was being paged, as he was not in his office.
In a moment, a woman in a white coat stepped up to them. “Officer Stonecoat, Dr. Sanger, I presume?” she said.
“We've been waiting twenty minutes to see Dr. Wash-burn,” fumed Lucas. “Is he or is he not in?”
“I am Dr. Sterling Washburn. How can I help you?”
“You?” asked Lucas, surprised, but pleasantly, staring at the lovely green-eyed, raven-haired woman. “I mean, your specialty is?”
Meredyth wanted to both hit him and apologize for him, but she held her tongue instead. She introduced Lucas and herself to the doctor.
“My specialty is heart surgery. I have a private practice, which is lucrative, and I give as much time as possible to the hospital here,” she answered Lucas's question and then some. “How may I be of assistance to you?”
Meredyth jumped in. “We understand you were Judge Charles Mootry's physician?”
“I had that dubious pleasure, yes.”
“Dubious, you say?”
“Charles hardly took my advice, but he and I enjoyed a long friendship, and his health was deteriorating along with his mind. Toward the end, he thought he could put his hands all over me… It was, or had become, a distinctly uncomfortable position for me, but I owed him a great deal.”
“You owed him? Money, you mean?”
“He supported me through school. He was quite the gentleman about it, until recently, as I've said. It started with cute little old man gestures and remarks but had escalated to, 'You owe me, this, Sterling.'“
“And did you feel obligated to him?”
“I did, of course…”
Lucas asked, “Since Texas Christian days?”
“I wasn't a full-time student there; I was just picking up some credits, still in high school at the time. I went to Tulane in New Orleans. Charles made it possible. I knew I wanted to be a physician, and I wanted a head start. Charles… Charles encouraged me, became a big brother to me. He supported me, as I said and as I've told others. There was never any secret about our relationship. I did love Charles, just not what he'd become.”
“So, your friendship began with a monetary favor?”
“No, no… We met at a mutual friend's party. It wasn't until years later, when he heard about my situation, that he came to me with the idea of helping me out.”
“And you returned the favor over the years by seeing to his medical needs?” asked Lucas.
“Yes, you could say that, although he and I were more like brother and sister than… than patient and doctor. He seldom listened to my directions, but he wouldn't pay another doctor, he always said. He was a… a funny man, a wonderful man.”
“Were you seeing to his pill supply, doctor?” Meredyth asked.
She looked around to be certain no one was listening. “I was… But I only supplied him with what he needed to stay sharp. That's all.”
Lucas replied, “You must have been devastated to learn of his death.”
“I was. I had just left him hours before,” she said. “I feared he might've overdosed when I first heard the news he was dead. Then, as it turns out, he was… murdered. I could hardly believe it. But when I spoke to the police, I told them who I suspected and why.”
“You saw him the night of his death?”
“Who did you suspect?” Meredyth asked at the same time.
She nodded to Lucas. “I told all this to the detectives investigating the case.”
Lucas bit his lower lip and asked, “Did you share drinks or wine with the judge that night before leaving him?”
“Why, yes, I did. He had just returned from a trip to Dallas-Fort Worth where he'd helped to raise a half- million dollars for AIDS research, and he felt like celebrating, or so he said. He was also exhausted. I prescribed a mild sedative and saw to it that he went to bed. He wasn't so old as he appeared, but he had a crippling arthritic condition, and he'd gone prematurely gray, and he had problems remembering things. His days on the bench, he truly missed. He was a lovely man, really…”
“So, who did you immediately suspect and why?” Meredyth asked point-blank.
“Over the past several years, some priest with some weird order was coming around, pretending to be Charles's spiritual advisor.”
“Does this priest have a name?”
“Aguilar. Don't ask me where he lives or where his church is. I don't know, but he was some strange person. I only met him a few times, usually leaving Charles's house. I never quite trusted him.”
Outside the hospital, Meredyth asked Lucas, “Well? Have you had enough? It appears Mootry's friends were devoted to him.”
“Let's go see the priest.”
While Lucas drove, she answered his questions.
“What do we know about the three people Randy came up with for us?”
“Not much. The lawyer likes to dive.”
“Underwater diving, deep-sea diving?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Might mean Dalton's also into spear guns?”
“That sounds like reaching to me, Lucas. But he's also into big-game hunting in Utah, Wyoming, and, get this, South Dakota and North Dakota, as well as Canada.”
“Which may well mean he's had some experience with crossbows?”
“It doesn't say so, but yes… precisely. He is a collector.”
“Collector of what?”
“Weapons.”
“Really?”
“As for Dr. Sterling Washburn… she-how did Randy miss this? — she's a well-respected surgeon with oodles of hours of community service.”
“Naturally,” replied Lucas, skepticism infiltrating each syllable.
“You know what you are, Stonecoat?” she asked. “You're a biased snob.”
“Me, biased? Me, a snob?”
“Bias, prejudice, call it what you like, but you're a snob toward snobs.”
“Oh, that's clever and funny.”
“You think because someone's well-to-do, because someone's successful, and socially successful, at that, then there's something inherently wrong with her.”
“Bingo.”
“God, you can be irritating.”
He ignored her ire. “And the priest?”
“Father Aguilar, according to what Randy's come up with, is, or was, Judge Charles Mootry's best friend and confidant.”
“Sounds to me like they all were his best friend and confidant.”
“Father Aguilar, however, was given heaping donations by the judge, and a good deal of the estate went to Aguilar's church, a monastic church in an older section of the city, the Third Order of the Sacred Sepulcher of Houston, Texas.”
“The Third Order of what?”
“The Sacred Sepulcher.”
“Got it, I think…”
“I don't imagine, nor can you, that Mootry was killed for the sake of the church.”
“If these assassins are stamping out vampires and evil, and can take the vampire's financial holdings, too, why not?”
“I wonder if the Vatican or the FBI knows about this Sepulcher church,” said Lucas.
