by Wally Duff
“Yikes. You seem to be having an epidemic of that here.” Eddie picked up his fish taco. “Glad I don’t practice here.”
He finished it in three bites.
Just like Janet.
“What are the ways doctors kill themselves?” I asked.
“Some would use a gun,” he began. “Messy but quick and works unless you pull away at the last second.”
“What about a knife?” Cas asked.
“Most people would slash their wrists because they see that on TV, but a doctor, especially a surgeon, who wants to kill himself would choose the femoral artery. One deep incision and you’d bleed out in a flash.”
“What about a doctor hanging himself like a few celebrities recently have?” I asked.
“They might do it, but from a doctor’s perspective, there are too many things that can go wrong.”
“Like what?” Molly asked.
“If you don’t break your neck, you might not die right away or, worse, might survive but be brain dead from lack of oxygen.”
“What about jumping out a window?” Cas asked.
“Not in a million years. A doctor would rarely do anything that dramatic because we have access to better ways to die that other people don’t have.”
“What about being burned up in a car crash?” Cas asked. “That’s dramatic.”
“A doctor might do that, but only if he wanted to destroy any evidence — like having AIDS — that would be found at autopsy.”
“Which way would you choose?” I asked.
“IV drugs,” he said.
“Why not pills?” Linda asked.
“Pick the right pills, and it would be happy time before you departed, but there’s the risk of vomiting from gastric irritation of the drugs effectively ruining your plan.”
“An IV would solve that,” Cas said.
“For sure. I would start one and inject Fentanyl for starters.”
“What’s that?” Molly asked.
“A synthetic opioid and potent narcotic analgesic, roughly a hundred times more potent than morphine — more like heroin. A lot of doctors get hooked on it, but if you’re going to kill yourself, why worry about getting addicted?”
“Hard to argue with that,” I said.
“It also causes respiratory depression, which ultimately is what you want to achieve.”
“What’s that mean?” Molly asked.
“You stop breathing and then you die.”
“After Fentanyl, what next?” I asked.
“No question, propofol.”
“I’ve heard of that one, but I can’t think of where,” Molly said.
“Try Michael Jackson,” Cas said. “His doctor put him to sleep with it.”
“I would do the same thing to myself,” he continued. “It’s a short-acting hypnotic agent. Fentanyl puts you in happy-land, and then you push in the propofol and drift off to sleep.”
“And never wake up,” I said.
“You got it.”
77
“Peter somehow contracted AIDS and then killed himself, but what about catching other diseases?” Cas asked.
“He had something else wrong with him too?” Eddie asked, as he poured BBQ sauce on his sandwich.
“No, Peter told me there were several different serious illnesses going around the doctors in his building, which was why, when he began to feel tired, he wouldn’t go see anyone,” she said.
“He didn’t want any of them to think he was a crock.” This time he reached for hot sauce for his enchilada.
“A high serum porcelain is the way Peter put it,” she said.
“Doctors are terrible patients. We always think we know more than the physician treating us does.”
“Excuse me for saying this, but the doctors I call on have huge egos,” Alexis said.
“It’s more than that. It’s tough to swallow your pride and surrender your own care into another doctor’s hands. You constantly want to question his or her judgment, even though you know that’s the one thing that bugs you the most when a doctor comes to you as a patient and does it to you.”
“But wouldn’t you would go to a doctor if you were sick enough?” Cas asked.
“First, I would order my own lab tests or x-rays, but if they came back abnormal, I’d be banging on my doctor’s door in the middle of the night.”
“How would all these doctors in the same building get so sick?” I asked.
“It would most likely be random circumstances, but it could be side effects from drugs.”
“Could a person give a drug to a doctor without him knowing about it?” Linda asked.
“Sure. The person could sneak a toxic dose of the drug into the doctor’s food or drink and make him seriously ill. But if the drug was stopped and he was properly treated, he probably wouldn’t die, so why bother?”
“I don’t get it,” Molly said.
“The reason for doing this is to kill the doctors, right?”
“That’s the assumption,” I said.
“The doctors would get sick, but if someone wanted to make sure he killed them, then he would have to use another method.”
“How would you do it?” Alexis asked.
“Not sure. I have to think about it.”
“How about faking a suicide of the doctor you wanted to kill?” Cas asked.
“I guess it could be done.”
We got up and went back to the kitchen for Molly’s dessert.
