Endowed with Death, page 9
Someone who felt a huge well of guilt for not having been there when her son went over the edge of the balcony. A mother who had wanted to protect and care for her son, but had not been able to.
Sylvia had implied that neither parent had the patience to deal with Michael when he had been a colicky baby and she had stepped in to hold him until he had cried himself to sleep. Maybe Terri-Lyn was not someone with much instinct for child rearing or who hadn’t had the time to properly establish a bond with him. It could be challenging to bond with a child with colic or medical issues that kept them in constant pain or discomfort. They weren’t the cute, cuddly bundles people expected, the baby you could hold or rock for hours just staring into his eyes. A baby who screamed, cried, and pushed or kicked against his caregiver was not easy to love.
Maybe Terri-Lyn recognized that she didn’t have the proper mother-child bond with Michael, and that was what she felt the most guilty over.
That and the fact that she or her husband had been beating on him, eventually causing his death.
Maybe she felt guilty about that.
17
It was the nanny’s screaming that had alerted everyone that something had happened, so she was clearly the one who had discovered his body after it had been dropped from the balcony. Kenzie moved on to her statement, which was quite a bit longer than either parent’s.
Sylvia said she had been working in the kitchen, the same thing she had told Kenzie. She had taken a break and gone to look in on Michael to make sure that everything was okay. She didn’t say who was supposed to be watching him during that time, if anyone. She had gone to the nursery and, not finding him there, had begun to conduct a room-by-room search.
She didn’t say if she had called for anyone else to help her, or that she had alerted either parent to the fact that he was out of his room and she didn’t know where he was. So maybe it was a fairly regular thing. Although Sylvia had told Kenzie that he would usually stay in his room to play.
She had reached a room with the door standing open and had entered to see if that was where Michael had gone. Looking around, she did not find him, but she felt a breeze and realized the balcony doors were open. She went to secure them, but it occurred to her that they were open wide enough to admit a child and checked to make sure that Michael was not on the balcony.
And that was when she had looked over the edge and seen Michael on the white concrete pool deck below her, splayed out and unmoving.
Her narrative ended abruptly. Kenzie imagined the screams that had drawn everyone in the household to the back of the house where Michael’s body lay. Sylvia probably had little recollection of what had happened after she saw Michael there. Neither parent had said that she made it down to the main level or ran out to Michael’s body. Perhaps she had collapsed, or someone had gone to her and comforted her, keeping her away from the body, just like they had prevented his mother from rushing out to see him like that.
More details had been added later. Bits and pieces of information that Kenzie imagined the detectives had managed to coax out of Sylvia and had her add to her statement.
“I did not see him climb over the rail. I did not see him fall.”
“I heard a noise. That was why I went to find him.”
What kind of a noise? Kenzie could imagine Tuttle prompting her. Did you hear Michael playing? Crying?
“Not Michael. Just a noise that made me think I should check on him and make sure he was okay.”
Kenzie pondered this. What had Sylvia heard? She seemed to have refused to give the detectives any description of what kind of a noise it was. Footsteps? Voices? Toys being thrown? Something falling? Just “a noise.”
Something that made her think she had better check on her young ward.
She said it was not a noise Michael had made, so maybe it was the parents. Maybe one of them had said something within her hearing that made her worry for Michael’s safety. The boy had not just wandered out of the nursery and climbed over the balcony rail. He had been killed by someone before he had been dropped from the balcony. And that someone might have said something in Sylvia’s hearing that tipped her off to the fact that Michael had been hurt again.
She was used to his getting hurt. She knew he would need painkillers. That she would need to rock and soothe him and try to keep him still so that the injury could start to heal on its own. She must know how badly he had been beaten in the past. She wasn’t stupid.
So she had gone looking for him, only to find that she was too late and they had already killed him and disposed of his body in a way intended to obscure what had been done.
Kenzie heard a door open and looked up. It had not been the door of the conference room she was hiding out in, but one of the other doors in the suite. She waited for a moment, head cocked, trying to identify any other familiar signs to figure out whether it was George returning with a transport or Julie getting a cup of coffee from the kitchen.
But it didn’t sound like it. She stood up from the table and left the boardroom to see who it was.
Dr. Wiltshire’s door opened down the hall. Kenzie waited to see if he was going to the kitchen for a coffee and, when he didn’t, she went to get him one anyway. Even though it was an inconvenience for him to be injured and to put everything on her, that wasn’t exactly his fault, and she wanted him to be in a good mood.
She prepared his coffee and then went down the hall to his office. She entered through Dr. Wiltshire’s open door, tapping on the door as she went by.
“I heard you come in.”
He looked up quickly, startled even though she had knocked and been careful not to sneak up on him.
“Oh, Kenzie!”
She tilted her head and laughed. “I do work here.”
She stepped forward and put the cup of coffee on his desk, switching at the last moment to putting it on her right, his left, so he could use his other hand. She looked at his right hand, still in a splint.
