Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (7 page)

He raised his eyebrows. "You're over
him?"

I shrugged. "Enough. What about you
and Lisa?"

He looked straight ahead. "Nothing
doing."

"Not even—" I wasn't sure
exactly how to ask. Booty call? Or, more likely, yearning looks over hymnals?

But he said, flatly, "No."

"Okay." I swung my feet. Even
though I hadn't had that much sun, my legs and feet were quite tanned. "I
know it’s none of my business, but I guess you didn’t break up over
religion."

"No, that part was good." He
was silent so long, I thought he wasn’t done, but finally, he added, "She
didn’t trust me."

It felt like a reprimand, however
indirect. I stayed silent.

"Around other girls." He
glanced at me sidelong and suddenly I wanted to smile. Hope, 2, Lisa, 1.

The waitress brought us our main dishes,
beef curry for him,
sag paneer
for
me,
naan
and
basmati
rice for both of us. Steam rose from the dishes. My stomach
growled.

Ryan just laughed. "Did you get any
breakfast?"

"Sort of." A pack of soda
crackers from my lab coat pocket.

He made sure to serve me first. That's a
Chinese thing, you show respect by serving the other person first, preferably
starting with the eldest. I smiled.

I reached for the
naan
. Butter shone in the bread's dimpled pockets, a cholesterol
sin, but I didn't care. Medicine makes you eat like you're at war. Not that
psych was supposed to feel that way, but I was actually more stressed than when
I'd been on emerg.

I tore off a piece of
naan
and watched Ryan's eyebrows come
together as he spooned food on his own plate, careful not to let the different
foods touch. I used to tease him about that kind of engineering precision. No
wonder his hobbies included model airplanes and tinkering with solar car
design. The guy was all about rulers and agendas. Except for me.

I started eating. The spinach in the
sag paneer
was mushy, but I liked the
cheese. Ryan's beef curry was better. I mixed it with the rice. He had a talent
for ordering something better than me, no matter how I pondered and reasoned
over the menu.

Ryan. Talent.

A light bulb lit up over my head.

Mrs. Lee's envelope was not as helpful as
I'd imagined. Most of it was filled with police reports, dense with jargon,
some information blacked out. Like I said, I knew that the team on the scene
had measured tire tracks, gathered up pieces of a broken headlight, taken paint
samples and measurements off the guard rail where Laura had been crushed.

Maybe, just maybe, Ryan could do
something with that data.

But first, I had to talk to Mrs. Lee and
get her permission.

Chapter
7

The
Mafia.

The
Crips.

The
Bloods.

The
Yakuda.

They
had it good.

That's
what I wanted. An organization I headed, where I could throw a dart at
someone's picture and say, bang. Take 'em out. And someone would. No fuss, no
muss.

But
part of me wants to know what it's like to kill someone myself.

I've
seen dead people in the movies. They got their eyes blank and some
nasty-looking makeup. But what does it really feel like to kill?

Say
if you're strangling someone. You've got your hands around the neck. You're
squeezing. She's fighting. She's clawing. She's choking. She's getting weaker.
Limp. Unconscious.

Can
you feel the second the life leaves the body?
 
Or do you just have to keep on squeezing until you're totally sure?

***

When I rolled in at 8:36 a.m. for my
morning psych ER shift, Nancy had already lined up an eighteen year-old sent by
the CLSC (Quebec community health) clinic for "R/O (rule out) first
psychotic break."

But Mrs. Lee waved to me from beside the
psychiatry office, her face bright with expectation.

Although she smiled, her eyes tracked my
every move. She wore a navy dress and beige sandals with a matching handbag, a perfect
lady who was no longer in strict mourning, except she'd taken full advantage of
my disclosure that I was in the emerg most days on this rotation.

She had hope. In more than one sense of
the word.

I groaned to myself. The psych office
door was open and I couldn't see Nancy or the eighteen year-old, so I waved
Mrs. Lee into the office. "Please sit down, Mrs. Lee."

"You read the file," she said,
even as she tucked her skirt under her legs and drew her purse on to her lap.
The woman did not waste time.

I nodded.

"You don't think I have a
case."

My head jerked up.

The corners of her mouth turned up.
"You think I haven't seen your expression before? I know it well."

That reminded me of a line in
Eat, Pray, Love
where Elizabeth
Gilbert's ex says, "You have the opposite of a poker face. More like
a...miniature golf face."

Mrs. Lee inclined her head regally.
"I've read the file myself, many times. I know there isn't hard evidence,
only hearsay. The police told me so. They felt sorry for me, but said they
couldn't help me."

"Then why did you give me the
file?"

She paused a long moment. "Did you
see the picture?"

I nodded. They'd included her class photo
in the news reports. "She was lovely." Clear brown eyes, delicate
features, a touch of humour in her lips. Not to mention her
pièce de resistance
, a sweep of shiny
black hair to mid-back, probably her one vanity.

Her eyelid flickered in acknowledgement.
"Did you see the resemblance?"

I paused, unsure how much to let on. Who
wants to admit that she looks like a dead woman?
 
"Some."

"Not just in looks, but in how you
act. She was very good at her work. She was always professional, always looking
out for the patient, always studying." She paused. "She pretended to
be tough."

I bit my tongue. Mrs. Lee was projecting
Laura onto me, to use another psych term. How on earth would this woman know if
I were tough or hard-working? I don't study enough.

