He strode into Emergency after parking at the far end of the lot, away from the path that an ambulance would take if it should come wailing beneath the portico outside the ER main doors.
He saw that Darla was no longer on the job. He knew that shifts changed at seven. Employees at the hospital worked twelve-hour shifts, seven to seven, which made their forty-hour weeks about three and a half days. They worked long hours when they were on the job, but it made for a good amount of time off.
He went up to the woman who was seated at one of the ER intake desks and introduced himself. He explained he was checking on a patient who’d been brought into Emergency earlier, but who had likely been admitted to a room.
“Or he could have been released,” Cooper finished. “His name’s Deke Girard.”
She was young, probably in her twenties, with a diamond-esque stud winking in the curve of her nose and short, dyed, black hair. Her name tag read Kris Dietrich. She blinked several times. “Let me call Dr. Russman. He’s on duty tonight,” she said, reaching for the phone.
“I talked to Darla when I was here. I came in with Deke Girard, and I just want to know if he’s awake yet.”
“I know.”
“Is there a problem?”
She looked away from him and spoke into the phone, explaining the situation, apparently to Dr. Russman. “He’ll be right with you,” she said, hanging up, and then made a point of ignoring him.
Cooper walked away to stand on the other side of the room. One side of the ER was the double doors that opened to the portico. Two sides were offices and hallways, and the outside wall that connected at a ninety-degree angle was a row of floor-to-ceiling windows facing the front parking lot. Beyond, he could see one of the maple-lined roads that ran through River Glen. Once upon a time there had been elm trees, but Dutch elm disease had taken its toll. Maples had been planted in the last twenty to thirty years. He remembered how small they’d been when he was in high school.
“Detective?”
He turned around to face a man with thick silver hair and bushy black eyebrows and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m Dr. Russman. Nurse Dietrich said you were asking about Mr. Girard.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Girard passed away about an hour ago. We notified his emergency contact, Ms. Hillary Campion. She may be downstairs at the morgue, if you would like to talk to her.”
Cooper was getting over the shock of Deke’s death. In the space of a few hours, he’d learned of the man who felt protective about Emma, had placed him on a list of interviewees, needing to know what connection he had with Emma and what his motivation was. Now the man was dead.
“I want to talk to her,” he told the doctor, and was directed to the nearest elevator bank, which was down the hallway that led to the main hospital, through an inner set of glass doors.
He’d just slammed his palm on the elevator button, lost in thought, when one of the cars opened, having come up from the lower floors. A woman in a stained coat and once white, now splotchy gray suede boots stepped out. Her legs were bare. Her face was clean but heavily lined, as if she’d gone through some hard living over the years. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail at her nape. There were wavy lines across her forehead, etched deeply, as if she had many worries. It was an educated guess that she might be Deke’s girlfriend.
She made eye contact with him. Cooper asked, “Hillary Campion?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m Detective Cooper Haynes. I saw Deke collapse and called the ambulance that brought him to the ER.”
“He was fine this morning,” she said, glaring at him as if it were his fault.
“He was walking to a bar when he collapsed.”
He hadn’t meant it to sound like a disparagement of his lifestyle, but that’s how she took it. “You don’t know us.” Her jaw quivered. “You didn’t know him.”
“I know. I wanted to talk to him. I—”
“What the fuck do you care? Harassing him. You . . . pigs.”
She swept by him and he caught a little of the body odor Emma objected to in Deke. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called a pig.
He called after her, “He knew Emma Whelan. Said he needed to protect her. I was a classmate of Emma’s.”
“Bully for you.” She was heading for the doors to the main parking lot.
“I just wanted to find out what he knew about Emma.”
She stopped short and looked at him with loathing. “Well, he’s dead now, so you can’t. Go back to your life and leave me alone.”
With that, she pushed the bar on the door and let herself out into the dark night. He watched her walk almost all the way to the skeletons of the maple trees.
Chapter Twenty
Jamie spent the next three days substituting for the same absent teacher, but the injured woman was able to return on Friday, her foot in a boot, releasing Jamie from duty. She took Emma to work. Cooper had returned to their house briefly on Monday night to let Emma know the man who’d caused her so much anxiety had passed away. Jamie had thanked him for coming by, and he’d accepted that, but then he’d left again. He’d alluded to the fact that he was planning on interviewing the Stillwells and said he would keep in touch, and he’d managed a couple of phone calls to check in. They’d briefly discussed parts of Emma’s case, but the circumstances weren’t great on her end; she often had listening ears around her when he called. He also couldn’t relay much about an active investigation, which meant the attack on Marissa, although Jamie also understood it was not his case. He did ask her to rethink about whether
