Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  Driving out to Vienna meant I would miss Cheryl’s call, but I knew she would leave the information as I had asked her to.

  “I’ll be there at twelve forty-five. Thanks for—”

  The click in my ear told me he had hung up.

  The curiosity devil had me full in his grip now. The caller’s voice said he really did know something—or thought he did—and it wasn’t something he was at all happy about knowing. I decided to go on out to Vienna and scope out the address. Knowing in advance who I was dealing with might give me an edge in knowing what to ask this guy once I met him.

  Seven

  Vienna is one of the older Virginia suburbs of Washington. It sits south and west of the Potomac, a couple or so miles west of the Capital Beltway, that eight-lane circle of asphalt around the capital that acts as a barrier to any logic or common sense penetrating from the rest of the country. Maple Avenue is one of Vienna’s main streets, lined with countless small businesses and office buildings. Three-ninety-seven was par for the course, a two-story office building of white painted brick and green wood trim. I drove into the parking lot, looking for Suite 104.

  It proved to be on the back right corner of the building, facing the parking lot. As I drove slowly by, I could see the name on the bronze plate next to the door: PETER MORRIS, M.D., INTERNAL MEDICINE.

  Peter Morris. Dr. Peter Morris. This was sounding less like a nutcase and more like the real thing. My watch said it was 11:45, and the three cars parked around the door of Suite 104 told me Dr. Morris was probably pretty busy right now, so I didn’t see any point in hanging around. Instead I decided to find someplace to grab a quick lunch and to try to learn a little more about the good doctor.

  I pulled back out onto Maple Avenue and, within a couple more blocks, found a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant. I used the drive-through window to get a grilled chicken sandwich, some coleslaw, and a diet Coke and drove around the back to one of several empty parking spaces.

  I picked up my cellular phone and called the information operator to get the number for Fairfax Hospital, the largest hospital in the area, the closest to downtown Vienna, and the one where Dr. Peter Morris most likely would have staff privileges. I dialed the hospital and asked the switchboard operator for the office that would have information on physicians. She quickly put me through to something the secretary who answered identified as Medical Staff Services.

  “Hi,” I told her. “I’m new to the area and I’m looking for a doctor who uses your hospital. A friend recommended Dr. Peter Morris to me, and I wondered if you could tell me whether he has staff privileges there.”

  “Yes he does,” she answered without hesitation. “In fact, Dr. Morris is the chief of internal medicine here.”

  “I see.” I thought for a moment. “I suppose that means he’s good at what he does?”

  “Well, we’re not allowed to make physician recommendations,” she said in a well-rehearsed voice, “but I think it’s safe to say he’s well thought of by the other physicians and he’s well-known in the community.”

  “Listen, thanks a lot for your help. Sounds like my friend was right about him.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, I thought as I hung up and reached for my lunch. What would a prominent physician out in Virginia know about the death of a woman who lived on Capitol Hill and whose body was found twenty-five miles away in a forest? And what would make him risk his solid-gold reputation by telling a reporter about it?

  At 12:15, I put the scraps of my lunch back into their takeout bag and called in to my voice mail at the newspaper. Immediately I heard Cheryl Wiggins.

  “Hi, Sutton,” her recorded voice said without identifying herself. “I think I have something you’ll find interesting, although I don’t know what it means. It seems Janet Taylor wasn’t strangled to death. There was a scarf cinched around her neck, but that wasn’t what killed her. In fact, it looks like the scarf was put there after she was already dead. Dr. Riner says she actually died from a closed head wound, a skull fracture, and that she didn’t die right away. The blow was to the left side of her head, probably from the front. She could have been unconscious for an hour or two before she died, and he put her time of death at between two-thirty and three-thirty P.M. Also, she wasn’t raped and there were no signs of her trying to fight anyone off, no skin under the fingernails or any other injuries except the blow to the head and the phony strangulation. Well, I hope this helps. ‘Bye.”

