Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe (5 page)

That decision felt right, unlike anything else since he'd regained consciousness. It gave him an immediate, achievable goal instead of the prospect of aimlessly wandering in the vast desert of his lost memories hoping to find a familiar landmark.

He would rediscover what he'd learned before, piece together the clues, and find Jesse's killer. And maybe, along the way, he'd find some of himself again, too.

Mark slept for a few more hours, then awoke before dawn, too keyed up and anxious to lie in bed for another minute. He used his authority as a doctor, and as chief of internal medicine, to intimidate a nurse into helping him remove his IV and catheter.

When he got out of bed, he was a little dizzy and his head throbbed, but he hid his symptoms from the nurse and made his way carefully to the doctors' locker room. He traded his hospital gown for surgical scrubs and a pair of tennis shoes from his locker.

He went to his office, where he put on his lab coat over his scrubs, grabbed a Diet Coke from his icebox, and sat down at his desk. The drink was so cold it was nearly frozen, just the way he liked it. He took a few sips and felt revived.

A wedding photo faced him on his desk. It was taken in Hawaii. Mark and Emily stood side by side on an impossibly green lawn against a backdrop of palm trees, crashing surf, and craggy shoreline. She was beautiful in a white wedding
holoku,
a long, form-fitting
mu 'umu'u 
and a Haku lei of white dendrobium orchids, baby's breath, and roses on her head.

Mark studied himself in the photo. He wore a white aloha shirt, white linen pants, and a green-leaf lei around his neck. There was a big smile on his face, broadcasting his happiness and pride.

He didn't recognize anything about the photo except his face. Everything else about it struck him as a convincing forgery. It was as if someone had taken his face from one picture, his clothes from another, and artfully combined the elements, then inserted Emily Noble at his side and a generic Hawaiian backdrop behind them both.

But Mark knew it wasn't the picture that had been altered. It was him.

Jesse is dead. He was killed saving your life. Someone has to pay.

He set the photo aside, facedown, and sorted through the papers on his desk. Most of them dealt with hospital bureaucracy and current patients. He didn't find anything relating to Grover Dawson.

He sifted through a week's worth of phone message slips, discarding anything that seemed to be part of his administrative routine and keeping the rest. Next he turned to the yellow legal pad he kept by the phone. The pad contained random scribbles—names, phone numbers, doodles, lunch orders, and scattered reminders in no particular order. A few caught his eye.

First Fidelity Casualty

Wedding band

Dentures?

Kemper-Carlson Pharmaceuticals

Cal-Star Insurance

Sechrest + Pevney + ?

The glass fish?

The pearl necklace?

He had no idea what the notes meant or if they were even related to the case. They were just scribbles.

There were two lists on the notepad that he'd boxed and doodled around, which suggested to him now that he'd given them lots of thought. They read:

Jesse

Insurance records & hospital admittance forms

Amanda

Deaths/three years

The notations were too general to glean much from them, except that he'd asked Jesse and Amanda to do some research. He would talk to Amanda and find out the details.

He opened his date book and reviewed his schedule for the previous two weeks. The days were filled with administrative meetings and appointments with patients. There were three meetings outside Community General with doctors whose names he didn't recognize: Dr. Richard Barnes, Dr. Tanya Hudson, and Dr. Bernard Dalton.

Mark looked up the three doctors on the Internet and discovered that Dr. Barnes was an epidemiologist, Dr. Hudson was a sociologist, and Dr. Dalton was a cardiologist.

What had he wanted to talk to them about? Were they related to his investigation into Grover Dawson's death? Or were they people he was consulting as part of his day-to-day medical routine? Perhaps they were new friends he'd made in the last two years and he was seeing them simply for the pleasure of their company. He would need Amanda and Emily to help him figure out the answers to those questions.

There was nothing more he could do in his office. His next stop was the morgue.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Too many people died every day in Los Angeles, resulting in more corpses than the county morgue could handle. Not only that, but the morgue downtown was a tiring commute from Community General Hospital.

So several years ago, Mark had come up with a way to relieve some of the county's burden and, at the same time, make it easier for him to examine the victims of the homicides he investigated.

He brokered an arrangement between the county and the hospital, establishing a satellite county morgue at Community General. The county gained more space and additional manpower at a fraction of the cost of a new, stand-alone facility. The hospital gained a new revenue stream and publicity points for supporting the community in a tangible way.

Dr. Amanda Bentley, the hospital's staff pathologist, was hired as an adjunct county medical examiner to oversee the new morgue and to roll to crime scenes as needed. Somehow she managed to effortlessly balance her dual responsibilities, becoming as comfortable at a crime scene as she was at an autopsy table.

Mark was sitting at one of those tables, files spread out in front of him, when Amanda arrived, holding a paper plate with an enormous cinnamon roll slathered in frosting.

"Busted," she said.

He looked up at her. "This isn't the first time you've caught me going through your files."

"But it's the first time you've caught me eating a ten-thousand-calorie cinnamon roll."

"I'll let you off on one condition," he said.

"What's that?"

"You split it with me."

She grabbed a clean scalpel, slid a stool over to the autopsy table, and sat down across from Mark.

"I'm having such a feeling of deja vu," Amanda said, cutting the roll in half.

"Why?" Mark asked, picking up his piece and taking a bite.

"Because I had this exact same conversation with you last week," she said. "You were even reading Grover Dawson's file."

Mark set down the roll and licked the frosting off his fingers. "That would explain why the file is sticky. You must have shared a cinnamon roll with me that morning, too. You just lied to me. This isn't the first time I've caught you with one of those pastries."

"Busted again," she said. "See? You're back to rooting out dishonesty wherever it lurks."

"What did I have to say about Grover Dawson's file?" 

