He turned out to be Vernon Mulliner, not David Niven at all. The woman shrugged but held out an ID identifying her as Lisa Cunningham, director of patient services.
Vernon was seriously annoyed by now. His demand that I tell him what I’d been doing at the forensic wing had a real bite to it this time. I gave him a card and repeated what I’d told the guard.
Vernon didn’t bother looking at Wuchnik’s photo. “Why do you care?”
“I’m tying up loose ends on Mr. Wuchnik’s cases,” I said. “This is one of them.”
“No employee gives out information here,” Lisa Cunningham said. “Everyone signs a strict confidentiality agreement, and if they violate it in the slightest, they are terminated instantly.”
“Have you fired anyone recently?” I asked her.
“I can’t tell you that, Ms.”—she looked at my card—“Warshawski. But we all want to know why you’re interested in what goes on here at Ruhetal.”
“Miles Wuchnik was murdered last Saturday night,” I said. “Maybe it didn’t make the news out here, but he was found stabbed to death in a cemetery in Chicago.”
“Oh, yes, the vampire murder,” Cunningham murmured.
“And he was out here when a client of mine was hospitalized. She wanted to know if he was stalking her. I’m talking to the people he talked to.”
Cunningham took the photo I’d tried showing Vernon. “I never saw him around the building. Did he check in with you, Vernon?”
Mulliner glanced at it this time but shook his head.
“It’s time you left,” Eric Waxman said to me, his mustache handlebars puffing out. “We’re running a state hospital on a small budget; our staff can’t spend time with private eyes who are trying to drum up business.”
I didn’t argue; if I wanted to return, I didn’t want to make my persona completely non grata. Waxman went back inside, but Vernon and the director of patient services walked me to the main entrance.
It was time for the shift change; there was a lot of traffic in and out, and I quickly disappeared from my escort’s sight. The queue to the exit was slow; I waited a good ten minutes before I eased back onto Therbusch Road. Before heading back to Chicago, I made a circuit of the hospital, looking for any breaches in the fences around the forensic wing. However little they spent on the grass, the state did a good job of keeping their razor wire in good shape. I didn’t see any place where I might slip through.
The shift change meant it was also the start of the evening rush hour. Since the city-bound expressways were glue, I turned south toward Palos, where Wuchnik’s ex-wife, Sandra, now lived.
She had just gotten home herself when I pulled into the cul-de-sac where she lived with her second husband. She came to the door still holding her handbag, a little girl of about four clinging to her pant legs. She was a heavy-set woman whose cheerful smile disappeared when I explained that I was investigating her ex-husband’s death.
“Oh, Miles! I was sorry to read about his murder, of course I was, but he was a dreary, depressing man who dragged me down with him. He didn’t want children, I don’t think he even wanted me. The only person he seemed to care about was his sister, Iva, and she was just as dreary as he was. When I learned he’d made her the beneficiary of his 401K instead of me, that was when I found a good divorce lawyer and took a hike. And met my new husband, and got my little precious here, right, sugar?”
She bent over to hug the little girl, who was trying to fill her in on the day’s activities. These involved going with Gram to the park, making a bear out of Play-Doh, and getting an ice cream.
“So you hadn’t heard from him lately?” I tried to get part of her mind back to her ex. “He wouldn’t have talked to you about his current investigations?”
She shook her head: she hadn’t heard from him since the divorce. “And frankly, miss, if I was you I wouldn’t bother. Miles had these big vague schemes that never went anywhere. In fact, he did really creepy things, like listen in on people’s phone conversations. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just dead wrong. Which I told him more than once. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone caught him eavesdropping and let him have it.”
There was definitely food for thought in that commentary. As I crept along the Eisenhower, I wondered who had been furious enough over Miles’s eavesdropping to murder the detective, and then ransack his home and his car to make sure all traces of his investigations were obliterated. Was it anyone connected to Wuchnik’s tour of the locked wing?
Leydon had managed to get into the forensic unit, and Wuchnik had been talking to one of the orderlies. What did the two of them know that I didn’t? What magical skills had Leydon possessed to breach the security there?