Web of Deceit by Katherine Howell Read Free Book Online Page B

Murray said, rolling his eyes at Ella. ‘As I said, there was a man –’
    ‘Pushing amongst a panicked crowed, yes, I heard you,’ Langley said. ‘Get the hospital’s diagnosis then do the notification.Clock’s ticking.’ The line went dead.
    ‘You’d think he was paying for the overtime himself,’ Ella said.
    She started the engine and watched the side mirror for a gap in the stream of headlights. Acting head of homicide Brad Langley was a numbers man: overtime, cases solved, man hours per case, detectives per shift. The fewer homicides that rolled down the chute, the more time detectiveshad to clear up older cases. He had every spare person digging into old files and re-interviewing key witnesses, chasing up evidence, following up whatever wasn’t followed up before. The more cases he could slam the door on, the better his performance rating and the higher on the ladder he could climb. She missed her friend and usual boss, Dennis Orchard, currently acting up in counter-terrorism.He listened, and he cared.
    At RPA, she parked in the police bay and they walked into the Emergency Department. Ella glanced around but couldn’t see Callum.
    Murray showed his badge to a young dark-haired nurse. ‘We’re here about a patient from earlier today, Marko Meixner.’
    ‘Him,’ the nurse said. ‘I triaged him and put him out in the waiting room. He chose not to stay and leftat some point in the next couple of hours. Why? What’s he done?’
    ‘Didn’t he even see a doctor?’ Murray asked.
    ‘Look around,’ the nurse said. ‘We’re overflowing with serious medical and trauma cases. A guy who runs his car into a pole and presents uninjured but perhaps depressed doesn’t automatically get a bed and someone to hold his hand.’
    ‘So he didn’t see a doctor,’ Ella saidflatly. ‘Did anyone else speak to him, other than you?’
    ‘I guess reception out the front talked to him when they got his details. This way.’ The nurse led them down a corridor. ‘So what’d he do?’
    ‘He’s dead,’ Ella said. ‘Thanks for your help.’
    They left her standing there and pushed through the double doors into the busy waiting area. Children wailed and parents shushed and rocked,teenagers huddled, one vomiting into a bucket, old people sighed and shifted on the hard plastic seats. Ella followed Murray to the desk, where he put his badge up to the security screen.
    ‘We need to speak to the staff member who talked to Marko Meixner,’ he said.
    The grey-haired woman in her fifties frowned at her computer screen as she scrolled down with the mouse. ‘That was me.’
    Behind her, two other women worked at computers and a man talked on the phone. In the waiting room crowd, a baby’s scream reached boiling point.
    ‘Is there somewhere…?’ Ella said.
    The woman gestured for them to head through another door, where she met them in the corridor. Once the door closed most of the noise was shut out.
    ‘I don’t know how much I can tell you,’ shesaid.
    Ella got out her notebook. ‘What did you and he talk about?’
    ‘He said he was scared, that somebody was coming to get him.’
    ‘Did he tell you that person’s name?’
    ‘No.’ She twisted the blue lanyard that hung around her neck, making her ID card swing on its end. Ella saw that her name was Barbara Martin, her designation clerk level 3. ‘He was very frightened though.To the point of distraction. I had to ask him a couple of times to tell me his address and next-of-kin particulars.’
    ‘Which are what?’
    ‘I’ll just grab them.’ She went back into the office area, then returned with a slim file. ‘His date of birth’s 12 August, he’s thirty-five years old, he lives at 13 Helen Street in North Sydney, and his next of kin’s his wife, Carla. He said he takesno medication and has no medical history. He said he’d never been to this hospital before, and when I put him into the system I saw that was right.’
    It was the same wrong information