“What’s the word? No cast needed?”
He sighed. “The splint is temporary. It needs extensive surgery and hardware if I am going to regain full function. They are trying to get a specialist lined up to do it. I’m not sure how long I will have to wait. Hopefully, just a day or two. And then the recovery period after that and physical therapy…” He shook his head, frustrated. “I would like to tell you that I’ll be back on the circuit again in a month. But it could be as many as six. Assuming I get full function back again. Fine motor… it’s vital for our work. I can’t just be hacking and slashing. Even if I leave the sewing up to someone else, there is still so much more that I need full motor function for.”
“Yeah,” Kenzie agreed. With less dexterity, it would be difficult for Dr. Wiltshire to continue in his position. “You must have really done a number on it. What exactly did you do?”
“I’m embarrassed even to say. Suffice it to say that I do not have a future in the PGA. Or any other sport, for that matter. You would think I would have learned as a young man that sports are not my thing. But with what I do here, the coordination required, thoughtful planning, reflexes… I assumed that my work proved I had all of those things.” He picked up his coffee with his left hand and sipped it carefully. “Sadly, there is still something vital that I lack.”
Kenzie frowned at this response, which was really not an answer to her question at all. Dr. Wiltshire was avoiding answering. He had said it was embarrassing, and she supposed that was why. He didn’t want to have to admit whatever had happened. Kenzie had experienced enough of those moments herself to be sympathetic. Stubbing her toe on something she knew was there. Possibly even the heel of her other foot. Tripping over a crack in the sidewalk or nothing at all. Walking into a closed door in the dark, thinking it was open. There was a long list of stupid accidents in her past too. Everybody had them, so why was Dr. Wiltshire so hesitant to admit his?
She’d heard him joke about playing golf before. Mostly about how his wife wanted him out of the house or wanted him to have a hobby before he retired so that he wouldn’t think he could stay home all day with her. He had never actually claimed to be good at it.
But what could he have done to break his hand so badly while playing golf? Swung into a tree? Fallen down a slope and tried to catch himself? An accident with an electric cart?
“No need to look so serious,” Dr. Wiltshire assured her. “At least your position here is assured, as there is no one else to take over the work at the moment.”
“Will you be looking for someone to do some part-time work? When things pile up and two people are needed to handle the workload?”
It was a quiet time of year, but when December hit…
“I will see who I can find. I was already talking to the head of pathology at the hospital in Burlington, seeing who he could suggest.”
“Good. Not that I want someone else to take over, but I don’t want to be here twenty-four hours a day. I’ll end up a zombie, and not the good kind.”
He chuckled. “Fair enough. So, how are things coming on our big case?”
18
“Are you talking about Michael Wade?”
“Who else?”
“I just wanted to make sure. Because he’s a small case and a big case.”
Dr. Wiltshire stared at her, and Kenzie wondered whether her comment had been difficult to follow.
“A small boy,” she explained. “But a big political situation.”
“Right, of course,” Wiltshire agreed. He took his glasses off and wiped them as if dust had prevented him from seeing her point. “Small but big. So what have we got?”
Kenzie pulled up a chair and settled in to discuss it more fully. “There are a number of things that I wanted to talk to you about.”
“This may be a case where it is in our best interests to… leave things a bit vague.”
Kenzie felt like she was the one staring at him now, in disbelief at what he was suggesting. “Leave them a bit vague? It’s our job to provide as much clarity as possible. For the sake of the public and to give the police the best possible chance to catch the culprits in a case like this.”
“I’m sure that there are some things that are… ambiguous. And perhaps it’s best if they are just left that way. Digging down too far, we run the risk of accusing or even just implicating the wrong person. And that would be doing the family a huge disservice.”
“Someone in that household was abusing him.”
“So it would appear. But again… perhaps it was someone outside the home. Or someone who was only an occasional guest. And throwing shade on the family brings with it the danger of lawsuits. Defamation of character. False accusations.”
Kenzie shook her head.
“There are… discrepancies in this case,” Dr. Wiltshire tried approaching it from another direction. “Inconsistencies between what the witnesses report and what the body is telling us. We could simply state that there was disagreement between those things and the justice system would have to investigate and take it to its conclusion.”
“But we know that the body is right. Not the witness statements. Someone could swear that they saw him walking around outside today, and it wouldn’t make any difference because we know he wasn’t. He’s on a table in the cold room. That’s the truth. And we need to be clear as to what the truth is. That is not in doubt. There’s no interpreting the truth.”
“I think it can be managed. If you’ll bring me your first draft, I can go over it, or we could go over it together, and discuss the best way to word those truths.”
“I really don’t think…”
“You and I both know that things are not cut and dried. There is often more than one cause of death or mitigating factor. We interpret what we find based on the clues at the scene and what the police find and communicate to us. Technologies change. We decide what tests are required or are not required. Our budget constraints require that we be conservative in how much time and money we spend on each case, pinching pennies like a grandma on a pension.”