  Interesting was right. And while I couldn’t say for sure what it meant either, I did have some ideas. It could very well mean that Janet Taylor didn’t put up a struggle because she knew the person in the room with her and she never expected that person to harm her. And it significantly changed the time when everyone had mistakenly assumed the attack occurred.

  I really wanted to get over to the police station where Hub Taylor was to be questioned, maybe even was being questioned right now. But I also had to meet with Dr. Morris to find out what he knew about Ann Kane. Now I had two dead women, at least one of them a murder victim, whose faces floated in front of me, asking for someone to learn how they died, to expose the evil that had found each of them. I knew neither was going to leave me alone until I had those answers.

  * * * *

  Back at Dr. Morris’s office, I parked my car several spots away, next to cars for another office, but close enough to watch people going in and out of his door. At 12:35,1 saw a group of three women come out, chatting and laughing, to pile into a black Jeep Wagoneer across the parking lot and leave, followed a couple of minutes later by two more women, who left in a blue Ford Escort.

  At 12:45 exactly, when no one else had put in an appearance, I got out and walked over to the office, where I knocked sharply on the door. It opened in seconds, held by a green-eyed, blond-haired man of about forty-five, whose six-foot-or-so frame was covered in a knee-length white coat over a crisp white shirt, a navy-and-red-striped tie, and black suit pants. He would have been handsome, but the dark circles under his eyes and the generally exhausted look about him weren’t flattering and told me I was seeing someone who was dealing with a lot of internal conflict and not handling it well.

  “Ms. McPhee?” he asked, just as I said, “Dr. Morris?”

  “Please, come in,” he answered quickly, stepping back to open the door fully, then closing it behind me. The waiting area of his office was done in soft tasteful shades of plum and pale rose, with expensively upholstered armchairs and love seats, and what appeared to be signed, numbered lithographs on the wall. This was the office of a very successful doctor, I thought, wondering again what could be driving him to talk to me.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” He gestured to one of the armchairs in the far corner, by a window. “Could I get you some coffee?”

  “No, no thanks,” I answered, taking the chair he indicated. “I just had lunch, and I have a feeling you’d like to do this quickly, before your staff comes back and sees me here.”

  He took the companion armchair, which was positioned to let him see out into the parking lot and from which he looked me over thoughtfully.

  “I… I’ve never really dealt with a reporter before,” he began hesitantly. “Is it true that if I ask you to, you will keep anything I tell you in confidence?”

  “It’s true that if I agree this is off the record, I won’t attribute it to you unless you tell me I can. I’ll try to corroborate what you say some other way so that I can report it without identifying you as the original source of the information. You have my word on that, Dr. Morris. Keeping a source confidential when I’ve promised to do so is a basic part of my job. My credibility is the only currency I have, with my sources and my readers. Plenty of reporters have gone to jail rather than violate the confidence of a source, and I feel pretty strongly about it, too.”

  Dr. Morris was sitting at an angle in the chair, his legs crossed and his hands clasped in his lap. As he looked down at those hands it was clear to me from his body language that this was a man who was
used to being in charge of the situation and who now found himself at the mercy of events. I decided I would get more out of him by letting him take the lead than by prodding. So I held my tongue—a monumental feat—and waited for him to begin. After a minute or so he looked up and I knew he would tell me what he so obviously needed to tell someone.

  “I suppose we’re somewhat alike in that way, Ms. McPhee.”

  “What way is that? And please, call me Sutton.”

  “We’re both keepers of confidences, Sutton. Just as I’m sure you are, I’m frequently told very personal things about my patients’ lives, with the expectation that what they tell me will go no further. In fact, I’m under legal and ethical restrictions to keep their secrets, and I could be punished for what I tell.”

  I nodded silently.