"You were convinced something wasn't right about the man's death," Amanda said, "but you didn't find anything unusual in the file."

"I don't know what I was expecting to find anyway. Your report simply confirms what Steve already told me," Mark said. "What else did we talk about?"

"That was it," she said, carefully dissecting her roll with the scalpel to reveal the cinnamon filling between the layers.

"Tell me about the deaths I asked you to look into," Mark said.

"What does it matter now, Mark? Seems to me you should be at home with Emily, trying to put your life back together."

She cut off a bite-sized strip of the cinnamon roll, speared it with the scalpel, and popped the morsel into her mouth. Mark guessed she was probably one of those people who separated Oreos before eating them, too.

"I can't do that until I find whoever was driving that car," Mark said.

"Leave it to Steve," she said.

"Jesse didn't get killed saving Steve's life. He got killed saving mine," Mark said. "I need to do this. For him and for me."

Amanda sighed. "Three days after I found you here, you showed up one morning with another one of these." She held up the plate with the cinnamon roll on it. "We were splitting it when I mentioned how sad it is when someone barely survives a life-threatening experience only to die later in an accident or from some other ailment."

Mark raised an eyebrow. She tipped her head towards him.

"That's exactly the expression you gave me then, too," she said.

"So what provoked you to share that unusual observation with me?"

"There was this twenty-two-year-old woman named Sandy Sechrest who tried to kill herself by drinking a lethal cocktail of vodka mixed with handfuls of opiates and benzodiazepines. She came into the ER at Northridge Hospital flatlined, but they managed to save her. Three months later, she cleaned herself up, got into a counseling program, and even found a job. And what happens? She's taking a bath one night, her hair dryer falls into the tub and
zap
, she gets electrocuted and drowns."

Amanda took another bite of her cinnamon roll and licked the frosting off her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing her story.

"That was the case I was coming from when I saw you that morning," she said. "You thought it was odd and I said no, it's simply ironic, those kinds of things happen all the time. I gave you another example, too. A woman named Leila Pevney survived a quadruple bypass only to die from the common cold. She took too many decongestants. The amphetamines in the medicine caused a fatal change in her cardiac rhythm."

"So let me guess," Mark said. "I challenged you to prove to me that cases like that ‘happen all the time' by putting together a list of people who died, accidentally or otherwise, shortly after near-death experiences. I asked you to go back, say, three years."

"Yes, you did," Amanda said. "And dutiful fool that I am, I fell for it."

"Fell for what?"

"You getting me to do a load of research. There I was, thinking I was doing it for myself to prove a point to you, when in fact I was doing it for
you
to satisfy
your
idle curiosity."

"I'm not that manipulative." Mark took another bite of his roll and licked his fingers again afterwards.

"Sure you are," she said. "You hide it by being avuncular. That's your charm."

"And did you do it?"

"The list was the size of a phone book. There are roughly fifty-seven thousand deaths, excluding homicides and suicides, in Los Angeles County every year. Of those, about seven hundred eighty people survive life-threatening conditions requiring hospitalization within a year preceding their deaths. Of those people, about thirty-four die within ninety days of their release from the hospital."

"And those figures have stayed pretty constant over the last three years?"

"More or less, except for the people who've died within three months of a life-threatening episode. That's up from thirty-three last year to forty-eight so far this year."

Mark did the math. "That's a forty-five percent increase. That can't be normal."

Amanda shrugged. "There's no telling what's responsible for the uptick. It's probably just bad luck."

"What about the autopsy reports on those forty-eight deaths? Did I ask for them?"

"Of course you did, as if you hadn't already given me enough work to do. But most of the patients died of natural causes and weren't autopsied. Their deaths were certified by their family physician, which, in at least two of the cases, was you."

"Which two?" Mark said.

Amanda got up, went to her desk, and scrounged around until she found the files she was looking for. "Hammond McNutchin and Joyce Kling. Their deaths were sad, but not unexpected."

Mark browsed through the files while Amanda returned her attention to eating her cinnamon roll.

Hammond McNutchin was a seventy-three-year-old man who, when Mark last saw him, was brought in by paramedics with a collapsed lung, congestive heart failure, and prostate cancer. Mark managed to save his life. He died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack not long afterward. At least it was in the comfort of his own home, Mark thought, instead of in a hospital bed.

Joyce Kling was a fifty-six-year-old lupus patient who came into the ER with chest pains. It turned out her pericardium was filling with fluid and Mark had to drain it. She nearly died on the table, but she pulled through, thanks to his valiant efforts, only to die of respiratory failure two months later while sitting in her recliner, watching women-in-jeopardy movies on Lifetime.

Both of the patients were very sick and died naturally. There was nothing about the circumstances of their passing to suggest otherwise. If there had been, his suspicions certainly would have been raised at the time. And yet he felt that familiar tingle at the back of his neck, that shiver of uneasiness.

He set the files down. From what he could gather so far, a week ago he'd been stumbling in the dark, driven by a vague discomfort and blindly trying to find the cause. Steve was right. There wasn't a case here. Not yet.

Mark started picking at his pastry again. "This isn't going to be easy."

"You know I'll help any way I can," Amanda said. "But can I give you some advice?"

"Of course."

"Don't forget about Emily."

"That's the problem. I already have."

"I know why you have to get back to your investigation. I respect that. But please don't use Jesse as an excuse to avoid dealing with Emily," Amanda said. "He didn't save your life just so you could throw it away. If you can't get back your memories of Emily, start working on some new ones. She's the best thing that's happened to you in a very long time."

Mark nodded. "So I've been told."

"You'll see," Amanda said. "She's a strong woman, and she won't let you push her around any more than I do."

"I thought you just got done telling me how I shrewdly manipulated you with my avuncular charm."

"She's immune to all that," Amanda said.