Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (18 page)

I shook my head and hit the gas, before
braking suddenly for the Lincoln in front of me. "Just go lighter."

He did his best in the stop and start
traffic. Ryan's never been the best masseur, but I felt myself relax into his
fingers. It was so good to have someone to care about me. It made a big
difference to come home to him instead of an empty apartment.

Mrs. Lee lived in Montreal West, an area
I didn't know well, but was only about 15 minutes' drive from mine. I managed
to park right across from her building. "It's a omen," I muttered to
myself.

A grey duplex apartment door popped
opened. Mrs. Lee appeared on the front stoop, waving.

She greeted us and put the kettle on.
Ryan answered in Cantonese and whipped out his laptop, so they were already
best buds by the time she took us on a tour of her home, culminating in Laura's
small, neat bedroom.

"I moved her things here
after," Mrs. Lee said, and stopped. She forced herself to continue.
"She had her own apartment."

"I understand." It must have
been so painful to go through Laura's possessions and move them back to her
childhood room. I didn't want to cross the threshold, but my dread was nothing
compared to what she'd been through.

Ryan touched her arm and said something.
Mrs. Lee paused, nodded at me, and allowed him to lead her back toward the
kitchen. Since my Chinese is limited to hello, thank you, and the names of
especially tasty restaurant dishes, I was grateful to Ryan for putting her at
ease and giving me some privacy.

Mrs. Lee called over her shoulder,
"You're the detective. Look at anything you want. Open it up. I trust
you."

I nodded and smiled, but it felt more
like a wince.

I've read a lot of books where they say
the dead person's room is kept as a shrine. Probably that was true here. At
least, I didn't get the feeling a whole lot of moving and shaking went on here,
aside from regular dusting. But there was a clear division between Laura's childhood
and adulthood in this small, square space.

The décor was the most obvious blast from
the past. One bookshelf was dedicated to school photos, awards, and stuffed
animals, but an older Laura had hung an Oasis poster above her bed and
suspended some CD's on fishing wire from the ceiling in front of the window.
The evening light made them sparkle like rainbows.

I swallowed hard and scanned for the
newer, less emotional stuff. The most obvious sources of information were the
two black filing cabinets pushed against the wall and a bulky old computer
squatting on the desk alongside a freshly-dusted box of 3 1/2 inch floppy
disks. I wasn't one hundred percent sure how to use those, so it was good that
Ryan had come along.

The bookshelf wedged next to the door,
preventing it from opening it all the way, was crammed with medical books and
neatly-labeled binders.

I sighed to myself. Needle. Haystack.
Meet the twenty-first century's lust for paperwork and gigabytes. What was I
looking for again?
 
What kind of clue?

Mrs. Lee had specifically asked me to
look at Laura's files, so that's what I would start with and, more than likely,
end with.

Ryan's voice carried from the kitchen,
talking faster than usual, and Mrs. Lee laughed in reply.

It was the first time I'd heard her
laugh, and she surprised me with a deep chuckle.

I couldn't abandon her now. I yanked the
first filing cabinet's drawer open.

Within a minute, I could see that the
similarity between me and Laura ran only skin deep. I sighed with relief. I
hadn't consciously realized it, but the whole "you look like Laura"
thing had been getting to me.

Fortunately, we were entirely different
animals.

She'd been very organized. She'd made
file folders according to clinical specialty—oncology, say, or
rheumatology—and kept filing articles until at least the week before she
died. I couldn't get over her alphabetized and colour-coded files. She even
used those stick-on dots, I guess so she could tell at a glance, "Oh, it's
yellow, must be family medicine."

I made up a less complicated system, but
gave up after a week when I decided, "If I need it, the Internet is my
friend. If I don't print it out, I can save a few trees." Plus I was lazy.

I wasn't sure how research articles were
going to clue me in to any potential murderer, but at least I knew how to sift
through this stuff better than the police. And since everyone said Laura was
into psych and emerg, that's where I'd find any money.

I started with the specialty I liked and
missed: emerg. I recognized two of the same articles they passed out to me last
month. Geez, didn't they update their teaching files in eight years?
 
But I agreed with the topics she'd kept, like
intubation, toxicology, coumadin. All keepers.

I flipped through a few handouts she'd
made, including transparent plastic overheads (remember those?
 
My teachers used them in middle school) for
presentations on sepsis and ectopic pregnancy.

There was nothing personal except four
reference letters, which I read.

"Laura
is extremely organized, punctual, and knowledgeable."

"Laura
has excellent clinical acumen."

"I
would not hesitate to recommend Dr. Lee."

"One
of the best residents in recent memory."

Wow. I could only hope they'd speak half
so well of me when I graduated. Two were doctors I didn't know, Dr. P.K. Kumar
and Dr. Charles Ouimet. The last and warmest was from Dr. Kurt Radshaw, the
doctor whose murder I had solved. I paused and blinked. He'd been a good man.

Otherwise, the emerg file was pretty much
business and not very useful.

The psych file was a lot fatter. I
flipped through the articles quickly. The topics were the same then as now:
suicide risk assessment, determining patient competence, depression and bipolar
disorder, etc. But then I found a whole stack of papers on antisocial
personality disorder.

That was unusual. It's the medical term
for sociopaths, psychopaths, whatever you want to call Robert Pickton, Jeffrey
Dahmer, Paul Bernardo, Hannibal Lecter, and other personifications of evil.

I've never diagnosed a patient as
antisocial. Not even on the advice of the attending staff. You can imagine how
it wouldn't exactly be a popular label.

