just wanted to run some ideas past you,” Zachary said. “But if you’re too busy, it can wait.”
“Some ideas about your case? Sure. Have you received the medical examiner’s report?”
“Not yet. Hopefully tomorrow.”
“What did you find out, then?”
“I wondered about the possible side effects of birth control pills. I’ve heard that there are risks in taking them.”
“Sure. Quite a number of possible side effects, some of them pretty dangerous.”
Zachary thumped the table in front of him. “Hah. I thought so. So if she was taking birth control pills and didn’t tell her mother or the dental surgeon, is it possible that a side effect from that prescription could have resulted in her death?”
“I don’t know if it creates any additional risks during surgery, but for sure they can cause clots, strokes, heart attacks. And a lot of less serious side effects.”
“Birth control pills could give her a heart attack?”
“Or put her at a higher risk for a heart attack. Yes.”
“What about some of the other things she was having? Migraines, stomach problems, difficulty concentrating?”
“Any of those, sure. They’re hormones. Headaches are common. They can cause all kinds of mental issues. Problems with concentration or memory, depression and other mood issues. Think about the issues that women have with PMS or pregnancy. All of those areas can be affected.”
“I’ll bet that’s what Kristin was on.”
“Do you know for sure? What did her mother say?”
“Her mother said that it was a prescription for an infection. She thinks. She can’t remember for sure. I think that Kristin probably went out and got them prescribed without her mother knowing about it. Suddenly she’s having all of these issues…”
“And weight loss.”
“Right. Could contraceptives have caused that too?”
“No… the opposite. They tend to cause weight gain. One of the things that women hate about them the most.”
Zachary thought the other side effects should have been hated at least as much. But he wasn’t plugged in to the women’s network. Who knew what things were talked about when no men were around?
“What does the prescription say?” Kenzie asked. “Is it a brand name? Progesterone?”
“No.” Zachary studied the multi-syllabic word on the printed receipt and did his best to read it to Kenzie.
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you still there? Did you get that? I’m probably massacring the word. Do you want me to text it to you?”
“That’s not a birth control prescription.”
“It’s not?” Zachary blew out his breath. “Here I thought I had it all figured out. She has a new boyfriend her mother doesn’t know about, a prescription she doesn’t know about…”
“It’s a good guess,” Kenzie admitted. “I might have gone there too. But that isn’t a contraceptive.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not something I’m familiar with.”
“I probably didn’t pronounce it right. Do you want me to message it to you?”
“I’d better get back to my work here. You can show it to me when I get home. I won’t be too much longer, I just need to tie up a few loose ends.”
“Okay. Talk to you later, then.”
Kenzie hung up. Zachary looked at the computer to see how the data transfer was progressing. He considered whether to search the name of the prescription to find out what it was on his own, but decided against it. He had plenty of other tasks that he should be doing, and discussing the medical aspects of his cases was one of the things that he and Kenzie enjoyed doing together. If he looked it up before she came home, there would be no point in her looking at it. He could search what it was for and what the side effects were, but that would ruin their fun.
He unlocked Kristin’s phone and looked through it for hidden apps. There was no point in going to her readily apparent social apps with their plain vanilla messages if she were using something else to communicate with people and the mainstream stuff was just for her mother’s benefit.
He was distracted by the beep of his computer, indicating that he had mail from Heather. He had been falling down on a number of tasks that Heather had already reminded him about more than once. He needed to focus and get a few of them done.
When Kenzie got home, Zachary looked around at the equipment and papers scattered around him on the couch, laptop desk, and carpet. It was disorganized and distracting. He would just keep jumping from one unfinished task to another if he didn’t corral it and take control.
“You okay?” Kenzie asked with a laugh.
“Yeah. I just didn’t realize I’d gotten snowed under…”
“That looks like quite the project.”
“Yeah.” Zachary shook his head, embarrassed by his ability to generate a mess in such a short time. A talent that more than one foster mother had not appreciated. “Just give me a minute and I’ll get this picked up.”
The laptop hard drive was finished cloning. The phone was nearly dead and would have to be charged before he could do anything more. There were at least a dozen more emails in his inbox than the last time he checked. Kristin’s logbook, Zachary’s notes, and other materials he had meant to scan or file were jumbled together. The prescription receipt was buried somewhere.
Zachary worked through the piles of paper in an effort to get everything organized. His own work was as disorganized as Kristin’s schoolwork in her desk drawer, everything just thrown together in a jumble. For Zachary, that was the normal state of affairs and he needed to work at it to keep things organized better. Or get help from someone who was naturally organized. But it was evident from Kristin’s previous term’s work and neatly labeled file folders that it was not normal for her. Something had happened in the past few weeks or months that had caused that to change. If not the brain fog from a hormonal contraceptive, then what?
