Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe (7 page)

He set his box down and ran his hand over the tabletop, feeling the uneven surface of the distressed wood.

"It's a good table," Mark said.

"It was the one piece of furniture you were adamant about keeping."

"What was wrong with everything else?"

"Nothing if you're two men living in a hunting lodge," she said.

"I suppose it's all at Steve's house."

"Most of it," she said.

"Amanda gave me a report of patient deaths," Mark said. "Do you know where it is?"

"You were just released from the hospital after suffering a head injury."

"So?" Mark said.

"So slow down. Don't you want to have some lunch? Maybe relax for a few minutes?"

"I won't be able to rest until I know where the report is." 

She sighed. "It's downstairs."

"Downstairs?"

She tipped her head towards the staircase in the entry hall. "Go see for yourself."

He did.

As the staircase curved down, the room below was slowly revealed to him. It seemed that he'd taken over the first floor and made it his investigation command center, where he gathered data and coordinated the efforts of his troops, who were Amanda and Jesse.

The walls were lined with enormous dry-erase boards, which were covered with lists of names and dates, hospitals and doctors, illnesses and accidents, arrows and lines drawn back and forth and all around until it looked like he'd scribbled out what he'd written. It was an unintelligible mess.

The scrawl represented his desperate efforts to reveal a pattern in the data he'd culled from the piles of papers and files that were scattered over his desk, his laptop, and his former living room couch.

The papers were everywhere and looked as if they'd simply been dropped on the room from above. It was pure chaos.

But he knew better. Each section of the room represented a different category. Every paper was where he'd wanted it to be. The disarray was actually an organizational system that only he understood—just not anymore. That knowledge had been lost along with the last two years of his life.

Standing there amidst his notes on the walls and papers on the floor was like being in the center of a diorama of his mind, a graphic representation of exactly what he was thinking three days ago, frozen in time.

The first step towards solving Jesse's murder was solving the mystery of this room. Mark had to discover whatever it was that he knew, whatever knowledge made someone want him dead...

Before the killer tried again.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Mark spent the rest of the day in his office, reading each sheet of paper and comparing it to his notes on the boards. He tried to map out the piles on the floor and compare them to the columns of names and dates he'd copied to the boards. He struggled to make sense of the multicolored lines, arrows, and circles he'd drawn in the various columns.

What did it all mean?

He squinted at a board, looking at it from various angles, trying to see any patterns within the scribbling.

Hour after frustrating hour ticked by. Emily came in once with sandwiches and juice and tried to convince Mark to take a break, but he couldn't tear himself away.

All he had to go on was that the death of Grover Dawson by fatal drug interaction had made him suspect foul play. His vague uneasiness was apparently exacerbated by Amanda's casual remark about the tragic irony of fatally ill people rebounding from preexisting medical conditions only to die a short time later from some other cause.

There were so many patient histories, formatted by the same database software, that they all began to blur together. The only differences between the documents were the names and causes of death.

It seemed like a lot of deaths, but these were very sick and often elderly people. The sad truth was that their deaths were expected.

While there was an increase in those deaths this year, Mark didn't see evidence that anything was criminally amiss. If he had found anything, he wouldn't have had Amanda and Jesse doing such a broad, unfocused search for information.

He'd apparently gone through Amanda's report of patient deaths and organized them by cause of death, whether illness or accident. Then he subdivided those groups by age, race, and sex. Then he divided them again by the doctors who treated them and the hospitals they went to.

Still no pattern emerged.

The only thing Mark could see that the patients had in common was that they all had come close to death at least once before succumbing to natural causes or accidents. But even the accidents were, in most cases, directly related to their afflictions and not surprising.

Over the last three years, one hundred sixteen people had died within three months of a near-death experience. Forty-eight of those deaths had occurred within the last twelve months, representing a forty-five percent increase in the number of such deaths annually.

While this seemed to Mark like an extraordinary surge, when he looked at each case individually, he saw that few of the deaths were unexpected considering the medical conditions of the patients.

There had to be a key to crunching the data, to figuring out if something was truly wrong or if the sense of uneasiness that had sparked his investigation was baseless. Until he found that elusive key, he was lost.

He must have found it once; otherwise nobody would have tried to kill him. There was no question that his instincts were right.

Unless the attempt on his life had nothing to do with his investigation.

No, he didn't believe that. His work in this room and what had happened in the parking garage at Community General were linked.

He could feel it.

Mark slogged through the box of hospital records that Jesse had collected for the forty-eight dead patients. From what Mark could tell, Jesse had dug through the computer systems of Community General Hospital as well as several other LA-area hospitals. Jesse must have called in a lot of favors to gain password access to those other systems. Once inside, though, he wouldn't have had much trouble finding his way around. They all used the same Enable database software.

Strictly speaking, what Jesse had done was illegal and a gross violation of patient privacy—if he'd been caught by any administrator besides Mark, he would have been fired. But the patients were dead. It wasn't as if they had any privacy to lose at this point. That was Mark's rationalization, anyway.

He continued to pick through the forty-eight patient files as the evening wore on. It wasn't until about ten thirty that he finally referred back to the notes he'd taken in his office at Community General. This time, when he looked at the unfamiliar names of those three doctors, he understood what they meant and where at least two copies of Amanda's report had gone.

And if he wasn't mistaken, it was one of those doctors who had given him the focus his investigation so desperately needed.

He turned to see Emily standing in the doorway.

"Hey, remember me?" she said.

"Is that a trick question?"

"We've barely spoken since you got home. It would be nice if we could talk sometime."

"We will," Mark said.

She nodded, though it seemed to be with defeat rather than agreement.

"It's getting late, and you've had a long day," she said.