All of that was true, but Kenzie still didn’t like what Dr. Wiltshire was suggesting that she do. Or what she thought he was asking her to do.
If Cash Wade was guilty of killing his heir, Kenzie wouldn’t bury that fact.
She didn’t have a lot of success going over her findings with Dr. Wiltshire. He was distracted and complained about being unable to focus due to the painkillers he was on for his hand.
He agreed with each point she brought up, but then tried to spin it so that it was irrelevant or ambiguous in meaning. She had to assume that he either knew the Wade family or was receiving significant pressure from the people that Cash Wade had promised he would call. He had the influence he claimed to; Kenzie would give him that. Old money or new, the man had clout. He had clawed his way into Vermont society and had it by the throat.
Dr. Wiltshire left after just a couple of hours, signing off on whatever reports he could and apologizing that he didn’t have the energy or focus to spend any longer with her.
“We’ll go over this later,” he promised. “Maybe put it to the side as ‘undetermined’ for now, and we’ll revisit it when I feel better.”
Kenzie just smiled at him. She didn’t disagree with him aloud, but there was no way she was going to set the case aside or waffle on the cause of death. She had been raised by a couple of people who were adamant about standing by what they believed, and she wasn’t going to cave to any pressure to do otherwise. She would uncover the truth and do whatever she could to ensure the culprit was caught and punished.
Since Dr. Wiltshire was gone and the phones and reception desk were already being covered, Kenzie decided that a field trip was in order. It was time she visited some of Vermont’s hospitals.
The Roxboro hospital was small, but Kenzie knew from experience that it was staffed by competent and talented staff and that their emergency room was second to none of the city hospitals. When the wait time was long in Burlington or Montpelier, people would drive to Roxboro, knowing that they would get in and dealt with faster there, even considering the driving time.
A couple of people she had gone to medical school with had been posted to the hospital, so Kenzie made a couple of phone calls just to say hello and see if they were still there. And to casually mention that she would be by to pursue an inquiry.
When she spoke to the nurse at the triage desk in the emergency room, she smiled and nodded. “Dr. Pulman said that you might be stopping by and that I should help you out however I could.”
“Well, that was very sweet of him,” Kenzie said with a smile. “If there is someone I could talk to, I don’t want to take you away from your duties here…”
Nurse Harris leaned over to look around Kenzie, emphasizing the fact that there was no one standing in line behind Kenzie and very few people sitting in the waiting room for their names to be called.
“I think you are safe.”
Kenzie chuckled. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems. Dr. Pulman seems like a nice guy, but you never know what kind of a boss someone is…”
“He’s not my boss,” Nurse Harris said comfortably, “And my boss will not get after me for helping out the medical examiner’s office when I am not inconveniencing any patients.”
Kenzie nodded. She turned her phone around, showing it to Nurse Harris.
“Now, I know you get tons of people through here, so this is a long shot, but I wonder if you recognize this boy as having been a patient here before.”
Nurse Harris looked at the picture for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. I recognize him.”
19
Kenzie leaned in, surprised. “You know him? You’re sure?”
She nodded again. “I’ve got a pretty good memory for faces. I know I’ve seen him here before.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “What… what did he die from?”
Kenzie had done her best to make the picture look as if the boy were just sleeping, even going so far as to add a pink filter to brighten up his gray skin, but it was still obvious, to a nurse at least, that the boy was dead.
“I haven’t released my findings yet. Would you pull up his records for me, please? His name is Michael Wade.”
“Sure, of course.” She turned to her computer and tapped in the name. She shook her head, frown lines appearing between her brows. “Hmm. W-A-D-E?”
“Yes.”
“I do not see that name here anywhere. Is it possible that he was admitted under another name? Mother’s name, stepfather’s? A lot of kids have several different last names these days. It can be a bear to try to untangle them all.”
“No.” Kenzie hadn’t seen Terri-Lyn Wade’s maiden name mentioned anywhere. She was always Mrs. Wade or Terri-Lyn Wade. She couldn’t imagine why Michael would be going by any other name.
“Well…” the nurse shook her head. “Do you think you could find out? I can’t really pull up his file without a name.”
“You would check ID, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, we check.” Nurse Harris looked squinted her eyes up at the ceiling while she thought. “Oh… I wish I could remember more about the circumstances he was brought in under. He was brought in by his mother, or maybe his grandmother. He had fallen…” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Or something had fallen on him. I think that was it. She was very upset. The mother. Said that she had only turned her back on him for a minute and then he had pulled something over on himself. You know how kids do. Climbing a tall piece of furniture or something.”
Kenzie nodded. She tried to think of a way to find Michael’s records if she was not registered under the right name.
“So he received treatment. Do you remember what day it was? How long ago?”
“No. A few months ago. I can’t be much more specific than that.”
