distance, but it could easily have been the anguished pounding of my head. I struggled to my feet, leaned against a nearby pine tree and waited for the world to stop spinning around me. What had that girl hit me with?
“Stella!”
Great. Now he shows up. I could hear Jake getting closer but when I tried to answer the only sound that escaped was a thin, high-pitched squeak. When he finally caught sight of me, he stopped and stared.
“What did you do, hit a tree?”
I just looked at him. Well, actually, I looked at two of him for a moment before my vision cleared. Jake was attempting to play, but his concern was evident in his eyes. I’d scared him.
“I opened a can of whoop ass on this tree here and then I used what I had left over on that little nurse’s aide Marygrace wanted us to interview.”
Jake looked around the clearing. “What’d you do then, bury her?”
I let go of the tree and took a few uncertain steps toward him. “No, idiot, I let her crawl off into the woods to die. It was the only honorable thing to do.”
He nodded. “She cold-cocked you and got away, huh?”
I looked past him and started walking back toward the nursing home. “Yeah, something like that.”
Jake stopped me, studying my face before gently tracing the area around my left eye with his thumb.
“Ouch! Stop that!”
He smiled softly. “You’re gonna have a hell of a shiner.”
“Yeah, well you should see her!”
Jake sighed as I shrugged off his attempt to support me while I walked.
“Where were you, anyway? Here I am, attempting to whoop some scrawny girl’s ass and you’re chatting with Spike on the phone. Where’s your sense of duty? You’re supposed to back up your partner.”
Jake’s expression darkened. “I hope you’re kidding. If somebody hadn’t seen you running and told Marygrace, I’d still be looking for you. I had no idea you’d get into something so fast.”
“Yes, I was kidding. What did Spike want?”
“Among other things, she called to tell me the coroner was about to send Bitsy’s body to the state forensic lab for identification when the feds stepped in and claimed it.”
“How’d they explain that?”
“They told the coroner she was married to a member of the diplomatic corps and that he’d requested it.”
“Which was bullshit, right?”
Jake nodded. “Yep. Guess there’s no doubt about it. She was still on the payroll.”
We’d reached the front entrance to the building, and Marygrace was waiting for us. When she caught sight of me, her expression ran the gamut from surprised to horrified to professionally neutral. I figured I had to look pretty scary to make her pull out her job face.
“Looks like you need a little doctoring,” she said. “Our physician’s assistant, Stephanie, can take a look at you.”
“I’m fine. I just got a little scraped up, that’s all.”
Marygrace raised an eyebrow. “Well, I just thought you might not want to scare the residents. Come on. Let her patch you up. Besides, I figured you’d want to talk to her anyway. She’s the one who usually looks after the residents in place of the doctor.”
I nodded, wishing my head didn’t hurt so much. “You don’t have a doctor on staff?”
Marygrace was scuttling down the hallway but the mention of expense and doctors made her pause momentarily. “With Medicaid paying? Hell, places like this don’t get real doctors. We get their P.A. and if it’s really bad, we might see them at the end of the day, when they’re already too tired and could care less about whether one old person lives or dies.” She apparently thought better of this because she quickly tacked on a disclaimer. “Not all of them are sharks. I’m just saying most of them are.”
“The doc here, is he a shark?”
“No comment,” she answered grimly. “But I like Stephanie.”
“Was she the one who initially treated Baby today?”
Marygrace shook her head. “Nope. She was seeing patients in Dr. Alonzo’s office when Baby got hurt. The charge nurse sent her on to the hospital and she’s still there. But Stephanie saw her after she reported someone had been in her room two days ago.”
Jake was walking along with us, the frown on his face deepening with every step. When Marygrace stopped to speak to a resident, I took him aside. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m just trying to put this all together. I mean, why go out a bathroom window and not a door?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Marygrace said, rejoining us and shamelessly eavesdropping. “All the doors are locked. You can only get out by punching in the code on the keypad that’s located next to each door.”
“And don’t all the employees have the code?”
“Sure,” Marygrace said, grinning. “Unless you change it and don’t tell them. That’s what I did as soon as I got back here. I wanted to control who was coming and going until the police got here. The front door was the only door with open access and I had the front desk clerk writing down the names of everyone who arrived or departed.”
“So, why didn’t she just walk out the front door?”
“Look at him!” Marygrace said, gesturing to Jake. “He’s got cop written all over him! He’s big. He’s got a bulge under his suit coat and he was outside talking on the cell phone right in front of the building. I’d take the window too, if I’d been in her shoes.”
I nodded, making a mental note to get the name of the staffing agency the nursing home used to hire Aida. They’d be reluctant to talk, if not downright uncooperative, fearing a lawsuit from the nursing home and citing confidentiality, but we could still try.
A tall woman with close-cropped wiry black hair stood in front of the North Hall nurses’ station, writing in a thick chart. She wore a spotless white lab coat, open to reveal a downright sexy pink knit top that crisscrossed her ample chest and highlighted the rich mocha color of her skin. As we approached, she looked up, took one look at my face and turned away from her paperwork.
“You don’t have enough to do, Marygrace, you gotta go gathering people up from the parking lot for me to see?”
Marygrace went off into one of her long, rapid-fire explanations punctuated with requests for medical attention and information. Within moments I was sitting in a chair in the conference room wincing as Stephanie dabbed Betadine on the scrape above my eye and Jake peppered her with questions about Baby Blankenship.
“Without Baby or her P.O.A. signing a release, I can’t talk to you about her condition or any treatment I may or may not have provided. As I understand it, you
