Un-Connected

by Noah Rea

  I told Deb about my new feelings, and I told her I was a little ashamed I had thought about myself so much up until now. She said there was nothing wrong with being scared of people like them. She was still too scared to be angry, but she wanted to help me do whatever I felt like I needed to do. She just wanted me to remember she needed me and wanted me to promise not to take any unnecessary risks.

  “Done.” I said.

  I told her I had not planned to do anything yet, but I was looking for some way to expose them. I told her I would include her in whatever happens, and I intended to be around for her to boss for a long time.

  When we got home, I decided to call Jim. I asked him if the FBI ever hired detectives or people to run down leads. He asked me what I had in mind. I told him I wanted to do something. I wanted to help expose whoever had killed and hurt people I loved. He said the FBI didn’t do too much with non-law-enforcement people. But he would see if he could get the name of an agent in Phoenix who would be willing to work with me.

  I told him I wanted to go to some nursing homes or the last residences of some of the people on his list and see what I could find out.

  Ideas were coming to me about ways to get information. I called Tilly to tell her that I wanted to do some poking around and ask about getting a picture of Grandma Moses to help. After I told her what I intended to do, she laughed and said grandma would be glad to help. Grandma loves cops and robbers stuff. She would love to help catch a bad guy. She said she would call and get it set up.

  Tilly called back in a few minutes and said grandma was excited about it, but I didn’t need to go over there. The guys working around the house would take her picture and text it to me. And I had it before Tilly could hang up. I thanked her and sat down with Deb to make a plan.

  What I was proposing was going to nursing homes that were on Jim’s list and in the Phoenix area. I planned to show the picture of “my grandmother” and then ask all kinds of questions about their policies, checking in, checking out, the kinds of care they offered, etc. Deb liked it and grabbed my phone. In a few minutes she had the list I had received from Jim and printed it out. She picked one and suggested we go. “After that, if we have time, we could go see another one, and then you could take me out to eat.”

  Sounded great to me and we were off.

  The first place Deb picked looked pretty new. The lady we talked to was not the normal lady that talked to new potential clients, but she said she had worked there since they opened and had worked at another nursing home for several years before that. She told us that in her opinion there was a difference between assisted living and a nursing home. We got that and talked about all their policies.

  I told her a friend of mine had a dad with Alzheimer disease and had walked out of the nursing home he was in. It took them about two hours to find him after they’d discovered he’d gone. They had no idea when he’d left. I asked her how that could happen. She guessed that their floor plan had something to do with it, but everyone in the industry had to pay attention and really care about their patients.

  I asked her what she meant about the floor plan making a difference.

  She said when someone comes in the front door, in her opinion he should run right into the front desk. That way people coming in and going out are identified and visitors don’t easily get into the building without permission. Nor do visitors have a hard time finding the one in charge of letting them see the person they came to see.

  She said it really came down to the workers at the home being responsible and really taking care of the patients. I asked her how often she believed someone got out the door at their place who wasn’t supposed to. She said that depended on whether we were asking about the ones who were deceased or the ones who were still alive. “The live ones should never get out.”

  But she thought it did happen maybe once every couple of months some places. She felt their place had a better record and that only happened to them about once or twice a year.

  “Now the deceased ones are a different story. We don’t have a doctor here all the time, and no other nursing home that I know of does either. So when a person passes, we either have to wait for a doctor to get here to pronounce them gone. Or we send the body in an ambulance to a hospital where they’re pronounced dead. Then the doctor fills out the papers and estimates time of death. The bodies of those deceased don’t always go where they’re supposed to. If the doctor pronounces time of death here, then depending on the instructions, we have an ambulance take the body to a mortician, or the mortician may come here to get the body.”

  She said she guessed that part was pretty much the same at the hospital.

