Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (25 page)

I touched my hand to my temple. Sometimes
I missed them so much, especially Kevin.

Two hang-ups. I refused to speculate. I
just noted down the date and time. Caller ID had finally kicked in, but both of
the hang-ups were from unknown callers and it was too late to trace them
because I'd gotten one more call after both of them. I'd send my data to the
police.

The last recording held Ryan's low voice.
"Hello, Hope."

I closed my eyes. Hearing from him felt
like a tonic. I needed him. I shouldn't, but I did.

"I wanted to come up this weekend. I
wanted to show you and Mrs. Lee the model, which is going pretty well. Work has
been crazy, but I spent some time on it. I think I can show they ran Laura over
on purpose."

Hallelujah. That was one reason I loved
that guy. I could count on him. I seized a pen in case he was going to deliver
any details. He could e-mail me the rest later. Mrs. Lee would be ecstatic.

"The only thing is..." He
sighed. "Something's come up. Well, actually, Lisa came up. The Chinese
grapevine probably already told you. It's no big deal, she caught a ride with a
friend, but she's staying until Sunday."

Slap down.

I started hyperventilating. I knew it was
too good to be true. Two guys wanting me. Now Tucker was off doing God knows
what, and Lisa was working her charms on Ryan.

Did I have any right to be jealous? No.

Was I?

Hell, yeah.

Ryan's voice penetrated my consciousness
again. "Did Tucker ever find that Martinez guy? He never answered my
message. Anyway. Like I said, about this weekend, no big deal. I'll be up next
weekend. I'll call you later, okay?"

No big deal.

No big
deal
.

No big deal, my sweet brown ass.

And why was he talking about Mike
Martinez with Tucker?

After that, I abandoned my tentative
plans of R&R with water, ice, a fan, and a well-read copy of
Sarah, Plain and Tall
. I got up and
paced. I did not want to brood. I did not want to weigh my own hypocrisy. I
could not bring myself to study psychiatry.

Ryan said his preliminary model showed it
was murder. I assumed he wanted to demo it for me and Mrs. Lee, and
troubleshoot any problems before we took it to the police, but we'd better have
our act together when we hit the station.

Ergo, I reviewed the facts that I knew
about Laura Lee.

Someone ran her down on August eighth,
2003.

They found the vehicle, but no
fingerprints except members of the owner's family, and a single blond hair that
wasn't in their criminal database.

We had no suspects, although Tucker was
suspicious of Michael Martinez from Laura's borderline group.

How could we track down this Martinez
guy?

I flipped through the white pages and
found three listings for M. Martinez, no Michael. That was a start. I'd have to
come up with a good story, though. Maybe pose as a telemarketer?

While I was thinking, I Googled Michael
Martinez in Montreal. The online white pages were the same as the print listing
and the name was so common, I found listings on everything from a baseball
player to a music teacher.

I wanted to talk this over with someone.
Tucker and Ryan were both out. I hesitated with my hand on the phone for a
minute. I'd been really bad about calling back my med school friends, and it
was a bit weird to start ringing them up and saying, "How you doing? Crack
any chests? Cool. Listen, I'm pretending to be a detective now...."

Suddenly, I remembered Tori Yamamoto, my
bestest Montreal girlfriend. Duh. I'd been overdosing on testosterone lately
and she'd been working off-site. Time to give her a call. She could apply her
meticulous intellect and give me another, much-needed perspective.

The phone rang and rang. I waited for her
machine to kick in, but suddenly I heard a click and she said,
"Hello?"

"Hey Tori, it's Hope."

"Oh, Hope!"

She sounded surprised. I forced a laugh.
"Yeah. Sorry I haven't been in touch since Tuesday. How've you been?"

"I'm good."

I remembered Tori was not a big chatter.
It was always kind of a shock after my other, motor-mouthed friends. I came to the
point. "Great. Listen, I don't know what you're up to tonight, but I was
wondering if we could hang out."

She paused long enough that I knew it
would be a 'no.' I doodled on my phone pad, a monster of curlicues and
googly-eyes with hooked eyebrows, while I waited for her to frame her response.
At last, she said, "Well, I would like that, but...please hold on a
second." She covered the receiver, but I heard her light voice and then a
man respond.

A baritone, actually. One that was
strangely familiar.

No. It couldn't be.

My gut said otherwise.

Tori came back on again. "I'm sorry,
Hope, I don't think tonight is—"

"Is that
Tucker
?" I burst out.

"Well." For the first time, she
sounded flustered. "Actually, yes. But it's not, ah..."

I waited for her to explain herself.
Themselves.

His voice rumbled in the background
again.

"I would like to see you," she
said finally. "Maybe tomorrow?"

I could not believe it. He'd only left my
place a little over an hour ago. He must have gone straight to Tori's.

Did the guy have yellow fever or what?

The walls of my little apartment seemed
to fold in on me.

I thought I was so special, but I wasn't.
I was just another prospective notch on Tucker's bedpost. I was just Ryan's
ex-girlfriend. I was just another resident grinding my way through the medical
system. I was just another sucker Mrs. Lee had prodded into helping to dig up
ancient history.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash the
phone. I wanted to kick in Ryan's computer screen and tear Tucker's drawing up
with my teeth.

No. I would never tear up that drawing.

What I really, really wanted to do curl
up and cry my eyelashes off.

"Hope?" said Tori. "I'm
sorry, I really should go. I'll call you tomorrow, if that's all right. Maybe
after breakfast?"

