Chapters (148)

Jacobi asked the pathologist, “What the hell happened here?”

“According to his chart, he had a simple fracture of his right humerus and a hairline fracture of the ulna, same arm,” said Dr. Paul. “Apparently, he fell from his bike.”

“And what else, Doctor?” said Jacobi. “Last I heard, a broken arm isn’t fatal. Or maybe it is at this hospital.”

“I was told to keep my hands off this kid,” the doctor told us. “So, you know, I can’t even guess.”

“That’s fine, Dr. Paul,” I said. “The ME is on the way. This little boy is going to the medical examiner’s office.”

Chapter 117

IT WAS ONLY 9:00 in the morning, roughly nine hours after Jamie Sweet had died with the side rails up on his hospital bed, presumably surrounded by people who were supposed to take excellent care of him and make him well.

I left a thoroughly exasperated Jacobi on the second floor with Charlie Clapper and his team. They were processing what was left of the scene: recovering the bed linens and the child’s gown from the laundry, dusting for prints, bagging the trash and the pair of caduceus buttons that had been left inside an empty water glass when the boy’s body was removed from the room.

I passed my detectives as I walked the corridors, saw that they were interviewing the doctors and nurses in the orthopedic wing, getting a timeline. Who saw the boy alive and when? What medication had he received?

Who had been on duty last night?

Who had found him dead?

I met with Jamie Sweet’s parents in the cramped second-floor waiting room. They were a young couple in their early thirties, huddled together in the corner of the room, caught between anger and shock, wanting to believe anything but what I was telling them.

“This is fucked-up,” Martin Sweet shouted at me, his face bloated with grief. “Jamie had a broken arm. A broken arm! I want to kill someone, Lieutenant.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you? I’m holding you responsible for finding out who did this to my son.”

Beside him, the child’s mother rocked and moaned. Bright red streaks ran from her cheeks to her throat, where she seemed to have raked her skin with her fingernails.

“I want to die,” she cried into her husband’s chest. “Please, God, let me die.”

“The chief medical examiner is going to look at Jamie,” I said gently, tears suddenly filling my own eyes. “I’ll call you as soon as I know what happened to him.

“I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

Chapter 118

SOMETIMES A BAD WIND BLOWS.

A security guard accompanied me to Dr. Dennis Garza’s office on the ground floor, just around the corner from the ER.

An aggressively thin woman with penciled-on eyebrows and long fuchsia talons stood outside Garza’s office, calmly using the fax machine at her desk.