  “This is very difficult for me, you see. Telling you what I’m afraid I know goes against all my training and experience. But I also was trained to save lives, to do everything in my power to save lives. Ever since I read the stories about Ann Kane, I’ve been torn over what to do. I’m afraid I may know what happened to her, and if I do, I might be the only person who can keep it from happening again.”

  “Then why not go to the police, Dr. Morris?”

  “Because I could be wrong. So very wrong. And if I am, the person I believe was involved is in a position to destroy me. If I go to the police, I would have no control over what they say to whom or how their investigation is conducted. I was hoping that if I told you what I know, you might be able to get at the truth without sacrificing my career.”

  “I’ll do the best I can.”

  Again he looked down at his hands in thought. When he made his decision to tell me the rest, I could see it in the squaring of his shoulders as he looked back up.

  “I think Senator Ed Lloyd may have had something to do with Ann Kane’s death.”

  Although I’m not a gasper, I came pretty close to it at the magnitude of his blunt statement. Senator Ed Lloyd, senior Virginia statesman and mentor of the recently widowed Hubbard Taylor, was one of the most powerful men in the country. He had the money and influence to buy and sell anybody I knew ten times over, and the political clout to make even the president tremble. But I tamped down my shock for fear a strong reaction on my part would frighten Morris back into silence.

  “That’s a pretty strong statement, Dr. Morris,” I said finally. “What makes you think so?”

  “Because I helped him cover up an earlier situation that could have killed another young woman like Ann Kane.”

  Peter Morris was watching me closely, his eyes asking me not to judge him too harshly. I could see that whatever it was he thought he knew had been tearing him apart, and his self-respect was in shreds.

  “Go on,” I prodded him.

  “It was several weeks, maybe a month, before Ann Kane died. A Sunday night. I was home alone at my house in McLean. I’m divorced, you see, and my ex-wife has moved back to Boston, so I live in our house. I got a phone call from Senator Lloyd, who’s been a patient of mine for about ten years. It was late, almost eleven. I know because I looked at the clock when the phone rang so late. Ed told me he had a problem that he needed my help with, and he asked me to meet him here at my office. I asked what kind of problem. He said his date had gotten ill and needed to see a doctor right away. Of course, I recommended he get her to an emergency room or call an ambulance. He said he couldn’t do that, that she was ill because of something she had taken at his house and he needed help from someone who could be discreet about it. I thought they must have been doing some drugs together or something. I’d never known Ed to have any sort of drug habit, but you know how older men can be around much younger women.”

  That was true. Ed Lloyd certainly wouldn’t have been the first fifty-five- or sixty-year-old politician to make a fool of himself over a pretty young thing. And he already had a reputation to prove it. Dr. Morris went on.

  “I tried to reason with him that I might not be able to do what was needed in my office, but Ed insisted that this was the only place he could take her, that I was the only person he could trust. So I agreed. I was afraid to delay him any longer, you see, because I knew the woman had to get to some kind of help soon, and Ed is a very influential and well-connected man who has referred some important patients to me over the years. I was concerned about her, and I didn’t want to offend him.”

  “So you met him here?”

  “Yes. I know I shouldn’t have. I could have put the woman’s life as much at risk as he had. I should have forced him to take her for emergency treatment, but Ed Lloyd can be very… persuasive, very forceful. So I met him.”

  “What happened then?”

  “When I got here, his car was parked outside, right in front of the door. He rolled down the window and said for me to come help him. I walked over to his side of the car and then I could see a woman lying down in the backseat with a coat over her. He told me to get her out of his car and inside, but I refused until I knew she was still alive. I told him to unlock the back door, and I opened it and reached in to check her pulse. She had one, but it was thready. Her skin was clammy and her breathing was shallow. She was moaning something and seemed to be at least semiconscious. I gave Lloyd the key to the office door and told him to get it unlocked and turn on a light while I got her out of the car.”

  “Did you know the woman?”

  “No. I couldn’t really see her well in the car, but once I got her inside and on an examination table, I could see she wasn’t anyone I knew.”

