Evans were on C-Level, conducting tests. Mrs. Sigsby told them to drop what they were doing and send their subjects back to residence. Both doctors were needed in the West Wing. Hendricks, who could be extremely irritating even at the best of times, wanted to know why. Mrs. Sigsby told him to shut up and come.
Stackhouse arrived first. The doctors were right behind him.
“Jim,” Stackhouse said to Evans, after he had taken in the situation. “Lift her. Get me some slack in that rope.”
Evans put his arms around the dead woman’s waist—for a moment it almost looked as if they were dancing—and lifted her. Stackhouse began picking at the knot under her jaw.
“Hurry up,” Evans said. “She’s got a load in her drawers.”
“I’m sure you’ve smelled worse,” Stackhouse said. “Almost got it . . . wait . . . okay, here we go.”
He lifted the noose over the dead woman’s head (swearing under his breath when one of her arms flopped chummily down on the nape of his neck) and carried her to the mattress. The noose had left a blackish-purple brand on her neck. The four of them regarded her without speaking. At six-three, Trevor Stackhouse was tall, but Hendricks overtopped him by at least four inches. Standing between them, Mrs. Sigsby looked elfin.
Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby, eyebrows raised. She looked back without speaking.
On the table beside the bed was a brown pill bottle. Dr. Hendricks picked it up and rattled it. “Oxy. Forty milligrams. Not the highest dosage, but very high, just the same. The ’scrip is for ninety tablets, and there are only three left. I’m assuming we won’t do an autopsy—”
You got that right, Stackhouse thought.
“—but if one were to be performed, I believe we’d find she took most of them before putting the rope around her neck.”
“Which would have been enough to kill her in any case,” Evans said. “This woman can’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. It’s obvious that sciatica wasn’t her primary problem, whatever she may have said. She couldn’t have kept up with her duties for much longer no matter what, so just . . .”
“Just decided to end it,” Hendricks finished.
Stackhouse was looking at the message on the wall. “Hell is waiting,” he mused. “Considering what we’re doing here, some might call that a reasonable assumption.”
Not prone for vulgarity as a general rule, Mrs. Sigsby said, “Bullshit.”
Stackhouse shrugged. His bald head gleamed beneath the light fixture as if Turtle Waxed. “Outsiders is what I meant, people who don’t know the score. Doesn’t matter. What we’re seeing here is simple enough. A woman with a terminal disease decided to pull the plug.” He pointed at the wall. “After declaring her guilt. And ours.”
It made sense, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. Alvorson’s final communication to the world might have expressed guilt, but there was also something triumphant about it.
“She had a week off not very long ago,” Fred the janitor volunteered. Mrs. Sigsby hadn’t realized he was still in the room. Somebody should have dismissed him. She should have dismissed him. “She went back home to Vermont. That’s prob’ly where she got the pills.”
“Thanks,” Stackhouse said. “That’s very Sherlockian. Now don’t you have floors to buff?”
“And clean those camera housings,” Mrs. Sigsby snapped. “I asked for that to be done last week. I won’t ask again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Not a word about this, Mr. Clark.”
“No, ma’am. Course not.”
“Cremation?” Stackhouse asked when the janitor was gone.
“Yes. We’ll have a couple of the caretakers take her to the elevator while the residents are at lunch. Which will be”—Mrs. Sigsby checked her watch—“in less than an hour.”
“Is there a problem?” Stackhouse asked. “Other than keeping this from the residents, I mean? I ask because you look like there’s a problem.”
Mrs. Sigsby looked from the words printed on the bathroom tiles to the dead woman’s black face, the tongue protruding. She turned from that final raspberry to the two doctors. “I’d like you to both step out. I need to speak to Mr. Stackhouse privately.”
Hendricks and Evans exchanged a look, then left.
4
“She was your snitch. That’s your problem?”
“Our snitch, Trevor, but yes, that’s the problem. Or might be.”
A year ago—no, more like sixteen months, there had still been snow on the ground—Maureen Alvorson had requested an appointment with Mrs. Sigsby and asked for any job that might provide extra income. Mrs. Sigsby, who’d had a pet project in mind for almost a year but no clear idea of how to implement it, asked if Alvorson