Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant (20 page)

Mark had a lot of faith in his unconscious mind to assimilate and sort random bits of information like pixels, and he knew that it often took time for a clear picture to emerge, but he couldn't help feeling he was falling behind in the race. The killer was out there pursuing the same targets and having a lot more success at it.

It wasn't until late afternoon that a break finally came their way. Mark got a call from Amanda on his cell phone. She'd traced the breast implant to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Dr. Morris Plume.

Five minutes later, Mark Sloan and Terry Riordan were on their way to Denver International Airport to catch the first available flight back to L.A.

That day Roger Standiford received a fax from Denver. It was a copy of an article clipped from the back page of the local newspaper. The story was about the murder of a ski instructor named Stella Greene on the slopes of Keystone, Colorado.

The article said the FBI was investigating the homicide, but a spokesman for the Bureau wouldn't comment on their involvement in the case. The victim, according to her coworkers, was a popular instructor at the resort for the past five years.

The fax was followed, almost immediately, by an E-mail request for the balance of funds owed on Diane Love. A photo, showing Dr. Mark Sloan and an FBI agent outside the Summit County coroner's office, was attached to the E-mail.

Standiford wired the funds to the hit man's account. If Mark Sloan was in Keystone, Diane Love was surely dead.

Two of the people who'd killed his daughter had been punished, but Roger Standiford wasn't feeling the joy or satisfaction he thought he would.

It didn't matter what he felt. What mattered was that Stuart Appleby and Diane Love wouldn't be feeling anything anymore.

Then again, he wasn't sure they ever did.

Dr. Morris Plume's clinic was near the corner of Olympic and Robertson, as far south as he could possibly go and still call himself a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

His offices were on the second floor of a two-story office building that had been built in the late 1980s and looked like a Rubik's Cube with underground parking.

The waiting area had the requisite aquarium and a selection of in-flight airline magazines. The most recent copy was six months old. The only interesting reading material Mark found, as he and Terry waited for the doctor, was a slick, colorful brochure listing all the procedures available to patients.

If it wasn't for the pictures of nearly naked female models, the brochure could have been mistaken for a restaurant take-out menu. Each procedure was listed like an entree, with glowing descriptions of the wonderful results followed by the cost. Tummies could be tucked, noses crafted, pecs endowed, foreheads lifted, eyelids firmed, ears tweaked, buttocks enhanced, and lips swelled. Breasts could be lifted, shaped, enhanced, firmed, sculpted, augmented, contoured, and reduced. Dr. Plume also offered BOTOX injections, Cymetra injections, fat injections, collagen injections, and thorough dermabrasion.

The brochure promised "everything for a new you," and Mark couldn't argue with that. Dr. Plume had certainly fulfilled the promise for Diane Love and, Mark guessed, the other fugitives, as well.

Mark slipped the brochure in his pocket as Dr. Plume stepped into the waiting room to greet them. Dr. Plume was a fit man in his midthirties who had apparently sampled just about everything on his own menu. His face was unnaturally smooth, his forehead tight, his nose sculpted to a slender point. He seemed extremely alert, his eyes wide, his ears pointed like a hound's. His chin was prominent and so were his cheekbones, his broad smile revealing two rows of gleaming, perfectly white teeth.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting," Dr. Plume said, shaking their hands. "I was just finishing up a tricky mastopexy. What can I do to help the FBI?"

"Do you recognize these people?" Terry opened a file and extracted a sheet with pictures of the four fugitives on it. He handed the sheet to Dr. Plume, who glanced at it quickly and gave it back to him.

"Nope, not offhand," Dr. Plume said. "I see so many faces in here."

"They would have come in five years ago." Terry took another sheet out of his file and held it out in front of the doctor. "Two of them left looking like this."

The sheet had pictures of Stuart Appleby and Diane Love as, respectively, Danny Royal and Stella Greene. Dr. Plume's smile faltered a bit at the edges.

"We traced the serial numbers on her implants back to you," Mark said, exaggerating the truth just a bit. "We know you worked on them."

"Yes, I recognize these two," Dr. Plume said. "I have a better memory of my own work. An artist remembers his paintings, not the blank canvases. Perhaps if you showed me what the other two look like now, I might remember them."

