Fifteen minutes later, Ruth walked through the door of the town’s local precinct. She had never been inside of any police station before. As she took in the open room filled with several wooden desks, the smell of stale coffee that had likely been brewing all through the night, and the group of officers gathered in the far corner, she grew uneasy. How did I end up here? She stood frozen in the entrance, replaying the words she had rehearsed in her head.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” A young officer approached the front desk. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
“Hello. Yes, I would like to speak to the officer in charge, please.” She spoke with confidence, in spite of the fact that her heart was thumping in her chest.
“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”
“Thank you, but I need to speak to whomever is in charge. It is quite important.” Surely Ruth couldn’t explain her case to this child. Robert would knock him over with a single blow.
“All right, ma’am. I’ll just go and see if he is available. What can I tell him it’s about?”
“I would like to report a murder.”
Ruth watched the boy’s eyes grow wide as she clutched more tightly to the attaché case in her hands. “Um, okay. Um, just a minute.”
Ruth watched as the boy walked to the far end of the room where the uniformed men were talking. They stopped for a moment and looked at her, and then one walked in her direction. He was a solid-looking man; perhaps he had played football in school. He didn’t seem old enough to be the captain, but he certainly had more gravitas than the one who had greeted her. She stood up taller.
“Ma’am, I am Officer Johnson, would you like to come sit down?” He ushered her toward a wooden chair next to what seemed to be his desk. “Charlie said you’re here about a murder?”
“Indeed.” Ruth nodded and began removing the files from her leather case and piling them on the desk. “It happened several years ago now, but I have the proof right here. My husband killed his patient. Not in the hospital, in his office. You see here—it says she died.” Ruth pointed to the page in Robert’s files. “He did it. He killed her.”
“Ma’am, I need you to slow down please. Can we start with you telling me your name?”
She blanched. Of course, this was the next step, but she was suddenly winded by the enormity of what she had to do.
“My name is Ruth Emeraldine Apter.”
Even as the words crossed her lips, she felt the respect she had worked for her entire life falling away. The family name that had belonged to captains of industry, who built America and underwrote this town, the hospital, and so many charities, would now forever be associated with barbarism. Failure.
But she had no choice. The lives she would save were more important.
Officer Johnson looked suddenly serious. “Mrs. Emeraldi—Apter. Are you saying that your husband killed someone at Magnolia Bluff?”
“I am.”
Ruth spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the nuances of lobotomy to the group of officers now circled around her, most of whom had previously heard about the heiress and the famous doctor who lived at Magnolia Bluff but knew little more. Then she took them through every aspect of Robert’s notes on Mrs. Rice in painstaking detail. How there hadn’t been one lobotomy, but three. How the woman had hideously deteriorated over the years. Ruth was grateful for the photos and even placed the intake picture next to the final one, where Mrs. Rice looked so obese and unwell, to underscore the extent of the failure.
“So even then, when she was in this state and clearly hadn’t been helped by lobotomy, he performed a third one. And this time, he went too far; her brain started to bleed, and she died.” Ruth looked up at them, expecting them to share her shock and outrage. To be readying themselves to make an arrest. Instead, they stood calmly, mildly nonplussed.