Read You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy Online
Authors: David Kessler
“I can’t believe how easily we got it!” said Nat.
“It’s too early to start celebrating. There’s still that full hearing in less than an hour.”
“So who’s going to serve what?”
“I’m going to serve the TRO on the warden at San Quentin. I want you to serve the order on the local airline office, then fax the other to the New York branch of Baker & Segal. Tell them to serve it on the COO or CEO, basically whoever they can get to quickest.”
“Do you want me for the full hearing?”
“Be available just in case. I might even need you to cover for me. It depends how fast I get back from San Quentin.”
“Okay.”
They split up and went to their respective cars. After Alex drove off, he put in a call to Juanita and she briefed him on her follow-up conversation with the nurse at the medical center, including her probing question to Susan White about the medical center’s true intentions. Alex weighed it up in his mind.
“Do
you
think they’re stonewalling us?”
There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the line before Juanita replied.
“I wouldn’t say that. I’ve checked up on the British Data Protection Act and it is a legal minefield.”
“My question is, do they
want
to cooperate?”
“I don’t know about the Administrator; I’ve never spoke to him. But I think the nurse genuinely wanted to help. She sounded sincere and I think she’ll try.”
“Okay, well get drafting then. Let’s keep it simple. We want the date Dorothy arrived and the date she left. Ask what treatment she received, but state that this is less important than the dates. State explicitly that if the treatment details are a problem, they shouldn’t delay, just ignore the question and send us the dates. We don’t want to give them any excuse for delaying.”
When the call ended, Alex remembered that David had said he was going to send him the poem that he had found on Dorothy’s computer. He logged onto his email account from his iPhone and found the message with the attachment already there. He clicked on the attachment and it opened:
You dragged me before the mirror
And ripped the clothes off of me
Forcing me to face the fact
That I am not, that I am not
The thing that you want me to be.
Alex felt uneasy as he read the lines. To whom were these words addressed? To her tormentor? To the boy who had bullied her at school? Was this her final message to Clayton Burrow?
…ripped the clothes off of me.
What did it mean? And who did it? Alex knew that he had to find out. And there was one person who could tell him.
By the time the fax from America started coming through, Susan White was already standing by the machine. The wording was pretty much what she had expected. She knew that she would probably get more attitude from Mrs. Lloyd if she called again, but she didn’t have a choice. Aside from that, Stuart had indicated that it would be all right to call him once the request came through. If she didn’t call him, he wouldn’t do anything: not consult lawyers, not ask for advice and not authorize her to transmit the information to Alex Sedaka’s office.
This time, much to Susan’s relief, Stuart answered the phone himself.
“Hi, Stuart. They’ve faxed over the request.”
“What does it say?”
She read it out to him.
“Okay, can you fax it over to me?”
“Sure. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have to get some legal advice.”
“Do you think you can get it quickly?”
“Look, Susan, I’ll do what I can!”
She hadn’t expected him to snap like that. But was it because he was under pressure or because he didn’t have any intention of doing anything?
“Okay. I’ll fax it over.”
She put the phone down and faxed it to his home. While it was going through, the phone rang again. Another nurse answered.
“What … look, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that…”
She was looking helplessly at Susan, who could hear shouting at the other end of the line. Susan mouthed “I’ll take it,” and the other nurse handed the phone to her.
“Hallo, who is this?”
A chill went up Susan White’s spine when she heard the reply.
“What do you want?”
“I understand that you’ve received a request to send over some information about Dorothy Olsen to the law offices of Alex Sedaka.”
“What of it?” asked Susan defensively.
“Well I’m just calling to tell you that that would be a breach of doctor
-
patient confidentiality as well as of the Data Protection Act.”
“But there’s a man on death row who’s going to – ”
“I know that.”
“But you can’t just let him – ”
“It’s not for you to decide. You are not authorized to tell them
anything.
Is that understood?”
“So … you’re just going to let an innocent man die?”
“That’s none of your concern!”
“Look … I know that you have the law on your side. But there’s a human life at stake.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Susan bit her lip as she waited.
“All right, but don’t tell them more than you have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell them about the date of the first consultation or the date of discharge…”
There was a painful pause.
“But you can tell them about the abortion.”
David was feeling bothered by his father’s reaction to the verse that he had discovered. The verse might not have been particularly relevant to their investigation, but they had to work with what they had and David had felt that having found it, it was his duty to pass it on.
However, David wasn’t one to take it personally. It was just that the reaction showed what enormous stress his father was under. He had just over eight hours to save a man’s life and they had found very little. In any case, his father was right. Poems were not going to help them. They needed cold, hard, solid facts – like the fact that she had bought a ticket to England, or the fact that she had downloaded a PDF brochure of a private health center in London.