  “How often does the death of someone here surprise you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes a person is in poor health, taking all kinds of medication, and they just appear to be close to death. Then there are others who are elderly and in poor health but seem to be alert and not in too much pain and not as close to death. In these cases we would expect the first one I described to pass away first. But how common was it for the one that looked healthier to pass away before the other one?”

  “It doesn’t happen often but we do get surprises.”

  “Do doctors ever come here to see patients or do the patients have to go to the doctor.”

  “There was a doctor here nearly every day.”

  “Do they see all the patients that the home wanted them to see or were they there for their own patients only?”

  She said that depended. “Some of the wealthier patients had doctors who just came to see them and then left. Some doctors had several patients, and usually they would see other patients we wanted them to see. Most doctors would see additional patients if the home asked them to or if they needed a doctor to sign a death certification. There was only one who consistently refused.”

  “Was he the doctor of wealthier patients?” I asked.

  “He had only one patient and I would say that patient was one of the wealthier ones.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t normally give out names but he is Dr. Robinson. I won’t say anything bad about a doctor but I think I’m safe saying he wouldn’t see any patients but his own.”

  “Did patients who appeared to have more money ever surprise you by passing more quickly than you expected?” Deb asked.

  She said they did. “They were the patients of this one doctor, and they talked about him frequently. He wasn’t like the other doctors. He only dealt with patients who had money.”

  “Normally I wouldn’t say anything, but I wouldn’t want people I knew to have him as their doctor. I might get fired for talking this way, but its how I feel. And I don’t want you to place your grandmother with him.”

  Also she told us he wouldn’t help them with any patients who weren’t his. And he wouldn’t discuss his patients’ needs with their nurses so they could help take care of them better when he wasn’t there. He didn’t listen to their input about what they thought the patient needed. His patients had a higher mortality rate than most of the other doctors.

  They decided not to say anything to anyone because it would look as if they were trying to get even with him for not helping them out. She said that was all she would tell us, but she would be sure he wasn’t my grandmother’s doctor. Her name was Margaret, and she gave us her phone number in case we thought of additional questions once we left.

  We left there and went to see Otis and Will who were at the truck stop talking. They were getting better. I told them what was happening with the elderly disappearing. He said every now and then Tilly and Barbara heard about somebody passing unexpectedly or disappearing, but they never gave it much thought before. He said they’d talk about it later and see if they could remember some things that would help.

  I told him about the conversation I had with the guys that brought the furniture. He looked at Tilly with a “who was it?” look and she told him.

  “Ok
ay, he said looks like another family meeting is coming up. Thank you for telling me, Sam. That is exciting and no one has said anything to me. I guess they think because I’m hurt my brain doesn’t work.”

  “I think it is your mouth they are concerned about.”

  Otis laughed. “I will have to get you for that one but you are probably right. It is either that or they think my brain is in my legs.”

  We didn’t get an early start the next day but just after lunch we got to the next nursing home on Deb’s check list.

  This next home was a solid older building of frame and brick fascia construction. The other one probably was a well-disguised metal building with several elevation details concealing the fact. This one may have been an old schoolhouse that was converted, but it was solid and very functional.

  The lady we spoke to was the manager and her name was Ann. She’d been there for over twelve years. We asked her the same questions we had asked Margaret. She said they had electric locks on the front door, and people only got in or out when the front desk clerk recognized them or intended for them to pass through.

  They had no trouble getting certifications from a doctor because they had a clinic they worked with who had a team of doctors, and one of them was there each day. It sounded like a good system to us. We asked if other doctors were allowed in, and she said they were. I told her we had heard about one doctor that we should not use because it seemed his patients had more problems. She asked if we knew the doctor’s name.

  “Dr. Robinson?” I asked.

  “I’m sure he isn’t on the list of doctors we recommend. We like to work with doctors whose patients have a good survival rate. When a doctor isn’t on our list, there is probably a reason and we don’t recommend that particular doctor.” She recommended the team clinic and maybe a few other good ones. She gave us her phone number in case we had more questions.

