“Okay,” I said. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t want to argue.
“Oh, thanks for sending the police after me. That was fun,” she said with forced joviality.
“I’m trying to be honest with them,” I said.
She laughed. “And you think I’m not? Not even close tae true. I showed him the piece of plaster and told him where I found it. He didn’t think it was important. But, I do concede that I should have done it sooner.”
Two apologies and an admission that she’d been wrong. I needed to keep up with all this good behavior.
“Well, good.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. If the police had thought the plaster piece was important, they would have taken it from her. Probably at least.
“Right.” She looked at me a long moment, a surprise ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds and twinkling in her pretty eyes. They were also honest eyes, even if I didn’t want to believe that. “Thanks for coming tae talk tae me. I know you came because you were looking for more information too”—she held up her hand as I began to protest—“but I’m not sure what it was. About Tom?”
“I came to talk to you because I felt I’d been treated unfairly by your article. I hoped that you might clear that up in future articles.”
“I’m not sure about that. I can’t make any promises. I’ll just report the facts.”
“Without a slant?”
I’d pushed too far. She smiled, but it wasn’t as pretty as her eyes. “I’ll talk tae you later, Delaney.” She turned and abruptly walked back into the newspaper office.
“I guess that could have been worse,” I muttered to myself before I headed back to my own job.
I did pull out my phone on the way and google “Dr. Glenn.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out who’d killed Mallory Clacher.
SEVENTEEN
“Edwin, it seems so obvious. Dr. Jack Glenn has resurfaced, and he killed Mallory. He needs to be caught before he kills again,” I said.
Edwin looked up from his desk and brought his eyebrows together. “The Dr. Glenn?”
“Yes, Dr. Jack Glenn: killer, former colleague and friend of Doctors Eban, Carson, and Clacher. They were friends—good friends from what I could find.”
Between the walk and the bus ride back to the bookshop, I’d had enough time to research on my phone. I’d learned exactly who Dr. Glenn was, and there was no doubt in my mind that he’d been Mallory’s killer. It made so much sense. I moved to the chair in Edwin’s office as he closed the book he’d been looking at. In fact, there were a few short stacks of books on his desk. Normally, that was something that would interest me, because he so rarely worked in his own office. Even one stack of books would be curious. But not today.
“You mean, it’s obvious Glenn was the killer like it seemed so obvious that Dr. Eban was the killer?” he said.
“I know what you’re saying. But Dr. Glenn is a proven killer! And the police are curious about him. They must have found something.”
Edwin thought a moment. “He went missing, is that correct?”
“Yes! Here, let me just read a few things to you.” I fired up my phone again and went to one of the Web pages I’d found. “Dr. Jack Glenn arrived at the medical school in 1998. He’d come to the school with all the right paperwork that proved he was a highly educated and well-trained surgeon. All that later proved to be false. He was not educated, trained, or experienced as a doctor of any kind.”
“Of course, ‘Dr. Glenn’ became what he was called even after it was proved that he wasn’t truly one,” Edwin said.
I nodded and then continued. “He worked as a surgeon, researcher, and professor at the university until 2005, when one of his patients died as the result of a botched appendectomy.” I paused and cleared my throat, remembering that Joshua and I had just been speaking about the miracle appendectomy procedures had been. “Things became more mysterious when the victim’s body disappeared from the hospital’s morgue, only to be found in the medical school’s anatomy morgue. Dr. Glenn claimed he hadn’t been the one who moved the body from one morgue to the other, but no one else seemed to have been near the right place at the right time to do such a thing.”
“It’s coming back tae me,” Edwin said. “Go on.”
“In the subsequent two weeks, two more patients died in Dr. Glenn’s surgery, and his hospital privileges were suspended. He disappeared three days after the imposed suspension and didn’t surface again until his wife called the police from a phone in Inverness.
“The botched surgeries had been kept under wraps pending investigations, so she hadn’t known about them when they left Edinburgh. Everything came to light when, while having her breakfast one morning, she read a small article in the Scotsman stating that the police and the university officials were searching for Dr. Glenn, who had gone missing shortly after three people had suspiciously died at his hand. It was thought she didn’t have a clue regarding what her husband had been up to, or why they had to leave Edinburgh so quickly, but that was never confirmed.”
“Oh, Delaney, she called Dr. Eban, didn’t she?” Edwin interjected.
“Yes! It says it right here. Her first call was to Dr. Bryon Eban, someone she knew as a respected colleague and a friend to her husband. He told her to stay where she was, and that he would meet them in Inverness. But she’d felt uncomfortable waiting and then placed a call to the local police, who, apparently, didn’t believe her when she’d told them who she and her husband were.
“Dr. Glenn overheard the call and then proceeded to suffocate her with a
