Unnatural Causes

by Dawn Eastman

  Emmett nodded. “That’s part of it. But there are a lot of good doctors out there.” He spread his hands out on his desk. “And I get along with everyone.”

  Katie smiled then. “So why?”

  “Because you never back down when you think you’re right. I had gotten a bit bored and very set in my ways. Then you came along for your rotation and challenged every outdated diagnosis or treatment you came across. You never accepted someone else’s treatment plan until you had done your own exam. I admired that.”

  Katie looked at her feet. She had no idea how to respond to such a compliment. They came so rarely in medical training, she didn’t know what to say.

  “Thank you. That means a lot coming from you,” she said. She looked up then and met his eyes. “So were you with Nick or at a meeting?”

  Emmett laughed until his eyes watered. “I was with Nick. There was a meeting at the church, and I hoped that whoever checked my alibi would only check to see that there was a meeting, not whether I was in attendance. I couldn’t tell them about Nick—not without opening him up to investigation. I had hoped I could get him some help and shut down whatever he was doing in his pain clinic without involving the police.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Katie said. And she was glad. She understood why Emmett had covered for Nick and hoped for all their sakes that they would be able to fix the problem before Nick destroyed the practice.

  Emmett raised his eyebrows and glanced at the phone.

  Katie nodded.

  “I’ll tell Debra to keep his patients on the books for next week. I’m sure it will all work out by then,” Emmett said.

  After his brief conversation with Debra, Emmett thanked Katie and walked back down the hall to the next exam room. There was a definite jauntiness to his stride this time. Katie was glad that he felt better even though she couldn’t share his enthusiasm or certainty that Nick would be fine.

  25

  Katie pulled into her driveway and killed the engine. She sat in a daze, staring out the windshield at nothing in particular. She had a couple of hours before Matt was due to pick her up, but all she wanted to do at this point was figure out who killed Ellen and put it behind her.

  She got out of the car and went into the house through the kitchen door.

  Caleb met her there. “Katie,” he said. “Thank God. I’ve been texting you for an hour.”

  Katie pulled out her phone and saw the texts. She’d turned her phone to silent and hadn’t checked it. “What’s wrong?” Katie asked.

  “Just a bit of stellar computer work on my part.”

  “You texted me twenty times to brag?”

  “You’re going to want to see this,” Caleb said.

  Katie followed him into the dining room.

  “I finally cracked the code to get into the locked files,” Caleb said.

  Katie dumped her bag on the ottoman in the living room and went to lean over his shoulder at the dining room table.

  “The files each have names on them, and they’re all individually locked,” Caleb said. “But now that I got into the main file, the rest should be easy.”

  “Show me what you’ve got,” she said.

  “We talked about how one of her clients may have killed her because she knew too much about them,” Caleb said.

  Katie nodded.

  “When I opened the main file, this is what I saw.” Caleb clicked and a window popped open revealing the contents of the protected files. There were three of them: clients, taxes, and research.

  “Let’s start with clients,” Caleb said. He clicked on that file, and a list of names popped up: Nick Hawkins, Lynn Swanson, Matt Gregor, Sandra Boules, Aaron Latimer, Jackie Munson. Katie only recognized the first three.

  “Oh, I see,” Katie said. Matt was one of Ellen’s clients. Did he have a secret that was big enough to kill over? Could he have injected Ellen with the Demerol right there in the ER? There had been stories about renegade medical personnel using their access to harm patients.

  “It’s not that I thought he was a homicidal maniac, but I thought you might want to know about this before you got too involved.” Caleb had been almost as devastated as Katie when Justin broke off their relationship. They had become as close as brothers—it had been one of the things she loved about Justin. Since Justin, Caleb had become more protective of Katie.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Katie said. “Thanks.” Katie had to get a grip. This was what came of investigating. It was similar to treating patients. All the secrets came out, often ones you didn’t want to know. But also the physician had to consider all possibilities until everything but the culprit was ruled out.

  Caleb grunted and clicked on the research file.

  Twenty or more documents filled the computer window. Caleb clicked on the first one.

  “A scientific journal on color-blind genetics,” Caleb said. “She was obsessed.”

  “What’s the next one?”

  “Looks like a scan of a newspaper article.” He zoomed in.

  There was a picture of two couples. The caption read, “Jack and Sylvia Riley with Eugene and Lily Talbot.”

  The next document was a birth announcement for Christopher.

  After they’d opened all the documents and spent an hour reading through them, Katie still felt like she didn’t know more than before they had broken into the computer.

  “Can you put all this on a thumb drive for me?”

  “Sure,” Caleb said. He rummaged among the papers on the table and came up with a thumb drive. He stuck it into the slot on the side of the laptop and copied it.

  “Thanks. I’ll have to read through all the articles more carefully and see if I can figure out what she was looking for.”

  Caleb pushed away from the computer. “I haven’t looked at the client files yet. Do you want to do that on your own?”

  “Yeah, I think I should,” Katie said. “Thank you, Caleb. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  She tamped down the discomfort of snooping in Ellen’s private files and clicked on one of the names she didn’t recognize first. Maybe if she found something in those notes, she wouldn’t have to read the files on the people she knew.

