Hunt and Prey (Kelsey's Burden Series Book 8) by Kaylie Hunter (novels to read for beginners txt) 📕

“Well, out of the fifty-two cases, forty-six are actually cases where a patient, while high on morphine, escaped either a hospital or their caregiver. In all forty-six, the police assisted finding and returning them. One guy was so stoned, he drove his car across the beach and straight into the ocean. Another woman went shopping at the mall—nude.” Gibson laughed, tossing some files into a box. When he realized the room was quiet, he looked around. “Well, I thought it was funny.”

“You better tell Charlie about the other six cases,” Abe said. “She not a fan of jokes when she’s working a case.”

Gibson straightened in his chair and grabbed his notepad. “Right. Well, of the remaining six cases, one was a kid stealing a morphine drip from the hospital, but he didn’t get very far. The police got him to admit he was stealing it for his grandfather who was bedridden. Two other cases were hospital workers caught injecting themselves. A fourth was a girl who’d swiped a vial of morphine from a hospice doctor. She was found by police an hour later. Number five was… Let’s see here…” Gibson dug through the stack of files. “Ah, yes, number five stole morphine out of a paramedic’s hand, but the medic was ex-army and dropped the kid on his ass. By the way, the patient who needed the morphine also lived. And the sixth case was a morphine overdose in an assisted living center.”

“Yoo-hoo…” Tasha said, barreling through the door and dropping a box at my feet. “Presents. I pulled the four victim files that Natalie requested. Two were marked heart failure, but one of the two had the bruise on the back of his neck. Another one died of an arterial embolism—a blood clot—but he also had the neck bruise. The fourth died of a heart attack, but he had late-stage cancer so realistically his organs were shutting down.” Tasha pulled out a chair and sat. “Of the four, we still had two of their blood samples in storage, so I ran a preliminary screening on them. One was clean, though he didn’t have the bruise so not surprising. The other was the arterial embolism.” She looked at me expectantly, almost giddy.

“And?” I asked, waving my hand for her to get to the point.

“The blood tested positive for coagulant medication! Can you believe that? Heparin to be precise.” She bounced in her chair with excitement.

“I don’t have a medical license, Tasha. You’ll have to dumb it down for me.”

“Oh, sorry. Someone with his medical record would never have been prescribed Heparin. In fact, he was on a prescription for blood thinners, so Heparin is a major no-no.”

I pulled the files out and found the two with the neck bruises. I handed one to Natalie and the other to Gibson. “Get me everything you can on these victims. I want to know where they worked, their family background, their financial status, everything. And I want it yesterday.”

Natalie and Gibson took off out of the conference room with their assigned files.

“Why Heparin?” Chambers asked Tasha. “The morphine was odd enough, but Heparin?”

“I don’t know, but I also have these files,” Tasha said, handing me three more files that she’d been holding. “Huey and I reviewed the ME office’s suspicious death files, looking for the similar bruising. One man died of an Oxi overdose but had no history of drug use. The other two died from hyperglycemia.”

“That’s low blood sugar, right?” Chambers asked.

“Right. But neither patient was diabetic and insulin levels were through the roof.”

“Abe,” I said. “Can you search police cases for Heparin and Insulin? See if anything pops?”

Abe didn’t answer but click-clacked on his keyboard. “In the last twenty-four months, we’ve had four cases involving Heparin and twelve relating to insulin. Want me to go back further than that?”

“Take a closer look at the Heparin cases,” Quille said from the doorway. “In either case, did we log the Heparin into evidence?”

“How long have you been standing there?” I asked Quille.

“I followed Tasha in,” Quille answered, frowning over at me. “I’m not liking that you and I seem to be thinking the same thing about this case.”

Ford looked between us, then over at Abe.

Abe studied his screen as he spoke. “We logged the Heparin into evidence for two of the four cases.”

Chambers stood. “All right, clue us in. What are you two thinking?”

I looked at Quille but he was just as reluctant to speak as I was. I looked over at Abe. “Can you finish the background check Gibson’s running? I need him for another assignment.”

“Sure,” Abe said, standing and closing his laptop. “Just give me a minute to grab the evidence logs off the printer. I have a feeling you’ll be needing them.”

Abe was smart, too smart. But he was also good at keeping his mouth shut, so I wasn’t worried that he’d figured it out. He returned a few minutes later with six pages of evidence log numbers, in numeric order by box number. Next to each number was the type of drug and the quantity of the drug that was logged.

When Gibson returned, Quille closed the door. “Let me make this crystal clear, what we are about to discuss is only a theory.” He scowled around the room. “Right now, we have no evidence to support our theory, therefore, we are not required to report our findings to internal affairs—yet.”

“Internal affairs,” Ford said as his eyebrows skyrocketed upward. “You think—”

“A cop?” Gibson said, then looked over his shoulder at the door and lowered his voice. “You think the killer we’re hunting could be a cop?”

I looked at each of them, before speaking. “Where is the one place you can find both hospital grade drugs and street drugs?”

Chambers sighed, nodding to the list of evidence logs. “A police evidence vault. Shit.”