Whacked in Whitechapel (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  Whacked in Whitechapel (Cassie Coburn Mystery #3)

  Samantha Silver

  Blueberry Books Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Also by Samantha Silver

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I am at the hospital. Come now.

  I stared at the text I’d just received from Violet Despuis. She was the best detective I knew–and if you asked her she’d say the best detective in the world, which might even be accurate–but it meant she dealt with a lot of criminals. And I worried that unfortunately, this time, one might have gotten the best of her.

  The Royal London? I texted back as I grabbed my jacket and purse off the stand in the hall and made my way toward the door, promising Biscuit, my little orange cat, that I’d be back later. This was an emergency. I hoped Violet was ok; the fact that she could still text was a good sign, at least.

  Violet’s reply confirmed that was where she was, and two minutes later I was throwing myself into a cab and barking orders at the cabbie like it was a life or death situation. The fact of the matter was, for all I knew, that was what it was.

  Had Violet been shot? Maybe she’d been beaten half to death. When could it have happened? I hadn’t seen her since the previous day. Oh God, what if she’d been attacked last night and no one found her until this morning? My heart seized with panic and apprehension as the cabbie pulled up to the main hospital in London. The Royal London Hospital was in Whitechapel, a gorgeous, modern building lined with multi-colored glass panels. I didn’t notice any of that right now, though. I paid the cabbie and practically ran into the Accident and Emergency room. I made my way to the counter.

  “I’m here to see Violet Despuis,” I said to the nurse behind the desk, who raised an eyebrow at me. She was composed, but the red puffiness of her eyes gave away that she’d been crying recently. Still, I was so worried about Violet that I didn’t give it another thought.

  “I’m afraid you’re in the wrong part of the hospital,” she told me. “This is Accident and Emergency; you’ll find Violet Despuis in ward 13F.”

  I made my way to the elevator, glancing at a map of the hospital. Ward 13F: Infection, Regional HIV and Respiratory Medicine. My chest tightened. Had Violet had a health scare? The elevator felt like it was taking forever, and when it finally arrived I mashed the button for the thirteenth floor. I watched as the numbers on the screen changed slowly–far too slowly for my liking. Ten, eleven, twelve. Finally, it reached the thirteenth floor and stopped.

  As soon the doors opened I was met by a London police constable, wearing the regular uniform of a white short-sleeved shirt and a cargo vest with radio, labels and pockets. She was young, early twenties, with short brown hair and a hard mouth.

  “I’m sorry madam,” she told me, holding out her hand, palm facing toward me, stopping me from leaving the elevator. “This floor is closed.”

  “Violet told me to meet her here,” I argued, trying to look around the woman. Why was the whole floor closed?

  “Violet Despuis?” the woman asked suspiciously, and I nodded.

  “Yeah. She told me to meet her here.”

  “Come with me,” the woman ordered, spinning around on her heel and making her way into the ward. It looked like every single other hospital ward I’d ever been in, including the one on the fourth floor that I’d visited in the past. With beige walls, sterile tile floors and medical equipment lining the walls, this could have been any hospital on earth. I followed the woman past an unmanned reception desk, past the beds in ward 13F, and to a room at the back of the hall. The closer we got, the more the police presence increased. What on earth was going on?

  “Miss Despuis?” the constable asked. “I have a woman here to see you.”

  “If she has dark hair and looks panicked, then send her in,” replied a voice with a strong French accent.

  I rolled my eyes as I pushed past and entered the room Violet was in. It was small; just a supply closet. Toilet paper rolls and cleaning fluid were stacked on shelves. “Are you all right?” I asked her, looking her up and down. Her long, dark brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a mid-thigh length plaid skirt with matching socks and a black off-the-shoulder t-shirt that read Paris>London.

  “Well, I am fine,” she replied. “This woman, on the other hand, is not.” Violet motioned to the floor, where a body lay. The victim was female, and going by the fact that the back of her blonde head had been caved in, I assumed blunt force trauma was the cause of death. Still, I wasn’t worried about her right now.

  “So you’re not injured?” I asked Violet.

  “No, of course I am not,” Violet replied.

  “Then why on earth would you send me a text telling me to come to the hospital now?” I asked, my confusion turning to outrage. I’d been worried.

  “Well, because I am at the hospital, and I wanted you to come now.”

  “I was worried you’d been shot!” I practically shouted at her, noticing that every face in the room was now turned toward me. “So maybe next time you could, you know, be a little bit more detailed when you ask someone to go to the hospital to see them immediately.”

  A small smile crept up Violet’s face. “I am glad you care, Cassie. I will be honest with you, because you care. I phrased the text the way I did as a test; I wanted to see how long it would take someone to get from Kensington to the hospital if they believed it was an emergency. It took you thirty-eight minutes. I am impressed.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “Do they have a mental ward in this hospital?” I asked. “Because I’m pretty much ready to have you committed myself. And they’ll listen to me. I’m a doctor.”

