He smiled his broad smile again, but he would not look at me. “Don’t hesitate to call if there’s anything further I can do.”
It nagged at me as I followed the long, empty corridor to the lobby, but my instinct was not to ask about Frankie or even mention the name. Backhall. Patients who are psychotic or suffering the DTs. Al Hunt had mentioned interviewing patients confined to the forensic unit. Was this a figment of his imagination or confusion? There was no forensic unit at Valhalla. Yet there very well may have been someone named Frankie locked up on Backhall. Maybe Frankie had improved and was later moved to a different ward while Al was a patient at Valhalla? Maybe Frankie had imagined he had murdered his mother, or maybe he had wished he could?
Frankie beat his mother to death with a stick of firewood. The killer beat Gary Harper to death with a segment of metal pipe.
By the time I got to my office it was dark out and the custodians had come and gone.
Seating myself at my desk, I swiveled around to face the computer terminal. After several commands, the amber screen was before me, and moments later I was staring at Jim Barnes’s case.
Nine years ago on April twenty-first, he had been in a single-car accident in Albemarle County, the cause of death “closed head injuries.”
His blood alcohol was .18, almost twice the legal limit, and he had nortriptyline and amitriptyline on board. Jim Barnes was a man with a problem.
In the computer analyst’s office down the hall, the archaic, boxy microfilm machine sat squarely on a back table like a Buddha. My audiovisual skills have never been extraordinary. After an impatient search through the film library, I found the roll I was looking for and somehow managed to thread it properly into the machine. With lights out, I watched an endless stream of fuzzy black-on-white print flow by. My eyes were beginning to ache by the time I found the case. Film quietly creaked as I worked a knob and centered the handwritten police report on the screen. At approximately ten forty-five on a Friday night, Barnes’s 1973 BMW was traveling east on 1-64 at a high rate of speed.
When his right wheel left the pavement, he overcorrected, hit the median strip, and became airborne. Advancing the film, I found the medical examiner’s initial report of investigation. In the comments section a Dr. Brown had written that the decedent was fired that afternoon from Valhalla Hospital, where he had been employed as a social worker. When he left Valhalla at approximately five P.M. that day, he was noted to be extremely agitated and angry. Barnes was unmarried when he died, and he was only thirty-one years old.
There were two witnesses listed on the medical examiner’s report, individuals Dr. Brown must have interviewed. One was Dr. Masterson, the other an employee at the hospital named Miss Jeanie Sample.
Sometimes working a homicide case is like being lost. Whatever street seems even remotely promising, you follow it. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a back road will eventually steer you toward the main drag. How could a therapist dead nine years have anything to do with the recent murders of Beryl Madison and Gary Harper? Yet I felt there was something, a link.
I was not looking forward to quizzing Dr. Masterson’s staff, and was willing to bet he would already have warned those who counted that if I called, they were to be polite–and silent. The next morning, Saturday, I continued to let my subconscious work on this problem while I rang up Johns Hopkins, hoping Dr. Ismail might be in. He was, and he confirmed my theory. Samples derived from Sterling Harper’s gastric contents and blood showed she had ingested levomethorphan shortly before death, her level eight milligrams per liter of blood, which was too high to be either survivable or accidental. She had taken her own life, and had done so in a manner that under ordinary circumstances would have gone undetected.
“Did she know that dextromethorphan and levomethorphan both come up as dextromethorphan in routine tox tests?” I asked Dr. Ismail.