I wouldn't argue with her. I didn't want
to give her any more ammunition. I felt sorry for her, but Tucker was right.
I'd gone far enough. Time to cut my ties. "Mrs. Lee."

"Yes." Her eyes were nearly
black in the dim light, but extremely calm.

"I don't think I can help you."

"I admit the file doesn't give you a
sense of Laura as a person. Her favourite colour was blue. She played soccer.
We had a puppy who got run over when she was twelve and she refused to have a
dog ever again because she loved him so much. She called me every week, even
when she was terribly busy with her work."

I closed my eyes. I talk to my family
every Sunday night, barring nights on call. The truth was, I could see myself
in Laura and Laura in me.

"I know you're not a professional
detective. But the professionals haven't helped me. I have to ask everywhere I
can. Will you help me?"

I steeled myself. "Mrs. Lee, you
asked me to read the file and I did."

"But there's more. In her
room."

Going to a patient's house. Ixnay, ixnay.
"No, thank you."

"She kept a filing cabinet that
might contain more clues."

Clues to a hit-and-run?

"Please. I think that, as a medical professional,
you might discover something the police passed over."

Why would a doctor make a better
detective than a detective?

"Please, Dr. Sze."

I shook my head. "I'd be wasting
your time."

She met my eyes. "Dr. Sze, as far as
I'm concerned, my entire life has been a waste of time since she died. The only
thing I can do is try and unearth the truth. I've been trying for eight years.
I need a fresh pair of eyes."

It was illogical. It was false hope.

I opened my mouth to say no, but my heart
answered instead of my brain. "All right. I'll think about going to your
house."
After I decide if it's
unethical or not
. "Actually, I was wondering something else."

"Yes?" Her fingers dented her
bag.

"I know an engineer who does
computer modeling in his spare time. I thought he might be able to use the
measurements from the police report to simulate the...accident and prove that
it was deliberate."

She nodded and cocked her head to one
side. "The police thought it was an accident."

"But in 2003, they might not have
done a computer simulation." If the
Quebec
police system is
funded anything like the medical system, they'd be a good decade or two behind
the rest of the civilized world. "R—I mean, my friend might be able
to prove it. If it's true."

To my surprise, when I met her eyes, she
was smiling. No tears. No argument. Just two words. "Thank you."

I licked my lips, more uncomfortable than
if she'd argued with me. "But I don't want to give you false expectations.
It probably won't prove anything."

"I know. But you're on my side.
Thank you." She leaned over the desk to shake my hand. Her grasp was firm.

I glanced through the open door and
spotted Nancy giving me the eye. Moments later, I ushered Walter Turrigan into
the office. He looked like your average eighteen year-old who missed the golden
days of heavy metal: a medium-built white guy with scraggly, shoulder-length
hair, in a faded black Alice Cooper T-shirt and tight jeans ripped at the
knees.

"Hello, Walter," I said after
Nancy closed the door behind us. It seemed rude to read through the referral
notes in front of him. I needed an ice breaker. "Do you go to
school?" I'd never understood the Quebec school system. They do high
school, some sort of pre-college thing called CÉGEP, and then college or
university. At eighteen, I wasn't sure where he fit. "Or are you
working?"

"I go to school. I might quit,
though." He wasn't quite making eye contact. His gaze fell somewhere
behind my left shoulder.

I glanced behind me. I saw nothing except
some cabinets and a print of Van Gogh's sunflowers. I turned back to Walter.
"Why might you quit?"

He paused. Shrugged. Brief eye contact.
"I've got more important things to do."

The skin at the back of my neck prickled.
"Like what?"

His eyes strayed to the sunflower print.
No answer.

I repeated, "What more important
things do you have to do?"

Another long pause, communion with the
print.

I craned my neck around and took another
look. Nice yellow sunflowers in a gold frame. We stared at it in silence
together before I asked, "Does this picture mean something to you?"

His gaze flickered to me. "I can't
tell you."

"Is somebody telling you not
to?"

He shifted in his chair.
"Maybe."

Bingo. This could be the moment to ask
the most important questions. I needed to know if he heard voices and if they
were dangerous. "Is this the same person who tells you to hurt
yourself?"

His left eyelid twitched. "Who told
you that?"

I had to move delicately and maintain our
rapport but still gather the information. Once a psychiatrist told me his
second choice of career was surgery. For the first time, I partially grasped
the idea of slicing with words instead of with a scalpel. I parried, "Why
don't you tell me about it? I want to help you."

He watched at the print for a long beat
and seemed to ask it, instead of me, "Who are you?"

"I told you. Dr. Hope Sze. A
resident doctor in psychiatry."

He paused. I waited. Silence is useful.
But then he said, "I can't talk to you."

"Why not?" slipped out of my
mouth. I'd rather have the scalpel. I'm way too blunt, too rushed, with words.

He raised his voice. "I can't."

Uh oh. I was losing him. "Would you
rather talk to the psychiatrist?"

He stood up. "I have to get out of
here."

"No. Please don't do that." I
really couldn't let a psychotic patient leave, and the last thing I needed was
a second Code White. "So, ah, tell me about yourself. Where do you
live?"

"I live with my parents. I may move
out, though."

There was a certain trend here. Whenever
he gave me a little information, he immediately backtracked. "Okay. What
school do you go to?"

"McGill."

Technically, we were enrolled at the same
university, although the only time I saw the campus was when I got photographed
for my student card and the few times I made it to aerobics class. "And
what are you studying?"