"Just a little while longer," Mark said.

"You won't do yourself or your investigation any good by pushing yourself too hard too soon. Come to bed, Mark."

He looked at her. The truth was, there was nothing more he could do here, not until he talked to those two doctors tomorrow. But he wanted to put off the awkwardness of going to bed as long as he could.

It wasn't bashfulness or prudishness. Katherine had died a long time ago. It wasn't as if he'd taken a vow of celibacy over the decades that followed. But he'd never shared his bed with a complete stranger.

Intellectually, he knew Emily Noble was his wife. But emotionally, she was nobody to him, just a skilled doctor and a pleasant person. Even so, he didn't want to hurt her by suggesting they sleep apart until he felt comfortable with her again. It seemed too cruel.

He rose from his chair at the desk and without a word followed her upstairs.

While Emily was in the bathroom, Mark searched for his pajamas and changed. Then he stood at the foot of the unfamiliar bed, uncertain where he was supposed to sleep. He liked the left side, but what if she did, too? What arrangement had they worked out?

He tried to guess on the basis of what was on the night-stands, but there were no easy clues like books or magazines. The phone was on the left side, and since she was more likely to be responding to an emergency call late at night, he thought she might have chosen to sleep within easy reach of the receiver. He opened the nightstand drawer and saw ChapStick, nail clippers, and some paperback novels.

She slept on the left side.

Mark slipped into bed on the right side, lay on his back, and stared up at the ceiling. He felt like he was sleeping in someone else's bed. His eyes blurred and he blinked hard, trying to sharpen the world around him as if it was merely a picture on a TV screen. His vision cleared, but he still felt blurry. Perhaps it was his entire being, not his eyesight, that was out of focus.

You're just tired, he thought. But it was more than fatigue. It was the effort of trying to adjust to how dramatically his life had changed in just three days.

Only that wasn't what had happened. He was experiencing two years' worth of changes all at once, with no memory of the events that had led to them.

It would take more than a day to cope, especially to adjust to the idea that he was married again after decades of life on his own. Although Steve had lived in the same house, they still managed to live mostly separate lives. It was a fine arrangement that he realized now he'd been in no hurry at all to change.

He glanced at the closed bathroom door, heard the sound of water running behind it. Emily had changed all that. He apparently loved her enough to make seismic shifts in his life for her.

At that moment, Emily came out of the bathroom, opening the door as if his gaze had been knocking. She was in a thin nightgown, but she didn't seem any more comfortable in it than he did in the bed. He wondered if she ordinarily slept in the nude and was wearing the nightgown to make him feel more at ease.

She was beautiful. There was no denying that.

"You look like you're lying on broken glass," she said. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"I'm afraid I'm the one who has been inflicting the pain around here."

Emily flicked off the lights and got into bed, turning on her side to face him. He could feel the heat radiating from her and drew his arms closer to his body, afraid to brush against her.

"I know you don't mean to," she said. "So I try instead to imagine what it must be like for you, how lost you must feel."

"Does that help?"

"Not really," she admitted. "Maybe you should tell me." 

"Tell you what?"

"How it feels," she said.

Mark shrugged. "I feel like a time traveler who has been yanked into the future. The world has changed, but I haven't."

"It's the other way around."

"Intellectually I know that. But at the same time I feel whole. I don't sense the gap in my memory. When I reach back, everything is there."

"I'm not," she said.

"And you wish I was trying as hard to know you as I am to solve the murder."

"That's our marriage in a nutshell," she said. "You're making progress already."

He couldn't see her smile, but he could hear the levity in her voice. What she said wasn't meant as a reproach—even though it was one.

"The thing is, I remember Jesse. I feel that pain and I have to do something about it."

"But you don't feel anything for me," she said.

Mark winced. He'd hurt her again. "You asked how I felt and I'm telling you. I'm not trying to be cruel. Investigating the mystery behind Jesse's death is familiar to me. I know how to do that. I have no idea how to find you again."

"I'm right here," she said, placing her hand on his chest. "We'll find the way together."

He nodded, took her hand, and gave it a squeeze. "I'm sorry."

She kissed him on the cheek. "Sweet dreams."

Mark let go of her hand and rolled onto his side, his back to her. He doubted his dreams would be sweet and wondered in what disturbing ways his guilt, anxiety, and grief would be dramatized on the stage of his unconscious. And within a moment or two he was asleep, where he found peace. The theater of his mind remained dark.

Medical neighborhoods sprang up and grew in much the same way ethnic neighborhoods did. All it took was one restaurant, grocery store, or church to serve as a social and cultural magnet and like-minded people would gather and stay, taking possession of one block after another, extending the boundaries of their neighborhood.

The same was true with hospitals.

West Hills was in the dry northwest comer of the San Fernando Valley, where housing developments, minimalls, and fast-food outlets were advancing on the few remaining ranches and the little bit of scrubland, the last vestiges of the area's rural heritage. At the leading edge of the steadily growing suburban sprawl was John Muir Hospital.

Within a year after John Muir opened, every building new and old within a mile of the hospital billed itself as a "medical center," renting space exclusively to anyone calling himself a doctor: surgeons, dentists, shrinks, veterinarians, and at least one epidemiologist. The entire neighborhood was now choked with pharmacies and other businesses serving the needs of those doctors.

Even though his office was right across the street, Dr. Richard Barnes had no official affiliation with John Muir Hospital and no reason to visit. He was there because the rents were far below what was being charged in Century City, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica. The neighborhood may not have had the cachet of those other addresses, but it offered a seductively short commute for medical professionals like him who lived in the affluent gated communities in Bell Canyon and the Santa Susana Pass area.