The next morning, Katie woke with the urgent need to follow up on every clue immediately or at least pick up where she’d left off the night before when she had passed out at her computer. She ate some toast, packed a thermos of coffee, and left a note for Caleb.
She decided to walk to the clinic. The golden light of autumn on the changing leaves was too beautiful to rush past. The streets were deserted, as the residents were either sleeping in or at church. Postchurch activities like gardening, biking, walking, and entertaining children wouldn’t start for another several hours, so she saw no one for several blocks. Mist still hung in the air and shrouded everything in a smudged pastel watercolor fog. The cooler fall sunshine was just beginning to burn off some of the haze and made the air itself sparkle.
Katie reached the back door of the clinic, fumbling with her coffee and her keys to unlock it. She quickly entered the security code on the panel, relocked the door, and went to her office. She put her jacket on the back of her chair and set the coffee mug on her desk. A twinge of paranoia had her deciding to make a quick run through the clinic to be certain she was alone.
The hallways were dim and quiet. She glanced into each exam room, flicked on every light, and finally convinced herself she was the only one in the building.
In the records room, there was one shelving unit that contained the files for deceased patients. Emmett didn’t have to hang on to these records, but he said he would keep them as long as he had the room. Katie doubted he would still have records from forty years ago, but the man did save everything.
She had decided to look for the charts for the Rileys, Christopher’s parents. If any of them had been alive, she would have felt more like she was intruding on their privacy. But under the circumstances, she felt that she was justified. Ellen’s research into color-blindness had given Katie an idea. Mrs. Riley had died about two years earlier, and Katie found her chart easily. Flipping through the pages revealed no surprises. When she died, she had been seventy-eight and suffering from diabetes and hypertension. The two factors combined to cause a fatal heart attack.
She was less lucky with Jack Riley. His chart was nowhere to be found. Katie doubted that he’d gone to a different doctor. Maybe that was a chart that had been shredded? Katie pulled a chart at random that looked old. This patient had died in 1975, so there were charts at least forty years old in this section. She couldn’t remember when Christopher’s father had died. She thought she remembered hearing that Christopher took over the business when he was quite young.
Katie doubted that Emmett ever purged files of people who had moved away or left the practice. If he didn’t pay attention, Angie would. She looked under the Ss to see if Noah Swanson’s chart was there.
It was. A slim file showing only a few visits for illnesses and one for a broken finger. There was very little information and not even an intake history.
Katie sighed and leaned against the wall. This was hopeless. Digging through old files was not going to help her solve Ellen’s murder. She wasn’t sure at this point what would help. She slipped the file back into its spot and turned out the light. She had one foot in the hallway when she heard a noise. Someone else was in the building.
“Hello?” Emmett’s voice cracked.
Katie let out the breath she’d been holding.
“It’s me, Emmett. I’m in the records room.”
She heard his footsteps turn and head in her direction.
“Katie, what are you doing here?”
“Just catching up on some paperwork.”
“I’m glad it’s you,” Emmett said. “When the alert came through on my phone, I didn’t know whether to call the police or just come check it out myself.”
“What alert?”
“Angie added this app to my phone.” He held it up for Katie to see. “It lets me know whenever the alarm is shut off or reset.”
“I didn’t know you had that.” So much for sneaking into the office.
“She just added it last week,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea with everything going on . . .”
“You mean Nick?”
“When the alarm went off, I thought it might be him. The police released him on Friday night just like you said they would. They didn’t have enough evidence. I rushed over here to see if I could confront him and figure out a way to help him. I’m sure being arrested hasn’t helped his mental state.”
“Do you think he’s been taking the drugs for his personal use?”
“Not necessarily,” Emmett said. “I think he’s been selling some of them to finance his own habit. We found some charts that don’t seem to belong to any patient in our computer. A bill is never generated, and insurance isn’t used. Most of them are patients with back pain or some other chronic pain, and he gives them Vicodin or OxyContin. I suspect he pays them to fill the prescriptions for him, in either cash or drugs. The medications themselves aren’t expensive, but he’d need to involve others to fill them for him. He’s too well known around here to do it himself. And if he wrote narcotic scripts for himself, it would trigger an investigation by the licensing board.”
So Nick had been selling medications and probably trading prescriptions in order to get people to fill prescriptions for him. Katie wondered if that made him more of a suspect in Ellen’s murder or less. Matt’s comment to follow the money came back to her. Maybe she and Beth were wrong. What if Nick killed Ellen because she found out about his scheme?