“Friends?”
Niomi shook her head and dropped her gaze to her hands. She knotted her fingers together. “Navid was… He didn’t… Oh, my.” She clucked her tongue. “I’m sorry. I won’t speak ill of the dead. It’s not right. Not when he can’t defend himself.”
“Ms. Allard.” I kept my tone low and gentle. “It’s important that we learn all there is to know about Dr. Kordestani. Anything you can tell us would be helpful. We want to locate the person or persons involved in his murder.”
Niomi rubbed her palms along her thighs, scrunching the material in her fists a few times before smoothing it out. “You need to understand. This job is… taxing. The burnout rate for doctors and nurses is exponentially higher than any other profession. We might be several years beyond the pandemic, but the effects linger for most of us. We work long hours under stressful conditions. It’s emotionally demanding, physically draining, and has a tendency to destroy families in its wake. I’m lucky my François is so resilient. I don’t know how he puts up with me most days.”
“Sounds like being a cop,” I mumbled, trying to remember the last time I slept a full eight hours or managed an uninterrupted weekend off.
Niomi lifted her head and met my gaze pityingly. “I’m sure you work very hard, Detective. It’s not a competition. If anything, you understand better than most what I’m talking about. It’s easy to lose yourself in the stress of the job. Tempers fray. Nerves burn. It’s easy to become mechanical and dispassionate. It’s self-preservation, in a way. Navid fell into this trap a few years ago, mid-pandemic. He lost himself to the stress and never fully recovered.”
“Can you explain what you mean?” Rue asked.
Niomi stared at her exposed feet, swathed in sweaty and stained socks, bending and flexing her toes. “Navid often forgot that our patients were human beings, sick or suffering, and looking for our help. To him, they became nothing more than products on a conveyor belt in a rundown factory where quality control went out the window ages ago. He showed little compassion. He shuffled people out the door as fast as they came in. He lost his wife as a result. He lost friends. I don’t see how any of this matters. Navid’s not here to defend himself, and even though I didn’t agree with how he did things, it feels wrong talking about him like this.”
“I understand.” Rue locked gazes with me from across the room. Despite her expressionless features, much was translated in the brief exchange.
My partner had also been accused of being too clinical at times, too uncaring and cold, but those descriptors were nothing more than the outer shell of who she was. Rue had once explained it was part of her Asian upbringing. Social introversion wasn’t unusual in first-generation immigrants, and Rue had described her parents as emotionally avoidant, encouraging her to be goal-oriented above all else. Making friends was less important than securing a career and establishing oneself in society. For her, connecting emotionally was a skill that required effort. She was capable, but it made her uncomfortable.
Having worked with Rue for a while, I’d learned to read the subtext etched in the depths of her fathomless dark eyes, and Rue was asking me to take over.
I crossed the room and shuffled a few magazines aside to sit on the edge of a short coffee table. “Ms. Allard, I understand your feelings. I respect that you don’t want to talk ill of the dead, but it’s imperative we ask these questions for our investigation. Can you think of anyone who might have recently upset Navid?Do you recall seeing him in confrontation with anyone? Did you witness an argument? With a colleague, perhaps. A patient. Maybe he mentioned a tiff with a friend or a neighbor.”
Niomi’s soft laugh was drenched in sorrow. “I can name about a dozen from the past week alone. Don’t you see, Detective? Navid was not loved. He was tolerated. We nurses were constantly smoothing ruffled feathers and de-escalating tempers. It was constant and exhausting. Even his ex-wife had problems with him. She was in and out of here regularly for one reason or another. Those two were oil and vinegar. Always fighting.”
Rue and I exchanged a glance. This did not bode well for our investigation.
Niomi continued. “Navid had a reputation for undermining patients’ symptoms and shuffling them out the door with barely a cursory look at their chart. He earned earfuls from a few enraged mothers with sick children or from fellow nursing staff. We are the ones who perform most of the exams. We present our findings to the doctors, and they dictate treatment.”
“Can you think of an instance that stood out more than another? A particularly volatile encounter, perhaps?” I asked.
Niomi was already shaking her head. “No. I’m so sorry. I want to help. I do, but…”
Rue and I metwith one of Navid’s colleagues and listened to a similar story. They, too, couldn’t identify any one person or describe a single incident that might have led to his attack and murder.
We left the hospital at close to noon, stopping for lunch at a fusion-style buffet café off campus before hitting the university. The cafeteria-style setup seemed to appeal to students, and we were lucky to get a table.
The buzz of chatter was its own protective bubble of privacy. With so many conversations taking place in the vast café, no one paid us attention, and we talked freely.
“Navid sounds like a grade A asshole.” Rue tore open a mini sachet of soya sauce with her teeth and drizzled its contents over her deconstructed sushi bowl. “He probably treated upward of a hundred or more patients a day. If he pissed off a tenth of them over the course of a month, our pool of suspects is still unreasonable.”
I stabbed a bowtie noodle from my cold pasta salad and speared the hunk of chicken next to it. “He’s not too friendly with colleagues either.”
“Maybe we’ll have better luck at the university.”
The drone of too many conversations washed over us as we ate. I drew up my work email, and a shot of warmth tickled my lower belly when I saw Navid Kordestani’s preliminary autopsy report sitting pretty at the top. I itched to reply, hoping the handsome new pathologist would be available for drinks later that night, but Rue spoke before I could summon the right words.
“It fits with the heartless bastard message.”
“Huh?” It took a second to shift gears, and Rue glanced at my phone, quickly deducing where my attention had strayed. “Plan your date later.”
“I wasn’t—”
Rue glared. I put my phone down like a reprimanded child.
“The message,” she said. “The flower spike through the heart. It fits with how everyone describes him. Heartless. A bastard. It tells me that this guy went too far with someone.”
“It broadens the scope, too. We’ve moved far beyond infidelity. We could be looking at a pissed off dad whose kid’s tummy ache complaints went ignored or a scorned hockey player who felt Navid lacked bedside manner or made his injury worse by disregarding symptoms, hence ruining his career.” Under my breath, I muttered, “The piece of shit probably got what he deserved.”