Zachary took some of the papers into the home office where they were supposed to be filed and grabbed a box to corral everything to do with Jennifer’s case. Kenzie looked out through the kitchen doorway as he finished putting everything away.
“That looks better.”
Zachary joined her. “You’d think someone had set off a bomb in there. I don’t know how I can manage to create that much of a mess in such a short time.”
“Neither do I, to tell the truth,” she told him with a laugh. “Did you make any headway after we talked?”
“Well… I got a few things done. Or partway done. But I didn’t really move the case forward. But I did save the medical stuff to discuss with you.”
“Oh, good.” Kenzie’s tone was genuinely pleased, not sarcastic. Zachary might expect her to be tired of dealing with death and the medical field after spending hours on it every day, but she was always happy to discuss whatever questions he brought to her.
She already knew about the prescription, and Zachary filled her in on the weight loss log as they worked together on dinner preparations.
“Now, are you sure it is a weight loss log,” Kenzie asked with a teasing smile, “and not something else? There are a lot of different things that she might have been tracking.”
“You’ll have to take a look at it. I’m… ninety-five percent sure, and that’s what her mother seemed to think too. But we could both be wrong.”
“We’ll see!”
24
Kenzie looked at the notebook when she sat down at the table before starting to dish up. While they liked to discuss files over dinner, it was best not to have too much paper at the table where it could be damaged by spills. Zachary intended to return everything to Jennifer in the same condition he had received it.
Kenzie’s eyes ran across the entries. “Date, weight, it looks like some symptoms she was tracking, dosages, heart rate and blood pressure.” Kenzie sipped her water, gazing at it and seeing whether she could squeeze any more information out of the records. “This one looks like a running total of her weight loss. Over fifty pounds, that’s nothing to sneeze at. She was doing really well.”
“Her mom said that she was walking a lot. She didn’t know anything else. Even that Kristin was keeping this log.”
“Well, I would expect her to have noticed this. Kristin was a big girl, but fifty pounds shows, even off of someone who is grossly obese.”
“She did notice… but she didn’t know it was that much. And she thought that Kristin was doing it healthily.”
“Considering the fact that she died… I wouldn’t count on it. Dieters can be really hard on their bodies. If she was also purging or severely restricting calories or taking drugs that were harmful to her system, her heart and other organs would be at risk. Something like anesthetic could cause a problem.”
“Because of what she was doing, not because she was allergic to it?”
“An allergy is always possible too, even if she’d had the same anesthetic without incident before. Sometimes allergies can develop quite suddenly. There’s no way to know without more information.”
“If the doctors had known what she was doing, would they have done anything differently?”
“No guarantees. I assume they monitored her heart rhythm and blood pressure while administering the anesthetic. But subtle shifts in rhythm can be missed. Or her heart might have just stopped without any warning.”
“But they wouldn’t have said it was too risky to do the surgery?”
Kenzie considered. “No, I don’t think so. There were risks, but unless they knew she was taking something that had a known conflict with the anesthetic, I don’t think they would have been that concerned.”
She handed Zachary the logbook and he took it back into the living room to put it with the rest of the items related to the investigation.
“And what was the prescription?” Kenzie asked. “Do you have that out there too?”
“Oh, yeah.” Zachary pulled out the receipt and handed it to her when he returned to the table.
Kenzie looked at the name of the drug for a minute and shook her head. “I’m not familiar with this.”
She pulled out her phone and carefully tapped out the drug’s name. She scrolled through the results with her thumb.
“It is a weight loss drug. Prescribed for people with type 2 diabetes, to help stabilize blood sugar, delay stomach emptying, and suppress appetite.” She nodded slowly. “Was Kristin diagnosed with diabetes?”
“Not that Jennifer said, no. But then… she has downplayed a few things. Kristin’s weight loss. Her poor marks at school this term. The severity of her asthma.”
“Maybe Kristin was diagnosed, but Jennifer didn’t want to tell you because she was afraid that would be the end of your investigation. You would just tell her it was a complication of Kristin’s diabetes. Or because she had not told the surgeon that Kristin was diabetic.”
“It’s possible,” Zachary admitted. There was a knot in his stomach at the thought of Jennifer lying to him. That was going beyond forgetting to give him information or shading the truth. He had shown her the prescription, and she had brushed it off as being an antibiotic. But she must have known the truth. “Kristin wouldn’t have been able to get the prescription without a parent, would she? She’s a minor.”
