“There’s something weird going on around this hospital,” Noddie told me. “Last week, when I found one of my patients dead, I totally freaked out. Mr. Harris was frisky. He was getting ready to go home, not die. Cardiac arrest? Far as I know, there was nothing wrong with his heart.”
“You found that suspicious?”
“That and the fact that when I found him dead, he had coins on his eyes.”
That threw me for a loop.
“Coins? What kind of coins?” I asked.
“Well, they look like coins, but they’re buttons, like from a jacket or a blazer. They have a raised pattern—what do you call that?”
“Embossed?”
“That’s it. They were embossed with a medical symbol—snakes winding up a pole with wings at the top.”
“You’re talking about a caduceus?”
“That’s right. A caduceus.”
I felt like I’d dropped through an open manhole, and was still falling.
Markers had been placed on the eyes of a dead patient.
How could that be anything but the signature of a killer?
“This is bad, isn’t it?” said Noddie, taking in the shock on my face. “There’s more.”
She homed in on me with her big oval eyes, as if she’d been pent up for a long while, and now she needed to talk.
“First time, maybe six months ago, I found these things on another dead patient’s eyes,” she said. “I thought, coins to pay the ferryman, something creepy like that.
“But when I found Mr. Harris, I honestly got the screaming-jeebies. And I got mad. I liked that old guy and he liked me and those things on his eyes? Uh-uh. It stunk like old cheese. Something is not right here, Lieutenant.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked the nurse, who was nice but didn’t strike me as the sharpest blade in the shed.
“I reported it to my supervisor, and she said we would take it to Mr. Whiteley. He’s the CEO of the hospital.”
My heart was pounding, booming in my ears. How had the hospital kept something this bizarre, this sinister, under wraps for so long?
“I’d like you to swear out a complaint,” I said to Noddie, but the young woman pulled away from me, backed up against the car door.
“You’ve gotta keep me out of this,” she said. “I can’t swear out anything. Jeez. I need my job. I’m raising two small kids alone. . . .”
“I hear you,” I said. “I’ll be as discreet as I can. Did you talk with the CEO?”
“Yeah. He was real stiff with me,” the young woman said, shaking her head at the memory.
“Said the coins were someone’s idea of a joke, and that if I blabbed, it could cost the hospital plenty—and that would mean cutbacks. He was making a threat.
“So I dropped it,” she said. “What else could I do? Now I hear talk, that other people have found these things and just go about their business. Months go by and nothing happens.
“Then bing, bing, bing. Dead patients one after another with coins on their eyes.”
“How many patients, Noddie? How many?”
“I don’t know. See these goose bumps? I’m freaking out all over again,” the nurse said, holding out her arm for me to see. “I mean, if it’s just a joke, like Mr. Whiteley said, what’s the punch line? ’Cause I just don’t get it.”
Chapter 67