78
After we finished the meal, the husbands went into the family room to watch the Cubs play the Nationals on TV. Eddie stayed with the women to continue the discussion about our story.
“Eddie, what do you think about Fertig killing Warren and maybe Denning?” Linda asked.
“It’s a stretch for me to accept that he’s killing doctors because they’re on a committee to investigate his results,” Eddie said. “Have the cops found any evidence, like fingerprints or DNA, to make them suspect him?”
“There wasn’t enough left of Peter’s car to search for evidence,” Cas said.
“Denning was a player,” I said. “The detective told me his condo had almost too many fibers, hairs, and fingerprints for the lab to process.”
“What Tina is reluctantly admitting is that there is not one shred of evidence to implicate Fertig as a suspect,” Linda said.
“How about taking a different approach?” he asked.
We waited.
“All of Fertig’s allegedly cured breast cancer patients will eventually die from some disease, right?” he asked.
“Obviously, but why is that relevant?” Linda asked.
“What if each one dies from the same disease?”
“That’s statistically impossible, especially in an aging population,” Linda said.
“But if this is happening, would Fertig hide a fact like this in his paper charts?” I asked.
“Having paper charts doesn’t mean a doctor is hiding something,” he said. “I have paper charts too. Lots of doctors use them as a backup for their EMRs. It’s a sound business practice.”
“Paper charts or not, to keep that quiet would be worth murdering for,” Cas said.
“Like Dr. Michael Doyle,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Alexis asked.
“A man called the ‘Fat Doctor’,” I said. “Fourteen years ago, he had a formulation that worked for losing weight, but it had life-threatening side effects.”
“Maybe Fertig is another Doyle,” he said. “He cures the patients of breast cancer, but they die from something else because of his treatment.”
Uh-oh.
I didn’t mention that Doyle tried to kill me. I hoped Fertig wouldn’t do the same thing.
Part 3
79
It was Monday morning. I jogged a little faster on the treadmill at XSport Fitness. Eddie flew back to Omaha early Sunday before another fall storm hit Chicago and screwed up the departure times. A cold front remained in the area, and trying to ge
t back in shape inside was a better way to go. Warmer too.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that I had a visitor.
“There’s been another one,” Janet Corritore said. She wore a black suit with a white turtleneck sweater. She wasn’t here to work out.
I shut off the machine and took a drink of water before I replied. “Another what?”
She adjusted the gun on her hip. “I’m not sure. It could be another suicide, or it could be a murder.”
Exercise could wait. “A doctor?”
She nodded. “Dr. Samuel Clark.”
“How did he die?”
“Allegedly, he hung himself.”
Allegedly?
“He used to specialize in breast cancer surgery,” she continued.
“Used to?”
“Yeah, apparently there hasn’t been much need for his expertise since Fertig arrived at MidAmerica Hospital. According to what I’ve been told, all he did was a few general surgery cases, insurance physicals, and some family practice. He worked in a small office with an adjacent surgery center which he shared with other doctors.”
“I’ll make arrangements for Kerry. Be right back.”
The girls in the daycare area said they would watch Kerry if I wouldn’t be gone longer than two hours.
Janet drove a Chicago PD brown Ford Crown Vic. Tony met us in the hallway outside of Clark’s office. A yellow crime scene tape blocked the office door.
She looked at me. “You know the drill. This is an active crime screen. Stand right here.” She turned to Tony. “Open the door.”
He did. I peeked inside. Clark’s office was the kind of doctor’s layout I was used to. Cheap chairs, fake wood flooring, tattered magazines, plastic flowers, and reproductions of famous paintings in metal frames hung on the walls. CSI people worked in the room.
I looked around for security cameras. Janet noticed me doing it.
“This is a low-rent building,” she said. “There aren’t any security cameras.”
“Too bad for you guys. Where’s the body?”
“Still hangin’ in there.” Tony pointed over his shoulder toward an operating room. Another yellow crime scene tape blocked that door.
“The EMTs didn’t take him down to resuscitate him?”
“No reason to,” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“The time of death was probably Sunday afternoon,” she said. “He was found this morning by his one of his nurses.”
“With that TOD, dude was way too dead when she found him. EMTs didn’t want to disturb the crime scene until the M.E. gets here.”
Tony pushed a metal plate on the wall, and the door into the OR swooshed open. The air from the room blew gently in my face. The stink from Clark’s bowels and bladder releasing after he expired was the predominant smell.