  Ok, so I was almost a doctor. A few months before I was supposed to finish my residency and finally graduate from Stanford Medical School, I was hit by a car which derailed not only my degree, but also my life. Finding myself falling into a depression, I packed up my things on a whim and moved to London, where I met Violet. Sometimes I felt like medical school was a piece of cake compared to trying to figure that woman out.

  “I am aware of your medical training; that is why I called for you to come.”

  “It looks like someone bashed her in the head,” I replied.

  “Yes, thank you docteur,” Violet replied sarcastically, and I had to smile. I took a better look at the victim lying on the ground. She looked to be around five feet two inches tall, wearing comfortable shoes, and scrubs. She had on no makeup, but it was obvious even without it that she had been quite pretty in life. Her blue eyes stared lifelessly up toward the ceiling and her blonde, curly to the point of almost being frizzy hair was caked in blood from where she’d been hit. I looked around but couldn’t obviously see any murder weapon.

  “Nurse?” I asked Violet, who nodded.

  “Yes. She has worked at this hospital for three years. Anita Turner.”

  I looked the victim up and down, then sat on my haunches and looked up
at Violet. “I don’t see anything weird here,” I told her.

  “No, I did not expect you to. In fact, it is not because of her body that I need you here. I need you because you know how they work, the hospitals. I find this case interesting, and I think that it will require some more exploration in the rest of the hospital.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, looking down at the victim once more. Before Violet got a chance to answer, however, a tall man dressed in a suit with a friendly face and red hair entered the room.

  “Have you got anything for me yet, then?” Detective Chief Inspector Williams from the Metropolitan Police asked. He nodded at me and gave me a smile; this wasn’t the first time I had joined Violet on a case which he worked.

  I returned the smile as Violet answered. “It is lucky for you that you called me. There have been precisely seven members of London’s ‘finest’ in this room since I have arrived,” Violet said, using air quotes. “None of them noticed that Anita Turner was not killed in this room. She was killed elsewhere, and her body brought here. Going by the marks on the floor, I suspect her body was hidden on one of the carts used to carry towels and sheets around the hôpital.”

  “What marks on the floor?” DCI Williams and I both asked, almost in unison, as both our heads bent down toward the ground. I looked at the floor but saw nothing, except for the boots of the other police officer who was still in the room with us.

  “Those,” Violet said, moving about a foot away and pointing to an absolutely tiny, dark red spot on the floor. She then pointing to another one, about two feet away. As I looked further down the hall, I noticed that in fact, almost every two feet exactly, there was another one of those marks leading to the elevator. “They are blood, most likely from the victim. A couple of drops must have got onto the wheel of the cart as the murderer was piling her into it,” she said.

  “But then why leave Anita Turner’s body here?” DCI Williams asked.

  “I suspect that whoever was responsible for the murder was well acquainted with the hospital. I have asked the people who work here. The reception desk on this floor is often left unattended. The ward 13F is not often a full one; at the moment there are only two patients in the ward. It is an easy place to leave a body, and possibly have it be left undetected for a day or so, especially if whoever killed her then replaced the toilet paper. Luckily for us, one of the resident docteurs required a pH testing kit, and thought that perhaps this supply cupboard may have some. It did not, but they did find us a body that had been here for just over four hours.”

  “She can’t know how long the body’s been here, she’s not a doctor,” one of the cops protested, and Violet shot him a dirty look.

  “I am not a teacher either, and yet I can tell that you are a complete imbécile just from the words that come out when you open your mouth. This woman was killed just before six o’clock this morning.”

  “If England works like America, that means she was killed right around shift change.”

  Violet nodded. “Exactly. I suspect that was done on purpose. With everyone either rushing to get to work or rushing to leave work, it makes it less likely that someone would notice an errant trolley being taken somewhere it did not belong.”

  “So where was Anita Turner killed?” I asked.

  “Ah, but I have a far more interesting question to ask,” Violet replied, looking at me, her eyes flashing. “Why did the killer feel the need to move her body?”

  I shrugged. “Give them more time to get away?”

  “Perhaps. But this is a supply cupboard, it is not exactly an unused part of the hospital. I can think of at least twelve places in this hospital where I would leave a body and have it remain undiscovered for at least a week.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not exactly a normal person,” I replied.

  “Perhaps not. But our killer managed to commit a murder in London’s busiest hospital, move the body and have it remain undiscovered for a few hours, and it was simply chance that prevented it from being found much later. Why? Why not simply leave the body where the murder took place? The murderer obviously killed this woman in a secluded area, or there would have been someone to call the alarm. And to require a trolley to move the body, that required a lot more risk than simply shoving her into a corner. No, there is a reason why the body was moved here, and we must find it.”

  DCI Williams pinched the bridge of his nose. “How on earth do you propose we do that? We can’t exactly shut down the whole of the biggest hospital in London while we do a search.”

