The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn Read Online Free PDF Page A

the driver, closed the door smartly and was gone.
    I said to Dave, “Another myth shattered.”
    Dave grinned. “You mean our boy Rick in a dirty suit?”
    “No, I mean our boy Rick jumping into the front seat of a taxi. A cabbie told me once that he could always spot easterners by the way they head for the back seat, even if they’re alone. And there’s Rick Spenser, an easterner right to the tip of his Dack’s, diving into the front seat like a stubble jumper. A mystery.”
    “A day for mysteries, my friend,” said Dave as he opened the glass door to admitting.
    The hospital smell stopped me. Memories. I had come here the morning they brought Ian’s body in. I hadn’t believed Andy.
    Dave was looking at me hard. “Jo, are you all right?”
    “No,” I said, “but I’m still functioning. Use me while you can.”
    “In that case, I’ll go find Howard and meet the press and you take care of the Lady. That’s what Andy used to call her, you know. He’d say, ‘Well, Dave, looks like we’re going to have to go to the Elstow Sports Day alone. The Lady has declined our invitation.’ ” He shook his head at the memory.“They’ve put her in the conference room. It’s just through those doors at the end of the hall. Be firm with her, Jo. Don’t let her make Andy look ridiculous. This has to be first class all the way.”
    He gave me a hug and walked to the foyer, where media people were drinking hospital coffee and checking sound systems and lights. Two men carrying hand-held TV cameras trailed him. I watched as he picked his way carefully over the tangle of cables and wires on the floor and moved a pot of pink azaleas from the reception desk to the table where Howard would be holding the press conference; then, shaking his head, put them back where he’d found them. Virgo all the way.
    Then I opened the double doors and walked down the corridor, in search of the Lady.

CHAPTER
3
    The room that they’d put Eve in was in the new wing. The corridor I walked down smelled of fresh paint, and the floor was soft with carpet. The names and titles on the doors that opened off the hall made it clear that this was where the power of the hospital, medical and administrative, went to work. When I came to the door marked Conference Room, I took a deep breath, knocked and walked in.
    The first thing I noticed was that, by anyone’s standards, the room was luxurious. During the election campaign seven years before, the other party had promised a massive program of new health-care facilities. “A hospital for every patient,” Howard Dowhanuik had scornfully called their program, but the people had bought it, and we lost the election. Now, seven years of scandals and kickbacks later, the number of hospitals in the province was exactly the same as it had been the day we left office. However, as a sop to the electorate, the government had, the winter before, begun construction on a new wing for the biggest hospital in the capital, Prairie General.
    This was their showpiece, their shining rebuttal to nagging questions about available beds and state-of-the-art medical equipment. They would use this as evidence of a promise fulfilled, but we could use it too – as an indictment of a government that starved rural hospitals but emptied out the treasury for the folks in the capital. As I stood in the door of the conference room, I filed away details: the shining oak of the conference table, the deep chairs upholstered in leather the colour of a dove’s breast, the handsome pieces of aboriginal art that blazed on the muted grey walls. Andy could get a great ten-minute speech out of this room … Then, like a blow to the temple, the correction, the change of tense – Andy could have gotten a great ten-minute speech out of this.
    Andy was dead. There wouldn’t be any more speeches. But I could do this much for him. I could take care of his wife. She was sitting at the head of the oak table. Her back was to a wall of windows