  After reading about Sandra Boules’s desire to be a tour guide in Italy and not a secretary at the phone company, she hovered the mouse over Matt’s name. It seemed that Ellen had been doing life coaching stuff with Sandra; maybe that’s all these files were about. People who just needed a little help getting their priorities straight and formulating a plan for success.

  But Matt was already successful. Why would he need a life coach? And he hadn’t told her he knew Ellen professionally. She checked the time. He was due in a half hour. Should she click, or should she ask him? Gabrielle’s voice floated into her mind. Everybody lies. She didn’t want to get involved with another man who had only a passing acquaintance with honesty or who had no idea what he really wanted. She clicked.

  * * *

  The doorbell startled her out of her computer trance. Crap. He was early.

  Caleb zipped out of his room and went to the door. “I have to meet him before you can go out with him,” he said. Katie rolled her eyes.

  She heard Matt’s voice at the door and jumped up to go change into something better than her clinic-day clothing.

  She heard them talking but couldn’t tell what they were saying. She hurriedly tossed on a wool skirt and tights, ankle boots, and a soft gray sweater. She heard them laughing and hoped Caleb hadn’t trotted out some embarrassing story from childhood. She swiped on another coat of mascara and decided that would have to do.

  There was a quiet knock on the door. Caleb.

  “Caleb, if that’s you, come in.”

  The door opened a crack and he slipped inside. “Matt thought I was your boyfriend.” Caleb was fighting a smile and losing. “He said he heard at the hospital that you were ‘living with some guy.’ I said you were, but the guy was your brother. He seems cool. He asked me which online
games I play. He saw the equipment and said he plays too.”

  Katie had to interrupt the budding bromance, or she’d never get out of the house. Just as she was about to cut into this stream of admiration, her stomach dropped. Caleb had left Matt alone in the dining room. With the computer that Katie had left open to Matt’s file. She pushed past Caleb and rushed out to the dining room.

  Matt was sitting in the chair that she had recently vacated. He looked up as she entered the room.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. He gestured to the computer. “This one seems to be all about me.”

  “Matt, I can explain,” Katie said.

  Matt shook his head. “No need. I know what this is. Somehow you got your hands on Ellen’s files, and rather than ask me about it, you read my file.”

  “That’s only partly true,” Katie said. This was going so wrong, so fast. “You know I’m helping Beth figure out who killed her mother. I had no idea there would be a file about you on there.”

  “That’s okay,” Matt said. “I came here thinking you were living with a guy and had agreed to date me behind his back, so I guess we haven’t really established trust.”

  “Matt, I’m sorry.” And she really was. She had known that reading those files would put her in an uncomfortable spot in general. She hadn’t known it would ruin things with the first guy she’d been really interested in since Justin.

  “It’s fine,” Matt said. He headed to the door. “I’m sure you’ll understand that I don’t much feel like going out tonight.”

  Caleb came and stood behind Katie.

  “It was nice to meet you, Caleb.” Matt shut the door, and seconds later they heard his car roar to life and head down the street.

  Caleb turned to Katie. “Katie, I’m sorry. I should have flipped the computer shut.”

  Katie shook her head and wiped her eyes. “It’s my fault. I should have asked him before I read it.” She made a weak attempt at a smile. “At least now there’s nothing to distract me from the case.” Katie took off her boots and slid into the seat in front of the computer.

  Several hours later, her brain was filled with snippets of information. She felt like someone had dumped a complicated jigsaw puzzle out of its box and took away the picture.

  A huge yawn overtook her, and she felt dizzy and blurry-eyed. She was no stranger to sleep deprivation, but usually she kept active to stay awake. She stood and stretched, feeling the tension in her shoulders as she finally unhunched.

  She saved all the files back to the thumb drive and brought it with her to her room, where she undressed quickly and fell into bed. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep. And waited.

  Her brain continued to try to put some of the things she’d read into perspective. Of course, she had read the Matt Gregor file and was relieved to discover that he had been seeing Ellen for career counseling. He was thinking about leaving medicine and was exploring other career options. That’s why he was doing all of the locum tenens work. It paid really well, and he’d be able to take some time off in another year.

  Lynn Swanson’s file held no surprises either. Ellen had met her at the women’s shelter where she volunteered. She described Lynn as skittish and was not confident that she would ever leave her husband. They had arranged for private counseling away from the shelter, as Lynn was worried her husband would find out what she was up to.

  The biggest surprise was Nick Hawkins. He was seeing Ellen for burnout. Katie thought all physicians got burned out once in a while. It was part of the job in many ways. Caregivers of all sorts eventually got to the point where they had to learn to take care of themselves first or risk losing the ability to care for others. But true burnout was harder to shake. The emotional toll of caring for sick and dying people and the constant demands of time and emotion were often too much to bear. The protective mechanism was to put distance between oneself and the patient. And then stop seeing them as individuals. And then stop caring. Nick had endured his own difficult recovery from his motorcycle accident, and his dependence on pain medicine combined with his continuing work with chronic pain patients was taking its toll.