Maybe Laura had done a presentation on
it. But for her emerg presentations, she'd kept copies of the overheads. No
such animal here. And again, I couldn't imagine the staff saying, "Let's
teach the medical students about something useful like antisocial
personality!"

I did attend a forensic psych lecture in
med school. I thought I'd hear about cool cases, but it turned out to be an
hour or two of legalese and disappointment.

I scanned the articles themselves to
learn more about the disorder. I already knew a little bit. The classic
triad—the "watch out for this kid" trio of symptoms—is
fire-setting, cruelty to animals, and bedwetting. We all laughed about the last
one in med school because it seems so incongruous, but here it was again in
black and white. If you dig into their childhood, they often tortured pets and
set fires by day and required rubber sheets at night.

The other thing I remembered, the biggie,
was lack of remorse. Usually, if you hurt someone, you feel bad about it, even
if you quickly justify it to yourself. But psychopaths really and truly just
don't care beyond their own needs. It's mine, I want it. You're in my way, too
bad. Steal from the collection plate. Boot the dog out of the way. Just a hop,
skip, and a jump away from adultery, embezzlement, and yes, murder.

Fellow people and creatures are just
obstacles in their way.

They may be charming. They may sleep
around. In other words, they'd probably out-play and out-last on
Survivor
.

A few more nuggets from Dr. Hare, a Ph.D.
and the research main man: a lot of them work in the entertainment industry,
which kind of makes sense. Law and politics are an even more natural fit. And
once he mentioned it, I could imagine them fitting in as cult leaders,
mercenaries, and (ugh) military personnel. But he also found them in medicine
and the clergy.

Yikes. They were everywhere. All cunning.
Hostile. Treacherous. Cruel.

I shivered. It makes you wonder how many people
are wearing a mask.

Arguably, the job of a psychiatrist is to
take that mask off.

Had Laura encountered someone who fit
this picture?
 
And instead of blowing the
whistle, had she tried to diagnose and treat him herself?

Because if there was one flaw in this
golden girl, I suspected it was her pride. She wanted the A plus-plus-plus.
What better way to do it than to capture a criminal herself?

Then I almost smiled. Okay, I still saw
some similarities between us.

But back to the more pressing question. If
I went out on a limb and said, Yes, there is a psychopath who killed Laura on
purpose, who was it?

I ran through the rest of the file and
found two oddities. One was an orthopedic review article on bone age, focusing
on the closure of epiphyseal (growth) plates in adolescents. She should have
filed that under ortho, or possibly emerg, not psych. I flipped through it. I
already knew that long bones lengthen through little growth plates on either
end of the bones, turning cartilage into bone. The growth plates look like
black lines on X-rays.

When I show teenagers the film, they
occasionally get excited because those black lines mean they're still growing.
Once the growth plate closes and the black line disappears, that bone's as long
as it's going to get. But since most of them are already taller than me, I
can't get too excited. I just want to know if they've fractured right through
the growth plate because that's the weakest link.

Laura had made a note:

Humerus
ossification:

Upper
end ~20 y.o. , lower end ~16 y.o.

Radius:

Upper
end ~18 y.o., lower end ~20 y.o.

That was hard core. Orthopods need to
know that kind of information, but not most emergency doctors. Well, more
evidence that Laura deserved a gold star.

The other weird thing was a pamphlet for
gay-lesbian-bi-transgendered teens. That made me wonder if Laura had been gay.

I skimmed the remainder of the filing
cabinets, trying to avoid sustaining any paper cuts, while Mrs. Lee started up
some heavy duty opera in the other room. A soprano filled the apartment,
further setting my teeth on edge.

Finally, I shut the cabinet with a bang.
As I'd suspected, Laura was far too ethical to bring patient notes home. Even
if she had, there was no way I could pull the charts on all the patients she'd
seen.

The psychopath might not have been a
patient anyway.

I tapped my pencil on my teeth while Ryan
hummed along to the music. I grinned to myself. Mr. Culture.

There might be a faster way of cutting
through the chaos. I flipped through Laura's old Day Timer. It was all work, no
play, but it did tell me that when she died, she was running Monday evening
group therapy at the Douglas Hospital. A truly antisocial personality might be
memorable eight years later.

Tucker knew the doctors at the Douglas.
It was time to talk to Tucker again.
Oy
vey.

A baritone joined the soprano, their
voices dueling for supremacy on the recording. My stomach rumbled at the smell
and sizzle of food from the kitchen.

At long last, I stood to join Ryan and
Mrs. Lee, wondering just how, even if a sociopath existed, I might manage to
catch him nearly a decade later.

Chapter
1
8

There are real bad guys and there are posers.

A guy in our borderline group fooled me at first.

I earmarked him early. I figured he could come in handy. He came
on to Reena's little foster sister.

Reena tried to warn Wendy off. "He's older than me. He's
nineteen. And he's got a record, okay?
 
As in criminal?
 
Leave him
alone."

"I like bad boys," she said, flaunting her tiny tits as
best she could.

Wendy was one-hundred percent poser.

So Reena started on the guy next. "She's underage."

"She sure doesn't act it." Mike drained his beer.

"I mean it. She's only thirteen."

"No shit." But I saw his eyes dart from side to side. He
was thinking about easier pussy. Naw, this guy didn't play in my league.

Still, when Wendy crooked her finger and yelled, "Hey, this
is my new song!", he got up. They thrashed to Demerit and she just about
gave him a lap dance before she puked up her beer.