Sure.
After you have breakfast in bed with Tucker
. I could hardly speak through my clogged throat. "All
right. 'Bye," I managed.

And then I did cry. I was just so
exhausted. I sobbed until my nose and throat were raw and my head ached.

I knew I should just drop off into sleep.

I knew I was not firing on all cylinders,
what with the previous case, the psych stress, the man-madness, and the patient
potentially about to deliver.

Instead, I called the one person I was
sure would be healthy, home on a Saturday night and happy to talk to me.

Chapter
25

I felt better even before Mrs. Lee put
the kettle on. I took the thick white china cup in both hands and blew on the
tea. It held just the faintest aroma, although I could see small bits of leaves
on the bottom of the cup.

"Thanks for having me over," I
said softly. "I just couldn't stand sitting at home doing nothing."

Mrs. Lee set out homemade oatmeal cookies
without replying. I realized that I'd probably just summed up her past eight
years. We sipped and munched while I gave my painfully thin summary.

"I want to find this Michael
Martinez," she said, setting her cup down.

"I guess Tucker and Ryan are working
on it, although they haven't told me much."

"It's not enough." Her eyes
were nearly black in the dim kitchen light.

I understood. "What were you
thinking of doing?"

"Tracking him down myself," she
said immediately, before grimacing. She picked up a cloth and wiped down the
table. "Do you have any ideas?"

"I think they're covering the usual
leads. I was thinking about your file, though. You put an ad in the
papers."

"Every year." She nodded and
sat down again, the cloth still crumpled in her hand.

"What if we put an ad out for
Michael Martinez, offering a reward? Someone might come forward. From the
borderline group, or someone who knew him."

Her brow creased in thought. "That's
a good idea. I've been asking for information about the accident, but if we
could track down the perpetrator, I'd like that even more."

"We don't know if he's the
perpetrator."

She scrubbed at the table with new zeal.

My usual guilt kicked in. "Of
course, a newspaper ad may just be a waste of money. Let me put up some free
ads online and post a few flyers around McGill. He'd be twenty-seven now, a bit
old for college, but—"

"I will pay for it," said Mrs.
Lee. "All of it. The advertisements and the reward for information. I want
to do it in every city paper and the Internet, too."

I shook my head. "I think that would
be pretty expensive. I could probably pay for two ads, one in English and one
in French."

Her barely-there eyebrows arched in
amusement. "How would you afford it? You know you hardly get paid as it
is."

I'm the first to complain about our
meager residency salaries, especially when I get ten grand less than my Ontario
classmates, pay higher taxes, and have to cough up tuition fees, rent, and food
to boot, but I was not about to take advantage of Mrs. Lee. "I don't know
that this'll turn up any information. It's a stab in the dark. I can't take
your grocery money for that."

She threw back her head and laughed, but
her laughter had an edge. "Laura had a life insurance policy."

"She did?" I don't have one.
You never expect to kick the bucket below age thirty, minimum.

"All this time, I've been investing
the money, unwilling to touch it, hoping that..." She shook her head.
"Never mind. I can afford a few hundred dollars better than you can. If I
can spend the money on anything that has to do with my daughter, so much the
better. In fact, I would like to give you an honorarium."

I held up my hand. "No way."

"But you've been spending all your
spare time on Laura."

"It's the least I could do for
you." I sipped the tea and changed the subject. "We never talked
about money before, though, Mrs. Lee. Is it possible someone else wanted
Laura's inheritance?"

She sucked her bottom lip. "I don't
see how. She had no will and the money came back to me and my husband."

"What happened to your
husband?"

"He died of a heart attack two years
after Laura died. He was only 62 years old. I like to say he died of a broken
heart." She managed to smile. "She was always his little girl."

My dad said the same thing about me. I
shoved the pain behind my heart, where it could haunt me later. "What do
you want the ad to say? I could put it up online tonight."

***

Sunday morning, still furious and
restless after zero calls or messages from Tucker or Tori, despite their
promises, I decided to do something unprecedented: go to the hospital on my
weekend off.

I marched over to St. Joe's instead of
biking. I wanted to feel the sidewalk under my sandals. I wanted to glare at
the people sun-tanning bare-chested on their balconies with their feet planted
on the railing and a phone cradled against their ears. I wanted to stomp past
the soft-bellied middle-aged women who tended their gardens. I wanted to shake
my head at the drivers blocking the road, four-way flashers going, so they
could dash into someone's apartment.

Oh, and I wanted to put up some signs
asking for information on Michael Martinez. Mrs. Lee might be shelling out the
bucks, but I had a computer and a printer and packing tape a'plenty.

I crossed through HEC
,
l'École des hautes études commerciales
. I'd kind of avoided the
Université de Montréal's
business school because of the whole
aforementioned massacre deal, but now I needed to affix notices, and it was
possible that Michael Martinez was a business dude. I added a poster to the
closest lamp post. As an environmentalist, I wasn't about to plaster them
everywhere, but with every sticky-kiss of packing tape, my mood lifted.

I hadn't gotten any more mysterious phone
calls or letters overnight. Maybe I'd scared Wendy off.

Fifteen minutes later, I cut through St.
Joe's emerg, wondering if I might run into Tucker. Neither of us was on, but
you never knew. I put up two posters in the waiting room before the fluorescent
lights and the smell of iodine made me reconsider my folly. Before I could back
out into the sunshine, Nancy beckoned me over to the psych corner. "What
are you doing here? You're not on call."

"Yeah, I know."

"Get out of here. It'll still be
waiting for your tomorrow."