  “Did Senator Lloyd tell you who she was?”

  “No. He never used even her first name. In fact, at one point I asked him who she was, and he told me it was better if I didn’t know.”

  “Okay, so then what happened?”

  “As I said, I took her into one of my exam rooms and began to check her over, and I asked Lloyd what had happened, what she had taken. He told me she had taken Demerol.”

  “The same thing that helped kill Ann Kane,” I said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Morris agreed. “At first I assumed it was this woman’s own medication. I asked Ed if she had been drinking along with it. He said she had had a couple of cocktails. I asked him how long after the drinks and the Demerol before she had gotten ill and what kind of symptoms she’d had. He said it took twenty or thirty minutes and that she had gotten very drowsy but also very agitated, and she kept falling down. That was when he called me.”

  “Were you able to help her?”

  “Yes, fortunately for all of us. A doctor’s office has to keep certain equipment and supplies on hand in case a patient has a bad reaction to medication they’ve taken in the office. In a few minutes I was able to pump her stomach and do some other things to make her more comfortable. She responded well to it, and finally dropped off to sleep. I monitored her vitals for a couple of hours, long enough to see that she would be all right. I told Lloyd he should take her home and put her to bed. I told him she’d feel like hell for a day or so, but that she should be okay. He said, ‘Of course she will. I knew I could count on you to take care of her.’ But he said it in this cold, unemotional voice. I realized that he had shown very little concern for the woman the entire time she was in my office, other than to make sure she would be well enough so no one would know what had happened. That was when I remembered.”

  “Remembered what?”

  “That I had prescribed Demerol for Ed Lloyd after some office surgery. Maybe nine months before. It was a onetime prescription, but he probably didn’t need the full amount. The conviction began to grow on me that Ed had given her the Demerol. When I started asking myself why he would have done such a thing, I didn’t like the answers I came up with. That was when I began to be afraid.”

  “So you think Ed Lloyd risked this woman’s health by drugging her, maybe in order to have sex with her?” I had heard the stories of Ed Lloyd over the years, as had every other reporter who had spent any time in or around Washington: his womanizing, his
drinking, his divorce when his wife of decades couldn’t stomach it any longer, and his vindictiveness when a woman he wanted turned him down. But this allegation that he had drugged a woman to have sex with her was a new and outrageous low.

  “I knew he did,” Morris answered, his shoulders slumping down into the chair. “I looked at him, and in that moment I knew he did, and he saw that I knew it. That was when he threatened me.”

  “In what way?”

  “Not blatantly, you understand. He’s too experienced a politician for that. He helped the woman out to the car and came back inside. He said, ‘Doctor, I need to be sure that this little incident will stay just between you and me.’ He said, ‘I can’t afford for this story to get out… and neither can you. She’s just a piece of ass I found up on the Hill, and she’s not worth our careers.’ I knew he meant what he said, that if I told anyone, reported it to anyone, he’d do his best to ruin me.”

  “How could he do that?”

  “At the very least I was guilty of poor medical judgment. I shouldn’t have let him bring her to my office instead of an emergency room, knowing she was having a reaction to some kind of drug. When I found out what it was, I should have called an ambulance immediately. She could have had permanent neurological damage. She could have died. And when I realized he had drugged her deliberately, I was afraid I might be guilty of helping him cover up a crime of some sort. So I let him take her home, and I assumed she was okay when I never heard any more about it. Until they found Ann Kane.”

  Now we were getting down to it, to what had convinced Morris that Ed Lloyd was involved in Ann Kane’s death and had driven him to call me.

  “Dr. Morris, was this woman Ann Kane?”

  “No, no. I’m sure of that. This woman had black hair, and she looked very different from the picture of Ann Kane that the papers ran.”

  “Then I don’t understand, Doctor,” I said, trying to keep impatience out of my voice. “What is it about all this that makes you think Ed Lloyd had anything to do with Kane’s death?”