The nurse’s aide had already stuffed the sheets into a canvas trolley and was walking away from me.

“Wait,” I said, lunging out and grabbing for her arm.

Her face stretched with surprise. Kind of jumpy for hospital personnel.

“Take your hands off me. Please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, showing her my badge. “Lieutenant Boxer, SFPD. I came to see Mrs. Haggerty in room 311.”

“Well, you’re too late.”

“Too late? I just spoke with her on the phone. What happened?”

I envisioned the woman hunched over the phone, scared out of her mind.

I’d just spoken with her!

“She checked herself out without doctor’s approval. I wheeled her out to the street myself. Helped her into a taxi. Yellow Cab, if that matters. You done with me now?”

I nodded, said thanks.

The nurse’s aide continued down the hallway, leaving me in the corridor alone.

I was heading toward the exit when a nurse in blue scrubs beckoned to me from a room across the hallway. She was a light-skinned black woman, about twenty-five, rounded face, her reddish hair in twists. The ID tag hanging from the ball chain around her neck read “Noddie Wilkins, RN.”

“You’re with the police?” she asked, her voice low and urgent. “I have to talk to you. I have to tell you what I know. The police should be involved with what’s happening.”

Chapter 66

Chapter 66

WE DECIDED TO TALK somewhere outside the hospital. Noddie Wilkins and I sat together in my Explorer, sipping cafeteria coffee from paper cups.

“There’s something weird going on around this hospital,” Noddie told me. “Last week, when I found one of my patients dead, I totally freaked out. Mr. Harris was frisky. He was getting ready to go home, not die. Cardiac arrest? Far as I know, there was nothing wrong with his heart.”

“You found that suspicious?”

“That and the fact that when I found him dead, he had coins on his eyes.”

That threw me for a loop.

“Coins? What kind of coins?” I asked.

“Well, they look like coins, but they’re buttons, like from a jacket or a blazer. They have a raised pattern—what do you call that?”

“Embossed?”

“That’s it. They were embossed with a medical symbol—snakes winding up a pole with wings at the top.”

“You’re talking about a caduceus?”

“That’s right. A caduceus.”

I felt like I’d dropped through an open manhole, and was still falling.

Markers had been placed on the eyes of a dead patient.

How could that be anything but the signature of a killer?

“This is bad, isn’t it?” said Noddie, taking in the shock on my face. “There’s more.”

She homed in on me with her big oval eyes, as if she’d been pent up for a long while, and now she needed to talk.