And she’d have the means to medicate them.
Had this woman killed nearly three dozen patients? Maybe even more than that?
“Did Inspector Jacobi read you your rights?”
“Yeah, I did. But now that you’re here, I’ll do it again,” Jacobi said, his time-roughened face a few inches from hers.
“You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. You understand your rights?”
“You leave that girl alone,” someone shouted from the back of the room. “She did nothing. Let her go.”
A group of nurse’s aides picked up the chant. “Let her go, let her go.”
“That’s enough,” I yelled, slamming a locker door with the side of my fist. The chanting cooled to a low rumble.
“Do you understand your rights?” said Jacobi again.
“Yes. I do.”
“Why’d you run, Marie?”
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“The police,” she said.
I was already thinking how the DA’s office was so overwhelmed with their ever-expanding case load; they’d tell us to kick this suspect unless we had enough on her to convict.
“Find anything besides those buttons?” I asked Jacobi.
“This is all hers,” he said, pointing to a pile of humble clothes and toiletries on the bench. The most lethal object in the pile was a Danielle Steel paperback. I emptied St. Germaine’s handbag, finding a worn wallet, a plastic pouch of cosmetics, a purple comb, an overdue phone bill, and a soft wool doll the size of my thumb.
The doll was crudely made of black yarn and colored plastic beads.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s for good luck, only.”
I sighed, dropped the doll back into St. Germaine’s handbag. “Ready to go, Ms. St. Germaine?” I said.
“I’m going home?”
As Jacobi and I drove to the Hall with St. Germaine in the backseat of the car, I started thinking ahead to the next forty-eight hours, wondering what Claire’s autopsy of young Jamie Sweet would show, hoping the killer had made a mistake, wondering if St. Germaine had a connection to Dennis Garza.
Most of all, I was hoping for a confession.
Hot damn. We’d finally gotten a break.
We had a suspect in custody.
Chapter 120
CINDY’S SENSATIONAL FRONT-PAGE story about the MYSTERIOUS MARKERS OF DEATH had already hit the newsstands by the time we escorted Marie St. Germaine through the front doors of the Hall of Justice.
The chief had something to feed to the press, but as the day wore on, I started to feel the kind of nausea that comes from going around in circles. Jacobi and I had been in the box with Marie St. Germaine for four hours. The room behind the mirrored glass was packed to the walls with homicide inspectors as well as the chief and the DA.
For at least an hour, the mayor of San Francisco was back there, too.