What they didn’t have was any proof that she had actually got there. And this kind of proof would be very hard to get from the United States. Or would it?
If Dorothy had gone to England, she would have had to use money when she got there. Unless she went to some cloistered nunnery she would have had to function in the real world. Of course she had the jewelry, but she could hardly have used that as a negotiable instrument in day-to-day transactions. The fact that she had liquidated her trust fund and bought the jewelry was moderately compelling evidence of her intention to flee. But would she have traded the jewelry for money and risked having a lot of bulky cash on her in London? Or would she had opened a new bank account where her money would be safe and readily accessible when she needed it?
The answer was probably the latter. And, given sufficient time, they could probably get court orders and search through banking records to find her. But time was of the essence. They had only discovered late in the day that she had even been
contemplating
going to England. Would the courts give them the time they needed now to prove that she actually did? Or would they take a more stubborn and intractable line, on the grounds that the defense should have done this before?
Clayton Burrow had become a pariah and the courts had shown no particular desire to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even David had little regard for Burrow. But they were now seeing faint signs that he might be innocent after all, at least of murder. He couldn’t ignore that, even if the courts could.
The only question was, how to make progress. Assuming that Dorothy
had
opened a bank account in London, how could he go about finding it and proving it quickly? Well the first thing to do was to work out
where
she might have banked. The Finchley Road Medical Centre provided a useful starting point. She probably didn’t know London and would likely open a bank account somewhere near where she was staying or where she had some interest.
Using Google as his first source of reference, he searched for British banks. Then, armed with a list of names, he searched for “Finchley Road” in conjunction with various bank names.
It was the first stage of what he suspected would be a long and arduous process.
Alex was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge when the call came through.
“Hi, Juanita.”
“Hi, boss. I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
“Give me the good news.”
“They told me what treatment Dorothy had at the medical center.”
“What?”
“She had an abortion.”
“An abortion?”
“That’s what they told me.”
“Why would she go all the way to London for an abortion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, so what was the bad news?”
“They refuse to tell me anything else. They said they can’t send us any written confirmation of the date she arrived or tell us the date she left.”
“So they’re giving us the opposite of what we asked for.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And they refuse to give it in writing?”
“That’s what she said.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t think she was lying.”
“No, I accept that, Juanita. It just seems rather strange.”
“Something’s occurred to me, boss. Maybe it was Clayton who got her pregnant, maybe she tried to blackmail him.”
Alex remembered that he hadn’t told Juanita about the poem.
“You think he killed her to silence her?”
“Maybe someone else killed her to protect him.”
“Like who?”
“Like his mother.”
“When I suggested that, Juanita, you ridiculed me.”
His tone was chiding.
“Okay, I’m sorry, boss. But now I’m not so sure.”
Nat felt the warm, humid air as soon as he stepped out into the open. After the air conditioned airline office, it was like stepping into a steam room.
He had just served the court order on the local office of the airline and he had to walk half a block to get to his car. He waited for almost a minute in the car while the air conditioning kicked in. Only then did he take out his cell phone and put in a call to Alex’s number.
“Hi, Nat,” Alex answered.
“I served the order on the local office. They looked kind of … shocked.”
“Do you think they’ll comply?”
“Probably not. They seemed a bit afraid, but I don’t think they can. I think they couldn’t get the information that quick even if they wanted to.”
“What about the other one?”
“I’ve got time to get it back to the office and still make it to the hearing.”
“Are you sure?” Alex asked.
“Positive. I’m only five minutes away.”
Alex knew that five minutes could mean anything from two minutes to twenty. But he didn’t want to micro-manage – especially not someone as dedicated and motivated as Nat.
“Okay, just drop it off there and let Juanita deal with it. Just make sure you’re at the District Court when the ADA gets there.”
“Okay.”
Nat pressed the red button and put the cell phone in the glove compartment. As he did so, a picture fell out. Nat reached down and picked it up. He always carried the picture round with him, ever since he’d found it … a reminder. It was a picture of a young man, one of those spontaneous, frat party pictures where the alcohol-fueled revelry is interrupted when someone pulls out a camera and starts taking pictures. In this case, it was just a snapshot of a young man raising his glass and smiling. The previous picture in the sequence had been a reverse angle shot of the young woman who had taken this picture, evidently taken by the man. She too was smiling with delight. But that picture wasn’t here now. He kept it at home.
Whether the two people loved each other or were just posing was anyone’s guess. It took a bit of supplementary information to answer that one.