"That's what we're here to find out," Terry said. "We want to see the files on all four of them."

"I wouldn't know where to look."

"We'll start at A and work our way through," Terry said.

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that," Dr. Plume said. "I promise my patients strict confidentiality. I treat a lot of celebrities who wouldn't like their cosmetic histories revealed. I'm sure they'd mount a vigorous legal challenge against any effort you made to ransack my files."

Mark doubted Dr. Plume had any celebrity clients, but it would still be difficult to get any judge to sign off on a blanket search warrant of all the files.

"Besides, you say these surgeries were done five years ago?" Dr. Plume said.

"Yes," Terry said.

"That's a shame," Dr. Plume frowned, which wasn't easy, considering how tight his cheeks were. "Those files are long gone."

"Gone," Terry said flatly, narrowing his eyes.

"We had a flood."

"You're on the second floor," Mark said.

"We had a leak in the roof one particularly rainy week end. The entire office got drenched," Dr. Plume said. "We lost hundreds of files."

"You better hope the insurance company confirms that," Terry said.

"I didn't inform the insurance company," Dr. Plume said. "I knew it wouldn't be covered so I paid for the repairs myself."

"Who was the roofer?"

"It was so long ago, who remembers that kind of thing?" Dr. Plume let his voice drift off. "You know how it is."

"What I know is that you gave new faces to four fugitives wanted for kidnapping and murder," Terry said. "That makes you an accessory."

"I'm fully licensed to perform plastic surgery on anyone who wants it, and I am under no obligation to run back ground checks on my patients," Dr. Plume said. "Now, if you will excuse me—"

Dr. Plume started to go, but Terry grabbed him by the arm.

"Have you ever had a butt enhancement procedure?"

"No, I haven't."

"Then it's your lucky day, because you're about to get one, courtesy of the FBI. We're going to put a man outside your building on permanent and obvious surveillance, taking pictures of everyone who comes and goes from this office. We're going to scrutinize your tax returns, interview your patients, and go over your entire life with an electron microscope. And that's just for starters. We'll be on your ass night and day until we get what we want."

Terry released Dr. Plume, who seemed to have lost a little of the color underneath his tanning-parlor complexion. Without saying a word, the doctor turned his back on them and scurried back into his office.

"I'm sure they weren't the first wanted felons he's worked on," Mark said.

"So am I," Terry replied. "We'll crack him, it's just a question of when."

Mark shook his head. "No, the question is whether Brennan and Gregson will still be alive when we do."

The late-night FBI surveillance of Dr. Morris Plume's office was inconvenient for Wyatt, but at least they did him the courtesy of making themselves obvious about it. The two agents were parked in a Mercury Grand Marquis sedan across the street from the building, drinking Starbucks coffee and casually watching the building.

Wyatt drove up the alley behind the building in a Pacific Bell service truck he'd stolen earlier that afternoon. He got out, wearing a PacBell uniform and utility belt, pulled a ladder off the side of the truck, and propped it up against the building.

He climbed the ladder to the roof, disabled the alarm system, and picked the lock on the access door. Two minutes later, he was standing in Dr. Plume's office, staring angrily at three hefty bags filled with shredded files. He opened a bag. The paper was like confetti. Dr. Plume had invested in a very good shredder.

Wyatt destroyed the shredder out of spite, then removed the hard drives from all three computers in the office, though he doubted he'd find anything useful on them. For a moment he toyed with the idea of paying a visit to Dr. Plume's apartment in Marina Del Rey. Wyatt was sure he could easily torture the doctor into talking, assuming Dr. Plume had anything useful to reveal. But Wyatt couldn't do that without killing Dr. Plume afterward.

It just wasn't Wyatt's style. Although Dr. Plume was probably guilty of dozens of crimes, he was still technically an innocent. It was a subtle distinction, even for Wyatt, but enough to save the doctor for now.

Even so, Wyatt wouldn't forget Dr. Morris Plume. The doctor's day of reckoning would come.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The overwhelming impression Josephine Candella gave to everyone who met her was one of roundness. Round face, round belly, round shoulders, and a round mouth that always seemed in the midst of saying "Oh!"