And then I saw him.
80
Yikes!
Dr. Samuel Clark dangled from a black belt which was secured to the ceiling attachment of the operating room light. A tipped-over chair was under his feet. His brown loafer shoes had slipped off his feet and were on the floor next to the chair.
Tony and Janet ducked under the yellow tape and went into the operating room. The door closed. The next time it swooshed open, the outward flow of air caused Clark’s body to gently sway back and forth.
The door closed, and when it opened, his body moved again. The intermittent pendulum motion was chilling, like something created for a Halloween haunted house.
The next time the door opened, I notice several open magazines in the room. One lay open on the floor near his shoes. It looked like it was pornographic. The door closed. The door slid open again, as two more cops ducked under the tape and walked in.
This time I got a better look at Clark. There was no belt around his pants, which were unzipped. His flaccid penis dangled out of his underwear. His hands were loose at his sides. His bloated face was a dark red-purple, and his swollen, blue-black tongue hung out of the corner of his mouth.
Janet walked out. Tony stayed inside. While the door was open, I saw a nearly-empty quart bottle of Ketel One vodka sitting next to an empty glass on a side cabinet.
The door closed. I turned to Janet. “It’s hard to miss Clark’s body swaying back and forth.”
“One of the OR techs said it’s caused by a laminar air flow system,” she said. “It’s supposed to blow the bacteria out of the operating room when the doors open.”
“It’s still freaky,” I said.
“The rest of this scene is too.”
81
Tony joined us in the hall. “Dude was supposed to look like he was whacking off and then accidently killed himself.”
“Why do you think it’s a murder?” I asked.
“It’s too perfect, too clean,” Janet said. “At Denning’s condo, there were all kinds of fingerprints, DNA, and human hairs from lots of different people — almost all female — which, given his history, wasn’t a surprise. Here the victim’s prints are on the glass and bottle you probably saw on the counter and on the chair and the belt, but the rest of the room is clean.”
“Clean?” I asked.
“Aren’t any fingerprints, fibers, or hairs,” he said. “Should be from the nurses and such.”
“Maybe Clark had a good cleaning crew in his operating room.”
“No one cleans this thoroughly,” she said. “Our guys always find traces of something, but here? Nada.”
“Thought is the perp cleaned up and then planted evidence,” Tony said.
I waited.
“Found porn on Clark’s computer. Bettin’ our guys’ll find it’s new.”
“Didn’t the killer realize you would discover this?” I asked.
“Maybe the suspect’s arrogant and thinks we’re stupid,” she suggested.
I tried to picture how the murder was committed. “From what I saw through the door, Clark was a big man,” I said.
“About two bills and change,” he said.
“How much?”
“According to his DMV registration, two hundred and thirty pounds,” she said.
“There is no way in the world I could hold Clark up and put the belt around his neck at the same time,” I said, thinking about Diane Warren and Fertig possibly working together on Clark’s murder. “How do you know there was only one person here? Maybe two people did this.”
“After we saw how big Clark was, that was our first question to the CSI guys,” she said. “They can’t positively rule it out, but they think there’s only one suspect.”
“Then how do you think it happened?” I asked.
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“Here’s how our CSI guys see it,” Janet said. “The suspect and the doctor meet in his office. They have a couple of drinks until Clark comes close to passing out. The suspect assists Clark into the OR and takes off his belt. The suspect ties one end to the light and helps Clark stand up on the chair.”
“Perp stands the doc up on the chair and puts the other end of the belt around his neck and lets go,” Tony continued. “Doc hangs there with his feet still on the chair. Perp kicks the chair out. Snapple city on doc’s neck which finishes him off.”
“Why do you think the killer would come here to meet with Clark?” I asked.
“If Clark was on the committee, the suspect may have come here to either pressure him into making a favorable vote or present him a monetary offer the suspect assumed Clark couldn’t refuse,” she said.
“But Clark did.”
“A good guess,” she said. “When the suspect realized the talks weren’t going like he wanted them to, he slipped something into Clark’s drink to make him more compliant.”
“Any idea what it was?”
“Possibly Klonopin, but we’ll have to wait for the lab results to know for sure. There were sample bottles of it in Clark’s desk. One was open and several pills were missing.”
“What’s it used for?”
“Anxiety, but too much of it puts
you in la-la land,” he said.