  He hadn’t been having an affair as the rumor mill claimed. He’d been trying to save his career. Katie had to figure out how to steer the police away from Nick as a suspect without requiring Emmett to give him an alibi. She would ask Beth to turn the computer over to the police. Once Chief Carlson saw that there had not been an affair, maybe he would let Nick go. She knew that neither Nick nor Emmett wanted to tell him where they had actually been, and for the time being she would respect that choice.

  Her brain continued to run in circles and finally exhausted itself. Katie fell asleep and didn’t dream.

  26

  Saturday morning came much too soon for Katie. She woke at seven when her radio blasted nineties hip-hop. She had forgotten to shut off the alarm. With the determination of a marathon trainer, she powered through and fell back to sleep. She woke again at ten, disoriented and groggy. There was no bright sunlight forcing its way past her blinds. She got up and looked outside to a gray and gloomy day. The window was still wet from the morning’s rain, and yellow leaves stuck damply to the grass.

  It was hard enough to get out of bed on a Saturday, but weather like that made her want to crawl back under the covers with a good book and pretend that she wasn’t involved in a murder investigation. Because that’s exactly what she was doing, wasn’t it? She was secretly investigating a murder and keeping information from the police.

  The smell of bacon seeped into the room. Caleb. He knew how to get her out of bed. She followed the delicious aroma to the kitchen, where he was just plating a Swiss cheese and mushroom omelet.

  “For you, madam.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll give you five bites, and then I need to know what you found out.”

  Katie dug in. The food made her feel better. The coffee that Caleb set next to her plate brought her back to life.

  She gave Caleb a brief summary of what she had discovered. She told him about the photos of Christopher’s parents and another couple.

  “There was a family tree showing the inheritance of color-blindness. That was probably what all the color-blind searches were for. Color-blindness is an X-linked trait. That means it passes to sons from their mothers. If a woman is a carrier, she has a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to her son. A woman can be a carrier if her father was color-blind.”

  “So if the mother’s father was color-blind, the child has a fifty-fifty chance of being color-blind?”

  “Yes, if the child is male. If it’s female, then the father would have to be color-blind as well in order to produce a color-blind daughter.”

  “Got it. But none of the files pointed to anyone in particular? No deep, dark secrets?”

  “Not really.” Katie sighed. “But Matt said something interesting the other day.”

  “I’m sure he did,” said Caleb and waggled his eyebrows.

  “Stop,” Katie said. “He did. It might be the last bit of wisdom he’ll ever share with me after last night. He said to follow the money.”

  “Well, she has that tax file in there.”

  Katie nodded. “I looked at it, and it seemed pretty standard. So far, I haven’t found any money to follow.”

  “I thought Christopher was the one with all the money.”

  “I think that’s right, but Dan and Todd had that brawl at the funeral. Beth said it was about how Christopher was running the business. I wonder if Dan felt threatened by Ellen?”

  “It seems like the more we find out, the more suspects we have. I thought the whole idea was to narrow things down.”

  Katie nodded ruefully. “I agree. The more I look into this, the more secrets are uncovered. It’s like trying to diagnose a patient with a weird presentation. The more tests you run, the more slightly off results you get until your diagnosis is all muddled up with inconsequential lab tests.”

  Caleb looked at her for a be
at. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  Katie threw a dishcloth at him. He dodged it and escaped into the dining room. “Your turn to do the dishes!” he yelled gleefully from the safety of the other room.

  * * *

  Katie had cleaned up the kitchen and taken a shower. Just as she was about to open the files again on her computer to be sure she hadn’t missed anything, the doorbell rang.

  She left her room and went through the dining room to answer the door. Caleb was there at the table, engrossed in his own computer project.

  “Don’t get up,” Katie said. “I’ll get it.”

  Caleb hadn’t moved, but he managed to mumble, “Mmm-kay.”

  Katie pulled the door open expecting a kid selling coupon books or magazines.

  “Surprise!” Gabrielle said.

  “Hey, come in.” Katie stepped away from the doorway.

  “I didn’t really expect a call last night, but I thought I’d at least get a text or something this morning,” Gabrielle said. “When I heard nothing at all, I decided to come get the scoop myself.”

  “Oh, you mean Matt?”

  Gabrielle put her hands on her hips and scowled at Katie. “Of course, I mean Matt. How did it go?”

  “I’ll need some more coffee if we’re going to talk about this,” Katie said. “Come into the kitchen, and I’ll tell you all the gory details.”

  “I love details,” Gabrielle said. She dropped her coat and bag on the couch and waved hello to Caleb as she passed.

  Katie poured two cups of coffee from the pot that Caleb had made earlier and sat at the table with Gabrielle.

  “Go on then. Spill it.”

  Katie made a face and sighed. “You’re not going to like this,” she began. “There was no date. I blew it.”

  “What? How?”

  Katie filled her in on the disaster date that never was.

  “I don’t think he’ll ever talk to me again.”

  “This is pretty bad,” Gabrielle agreed. “I’m not sure I would talk to you again.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “But what were you thinking? Why would you read his file?”