“I was going to stop by to see Bette tomorrow. I’m glad she’s home.” Jamie hesitated. He’d been so busy, she hadn’t been able to see him. “Can you come over for dinner?” she asked, certain he couldn’t, still wanting him to. “Nothing fancy. Spaghetti.”
“Emma still on her pasta kick?” She could hear him smiling.
“Never off it.” She still hadn’t been able to have an in-depth conversation with him about Emma’s one-time boyfriend, though she had mentioned the pasta.
“I’ll see what I can do. I just finished with the Winkelmans. I want to stop by Glen Gen to pick up a copy of a security tape from the night Dr. Metcalf was killed. We had a copy, but it was degraded. Hard to see. Luckily, the hospital saved the original. I want to go check it out.”
“Come when you can,” she said.
As soon as they were off the phone, she ran upstairs into her mom’s bedroom and changed into a fresh shirt and pants, then hurried to the bathroom to check her appearance. When she returned downstairs, Emma said, “Is Cooper moving in with us?”
“No.”
She looked scared. “You’re moving in with him.”
“No,” Jamie stated more firmly. “We’re dating. That’s all.”
“And having sex,” she said seriously.
Jamie rolled her eyes.
Harley drawled, “That’s more than dating. That’s a relationship.”
“And it’s personal,” Emma added.
“The two of you . . .” Jamie muttered.
“Three of us,” Emma corrected. “Right, Duchess?”
The dog barked happily.
“Are you moving into Mom’s room?” Emma asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Yes, probably.”
“Then Cooper can come and stay.”
Jamie let that one go by. There was no arguing with Emma when she got on a subject. “Help me get this spaghetti ready,” she said. “Emma, I’m putting you in charge of the garlic bread.” She plucked a spreader from the knife caddy, but Emma shied away. “It’s not a knife,” Jamie said. “Not the same kind. It’s rounded on the end.”
Reluctantly, she took it up and began the task of buttering the slices that Jamie had already cut from the loaf of French bread.
* * *
Cooper checked his watch. He should’ve put Jamie off. He wasn’t sure he had enough time to check out the tape and get to her house by the time she liked to serve dinner for Emma and Harley.
He’d parked in the hospital lot where Dr. Alain Metcalf had the last night of his life. From the file, Cooper knew that Metcalf had put in a late shift and headed out to his car at around one a.m. An unknown assailant had come up behind him as he was getting into his car and smashed what had been described by the detective who’d seen the video as a heavy concrete block of some kind in his head. The killer had then dashed into the line of trees behind the parking lot, taking the block with him, to an access road below, where it was assumed he’d left his own vehicle. A bottle of unlabeled painkillers was found in Metcalf ’s Mercedes, and it was theorized he’d been selling them and had run afoul of one of his clients. That theory hadn’t held up, though. No other evidence of his being a so-called “pill doctor” had emerged.
Cooper mounted the concrete steps to the walkway that led to the hospital. He walked through an open breezeway to reach the front of the building from the back parking lot where Metcalf had preferred to leave his car.
Inside, he was directed to the security offices, where the man in charge, Kyle Johnson, was waiting for him. He set Cooper up in front of a screen and played the tape. Cooper watched as Metcalf walked to his car from the hospital, blithely unaware of what was in store for him as he hit the remote. The vehicle’s lights flashed and he walked to the driver’s side, reaching for the door handle. Suddenly, a person dressed all in black appeared. Before Metcalf could do more than make a half turn, the person hefted the heavy block and slammed it down on his head. He went down in a heap. The killer then bent over Metcalf, maybe checking his pulse. Satisfied, the killer headed through the trees, concrete block in hand, and disappeared.
Cooper watched the tape three times, looking for anything he might have missed, but though the tape was original, the grainy black-and-white of the security cameras made it difficult to see. The murder weapon looked like a cinder block in a kind of daisy pattern.
“Could you make me a copy? I’d like to try to refine it,” he said to Kyle.
“That is a copy, sir. I made it before you came. You’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you. Were you here when Dr. Metcalf worked at the hospital?” Cooper asked, sizing Kyle up to be somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you know him?”
Johnson hesitated. “I knew of him.”
“What did you know?” Cooper asked curiously. It was clear the man was reluctant to say anything.
“He was considered an excellent orthopedic surgeon.”
Cooper nodded. “I got that from the file. Anything else?”
“He was . . . always on the make. I never wanted to besmirch the man’s reputation after he was dead, but that’s just a fact. Some of the younger women found it hard to keep him at arm’s length. If he were around today, I don’t think he’d be able to get away with half of what he did fifteen years ago. He flirted with my daughter when she was a teen. Made her and me uncomfortable. I didn’t like him much.”
“None of that was in the report.”
He shrugged. “We all thought he crossed the wrong guy over drugs. It’s not a crime to come on too strong.”
Cooper rolled that around in his head as he drove to Jamie’s. Metcalf had been at the charity function with William and Nadine Ryerson and had taken Nadine home. He had a penchant for young women, flirted with teenagers. What if