Josephine was on a bed in the ER, clutching her husband, Phil's, hand, looking desperately at Dr. Mark Sloan with her big round eyes. "What is it, doctor? Gallstones? Appendicitis? Stomach cancer?"

"It's none of those things, Mrs. Candella," Mark said to the woman, who'd been rushed in from work that morning complaining of severe abdominal pain. He flashed her a big smile. "You're pregnant. Congratulations!"

Josephine and Phil Candella stared at Mark in shock.

"That's not possible," Josephine said. "Are you sure it's not something I ate?"

"Not unless you swallowed a ten-week-old baby whole."

"Oh," she said, then mumbled to herself, "I thought I was putting on a little weight."

"You don't understand," her husband said to Mark. "She can't be pregnant."

"She most certainly can," Mark said. "And she is."

"But I'm sterile," Phil exclaimed.

Now it was Mark's turn to say "Oh." Josephine Candella flushed guiltily and looked like she might say "Oh," too. Then again, she always looked that way.

"Maybe you're not as sterile as you thought. Life is full of surprises," Mark edged back toward the door. "Someone will be down from obstetrics to talk to you both shortly. Congratulations again."

Mark slipped into the hall and took a deep breath. He'd have to warn the doctor from obstetrics that she might be stepping in the middle of a major marital battle.

"Dr. Sloan, could I have a word with you?"

Mark turned to see Clarke Trotter, Community General's legal counsel, approaching him from down the hall.

"What's up, Clarke?" Mark said.

The attorney patted his considerable belly as if he was also carrying a ten-week-old child. "How was your vacation in Hawaii?"

"Eventful," Mark said, making some notations in Mrs. Candella's file and dropping it off at the nurse's station. "But I'm glad to be back."

"That's what I wanted to talk with you about," Clarke said. "Since you returned, you've worked one week and then went off again for three days."

"Something important came up," Mark said.

"Another homicide investigation, perhaps?"

"What are you getting at, Clarke?"

The attorney patted his stomach and tugged on his red tie. It was his tell. Bad news was coming. "You're supposed to be chief of internal medicine at this hospital."

"Isn't that what I'm doing?"

"Not when you're gallivanting around indulging your hobby," Clarke said.

"
Gallivanting
?" Mark said. "Do people still say that?"

"With all due respect, doctor, we aren't paying you a salary to solve crimes," Clarke said. "We're paying you to practice medicine."

"Clarke, how many vacation days have I taken in the last ten years?"

"I don't know offhand," Clarke said. "I'd have to check."

"Zero," Mark said. "How many sick days have I taken?"

"Dr. Sloan, you're missing my point."

"I understand what you're saying," Mark said. "But I think I've earned a little flexibility with how I choose to allocate my hundreds of days of accumulated vacation time and sick leave."

"Have you considered taking an extended sabbatical instead?" Clarke said. "Or have you given any thought to retiring?"

"No, I haven't." Mark said, an edge to his voice.

"This isn't personal, Dr. Sloan. I'm merely voicing the board's concern," he said. "It would be one thing if your outside time was devoted to medical research or something of that nature. But the activities you've chosen don't always reflect well on the hospital."

Mark looked Clarke Trotter straight in the eye. "One of our board members spends most of his time
gallivanting
from one European or tropical medical conference to another, all his expenses paid for by pharmaceutical companies we do business with. I don't think that reflects well on this hospital. Another board member is
gallivanting
with one of our young nurses behind his wife's back. I don't think that reflects well on the hospital, either. Shall I go on?"

"That won't be necessary," Clarke said.

"I'd be glad to have this discussion with the board," Mark said. "Why don't you pencil me in on the agenda and we can get all this gallivanting on the record."

"There's no need to do that," Clarke said. "I'll convey your sentiments privately to the board. Please think about what I've said. We can talk about this again another time."

"I'd rather not," Mark said.

Clarke smiled as if he hadn't heard and waddled away.

It wasn't the first time Mark had clashed with hospital administrators over his work assisting the police with homicide investigations, and he knew it wouldn't be the last. The criticism had waned for many years, but ever since a mad bomber he had pursued blew up half the hospital, the board had, not surprisingly, taken a much dimmer view of his investigations.