  Violet smiled. “I would never require such a crude and inefficient method. If you follow the tracks, you will find that they lead to the lift, am I correct?”

  I got up as DCI Williams, the other police officer and I all followed the tracks. Sure enough, they led straight to the elevator doors. I turned and found that Violet had followed us as well.

  “Good,” she said. “So now, it is a simple matter of elimination,” she said, pressing the elevator’s call button. A moment later the doors opened and DCI Williams, Violet and I stepped inside.

  “The rest of you, stay here with the body,” DCI Williams ordered as Violet pressed every single button on the panel, like an overly enthusiastic child. The elevator immediately dipped down to the twelfth floor, stopped, and the doors opened. Violet looked at the floor.

  “There are no marks here,” she commented, pressing the ‘close doors’ button. Repeating the process over and over, we continued to make our way down the elevator and toward the bottom floor. By the time we’d reached the lobby, I was convinced this wasn’t going to work.

  “Maybe he killed her in the elevator,” I suggested.

  “In that case we should be looking for the greatest janitor in the world,” Violet replied, “as no one would be able to clean a crime scene that fast.”

  “I know, it was a joke,” I muttered, feeling a bit of the tension in the room. However, when the elevator stopped at the first basement level, the three of us perked up. There, on the concrete floor, was another one of the marks from the cart’s wheels. We’d found it!

  Chapter 2

  The three of us piled out of the elevator, and like bloodhounds attracted to a scent, we followed the path of blood marks down the hallways below the hospital. This was a purely administrative area. We passed the entrance to the morgue, and a few other doors whose names I didn’t notice. After all, my focus was on the small blood marks that were going to lead us to the murder location. We made our way further down the hall until eventually we reached a large steel door.

  I looked up at the door and saw a large biohazard sticker, along with a large yellow sign warning that only authorized personnel were allowed inside.

  Violet tried to open the door, but, naturally, it was locked. The keypad next to the door had a red light above it.

  “I’ll go find someone to open this door,” DCI Williams said. “After all, I’m pretty sure they’ll consider us to be authorized.”

  “How long have you known me?” Violet asked, shooting DCI Williams an exasperated look before looking at the keypad. Less than ten seconds later, she punched in four numbers. The buzzer flashed green, and Violet pressed the handle and entered the room.

  “I swear, if this were the middle ages they’d burn her alive,” I heard DCI Williams mutter under his breath as the two of us followed after her. I smiled; Violet had already given me a lesson on how to get through numbered keypads a few months earlier, but it was still impressive to see her in action.

  We entered what was obviously a biology lab. Large science tables lined the room, with sinks and gas taps to hook up Bunsen burners at regular intervals. Microscopes sat on some of the tables; I recognized a centrifuge as well. An eye wash station and a body wash station at the back made it obvious that dangerous chemicals were used here occasionally.

  Violet made her way around one of the tables, and DCI Williams and I followed her. Violet stopped in front of one of the counters at the far end of the room. She sniff
ed the air carefully.

  “Do you smell that?” she asked. I sniffed as well, but shook my head. It smelled like regular air to me. From DCI Williams’ reaction, I gauged that he felt the same way.

  “There has been cleaner used here,” Violet said. She made her way toward the cupboards, opening and closing them while muttering to herself in rapid French. Finally, she found what she was looking for, and with a triumphant cry of “Aha!” pulled out three small bottles and a box of Q-tips from one of the cupboards, making her way back to where we were.

  “It is always nice to have a crime committed in a science laboratory,” she explained. “This way, we do not have to wait for equipment.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “The Kastle-Meyer test,” Violet replied. I racked my brain as the name sounded familiar; in years of medical school training I must have heard the name. Finally, it came back to me.

  “Oh! It’s a test to see if there’s blood, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Violet replied, opening one of the bottles and carefully pouring one drop onto the end of a Q-tip. “I am using phenolphthalein in order to detect the presence of hemoglobin. I am first using a drop of ethanol on the cotton bud to increase the sensitivity of my test.”

  Violet carefully swabbed the Q-tip along the floor next to the counter, then added a drop of a second fluid onto the Q-tip, and then added a drop from the third bottle soon afterwards.

  “If the sample turns pink in the next few seconds, then there is blood,” Violet declared as the three of us watched on. Sure enough, only seconds after adding the third drop, the Q-tip began to turn a shade of dark pink.

  “There,” Violet said with a smile. “You can call your men, DCI Williams. You have your primary crime scene.”

  “That test isn’t one hundred percent accurate though, is it?” I asked Violet. I was starting to remember more and more about it.

  “No, that is correct. In fact, if the killer had simply used oxygen-based bleach to clean instead of chlorine-based, then my test would have come out negative. Also it is possible for other elements to act as catalysts for the oxygenation reaction. However, combining the result of my test with what we know, I think it is safe to assume that this is, in fact, where Anita Turner was murdered.”