Chapter 52

Fiona Hendsbee called in the morning from her car, on the way home from working a night shift.
Rawle picked up the cordless and called upstairs as soon as he heard Fiona’s voice on the other end.
“-Kelloway!”
He was in the middle of trying to get Athan to sit on the potty before he crapped his pants. He yanked off his diaper and as soon as he did, a ball of crap the size of a golfball came tumbling out, landing on the bathroom floor.
Smack
“Ooo-ray!” Athan cheered. Rawle set him on the potty seat anyway.
“-Rawle!” Fiona was still talking in his ear. “I have to talk to you! Don’t pass me over to Kelloway.”
“Kelloway!” Rawle called upstairs again, not hearing.
“No! I said don’t pass me… I have to talk to you.”
Rawle’s heart began to pound. She wants to talk to me? Does she like me?
He felt an excitement blossom in his underpants. He tried to sound casual. “What’s up?”
Athan patted his knees and sang a gibberish version of Twinkle, twinkle little star as Rawle tried to pick up the ball of shit from the floor with a baby wipe.
“What’s going on?” He asked again.
“I’ve been talking to people at the hospital- We’ve been talking, all of us nurses. We figured out who did it.” She spoke in an excited, conspiratorial whisper. “We know who poisoned Kelloway!”
Rawle felt the blood rush fromhis crotch back up to his ears.
He covered the phone with his palm and called upstairs again. “Kell-o-way! I have to go out. For work. You have to get up, now.”
He heard her spring out of bed with a thump on the ceiling.
“-Fiona. Meet me at Timmy’s in five minutes.”
He hung and rushed to get Athan dressed and set up in front of some cartoons with a drink of apple juice, then he let Porkbutt out as soon as Kelloway came downstairs.
The dog had apparently devoured either a black sock or pair of black underwear at some point through the night and was now struggling to pass the fabric in the backyard.
The dog crouched and squatted and trotted around the yard for almost five full minutes, trailing a second tail of feces-coated black cotton behind him.
Hesus, help me!
“Will you hurry up!”
Finally, the dog scampered back inside. Rawle tore the Golf downtown, trembling, he was so excited. He was dying to know what Fiona and the rest of the Intensive Care detective squad had figured out, and how. He was a reportere and he hadn’t figured out anything.
When he got to Timmy’s, it was crowded but a very pregnant Fiona Hendsbee had managed to secure an empty two-person table in the back. She was having coffee and a 20-pack of Timbits, by a window facing the parking lot. She looked like she just got off the night shift.
He joined her at the table without ordering anything.
“What d’you find out?” He didn’t bother saying hello.
Fiona started speaking rapidly, with her mouth stuffed full of donut batter.
“We found something…. Dr. Flewelling…” She swallowed her mouthful. “We interrogated every staff member we could stop in the halls. We figure the poison had to be put in the mouthwash the same day Kelloway got poisoned, or the night before, because she used her mouthwash the day shift before that.”
“Yeah?”
“So, it must have happened sometime between Tuesday night at eight p.m. and Wednesday at 8:55 p.m. But, it was probably put in sometime before she came to work that morning. So, it was probably put in during the Tuesday night nightshift. That’s our best estimated time. Tuesday night.”
“Okay.”
“We got a list of all employees who used their passcards in the hospital Tuesday night from Roger Hickey in security. You need to use your card to enter the parking lot and enter rooms like the med room. So we have a list of hundreds of staff who worked that night. Then an AO told us yesterday that Dr. Flewelling had his computer password used without his permission Thursday during the nightshift. His password was used to access Kelloway’s chart. The day after the poisoning.”
She seemed to be saying something really great, but Rawle wasn’t quite following.
“The day after the poisoning, what…?”
Fiona leaned up in her chair, where she had been slowly sinking further and further down because of her pregnant belly and it’s effect on her centre of gravity.
“You’re not allowed to access someone’s chart if they’re not your patient. It’s illegal to look at someone’s medical record. It’s private, even if you’re a doctor. Not unless she’s your patient. Anyways, it’s hospital policy that you not look at other records and it’s something they’re enforcing now, with the computerized records on MEDITECH, because they can audit who looked at them, based on passwords. They know exactly who accessed what record when, and they cross check that with who had who as a patient, automatically. Some doctor’s password was used to pull Kelloway’s chart, but he wasn’t her doctor. The IT guys did an audit and found the unauthorized access.They reported it to Lise, the AO, and she went and asked the doctor to explain it-”
“OK,” Rawle said, still not understanding what she was getting at.
“But the doctor denied doing it. He said he never accessed Kelloway’s chart and it was accessed at three in the morning, when Dr. Flewelling was home in bed, so it couldn’t have been him. The IT guys figured someone must have stole the doctor’s code, or maybe Dr. Flewelling forgot to log off his computer.” Fiona could see she was losing him.
“Just listen. Only three people were working in the area where the computer was accessed. The computer was in a MEDITECH training room in the basement and everything down there is closed at night, the cafeteria, labs, ultrasound, stores, clinics. Everything except laundry. The only people in the basement at three a.m. were two laundry guys and one security guard who would have walked through on rounds-”
There was something nagging at Rawle. He interrupted: “-Just ‘cause somebody accessed her chart doesn’t mean they poisoned her in the first place. Maybe someone just wanted to see how she was recovering? You know how nosy people are.”
She looked at him with a hurt expression. He was crapping all over her detective work. “But it’s a clue,” she said in her mousy voice. “It’s a good clue. Think about it. Someone went in and accessed her medical record. A hospital employee. We already know it was a hospital employee that poisoned her. It makes sense that they might go in and check to see how much damage they did. Maybe they got nervous. They wouldn’t want to be asking all kinds of people how she’s doing ‘cause that would make them look suspicious.”
“Yeah… that makes sense,” Rawle said, thinking about it and staring down at the shiny table.
“So they used a doctor’s code, ‘cause they think no one will notice a doctor pulling a chart. They look at the chart and see what effect they had and how she’s recovering. The doctor’s own treatment notes and everything would be there.”
It did kind of make sense, Rawle supposed. “So, wouldn’t a security guard know that they do these computer audits?”
“That’s why he didn’t use his own passcode for the computer. That’s why he used a doctor’s code.”
Maybe she was on to something. Maybe this was how crimes got solved in real life, by following up on the tiniest-seeming lead.
“Okay. I accept this, for now. It’s a theory,” Rawle said, looking up at his wife’s friend. She was beaming.
“It’s a theory.” She took another Timbit out of the box and continued speaking holding the ball of fried batter in her hand. “The IT guys roughly narrowed it down to three people who could have accessed the chart that night. Two laundry guys and one security. Then we nurses looked at which of those three suspects worked Tuesday night, the night the poison was put in the mouthwash bottle.…” She looked at Rawle and smiled brightly.
“Yeah?”
“And only one of those three worked on both nights. One night to poison her and the other to look up her chart. Matthew Pye, the security guard. That’s P-Y-E.”
Rawle wrote the name down on a napkin.
“Here-“ she reached in her purse and withdrew a small photograph printed on computer paper. Rawle took it and looked it over eagerly. It looked almost like a mug shot. Is it the man who poisoned my wife? Rawle asked himself, he asked his gut.
The man in the photo looked like the Frankenstein monster, with short curly black hair and Rockabilly sideburns. He had a very square face and a huge ‘roid-user neck, with a tattoo creeping up from the obscurity of a hairy chest.
“That’s his employee ID photo,” Fiona said. “I know he did it, Rawle. I know he did it. He’s got the biggest arms I’ve ever seen.”