  Once we were in the Jeep headed home, I called the first home and asked for Margaret. When she answered, I asked her if she would verify something for me. She said she would not do anything that would get her in trouble for slander. She said what it meant to her is she would not verify anything negative. But she would tell me good things.

  “For example, if you told me you were thinking about hiring a certain doctor, and I know him or her to be a good one, then I would say we have had a good experience with that doctor. But if you suggest a doctor who I would not recommend, then I will change the subject, and you will be free to conclude anything you wanted from that.”

  I told her it was fair enough.

  “Can you recommend Dr. Robinson?”

  “I’m sure the doctor you’re considering to care for your grandmother will need to be one of the best. Who is the next doctor on your list?”

  I made up a name, “Dr. Johnson”.

  “I don’t know a Dr. Johnson, but I’m sure he’s a good choice.”

  Then after a pause, she asked if she had given me the information I needed.

  “You sure have.”

  “Good day then and we hope to see your grandmother soon,” she said in a cheery voice. And she was gone.

  Deb laughed out loud while leaning forward and slapping one hand on the steering wheel.

  “Margaret sure made it clear she would take a total stranger over Dr. Robinson,” she said. “Given her personal parameters to never slander, she couldn’t have been clearer.”

  After we had a good laugh at the deftness exhibited by Margaret, I had to make good on supper. But I got to eat with the prettiest girl in town.

  Once we were on our way, I asked Deb to drive again so I could call Jim and not cause a wreck. She liked to drive anyway, so we were kind of into that pattern.

  Jim answered, and I told him what I had found out.

  “I intend to make an appointment with Dr. Robinson unless you talk me out of it. Since we don’t know what’s going on, more information couldn’t hurt.”

  Jim agreed and said he had talked to a few FBI guys in Phoenix, but feeling them out over the phone wasn’t easy, and he hadn’t talked to anyone he was sure of. He would continue to work on it. Before we hung up, he told me we’d done impressive work.

  “You’re asking the right questions of the right people. You two have the instinct for detective work, which was hard to teach someone who didn’t already have it.”

  I thanked him, and we were home.

  We had a home. It sounded so good, so normal, and so restful. We watched TV and read until we were getting sleepy and went to bed. Snuggling her was good for the soul.

  The next day I called to make an appointment with Dr. Robinson. He answered the phone, and I told him my grandmother was getting too frail to live by herself. We wanted to see if he were a good fit for her. He was only taking patients referred to him from a few sources, but he thanked us for the call and hung up. So he wasn’t taking new people like my grandmother. Maybe it was because she had a family. We hadn’t told him she had money or not.

  So we borrowed a phone from one of Otis’s nieces, and Deb called Dr. Robinson. She said she was a nurse, and a lady she had been caring for was getting too feeble to live at home. She had no family but did own her own house and seemed to have plenty of money to pay for whatever she needed. She was looking for a doctor to turn her over to who would recommend a nursing home or assisted-living facility and then take care of her. Deb had too many patients and didn’t have time to see her once she moved.

  Dr. Robinson all but slobbered on Deb over the phone. He said he’d be delighted to take over her care. Deb told him she’d send an email with the lady’s name, address, and phone number, and he could take over from there.

  When we told Jim, he about had a dancing fit. He was sure we were on to something. He asked how we would feel about him coming to Phoenix for a few days. We said we would rather he came to Phoenix than we go to Washington.

  “See you in the morning,” he said.

  We decided to go back by the truck stop to see if anything was going on there. It was quiet, boarded up, and really sad looking. We drove around back and began to look around for ideas about where to put the store. I told Deb it would be nice to not have to move the pumps and especially the ones with underground tanks. She agreed with that, but she didn’t have a solution either.

  We went driving out on the land in four-wheel drive and bouncing around. Deb screamed and laughed. She was still driving, so she couldn’t blame anything on me. We drove past the yellow target sign and kept going. We agreed we didn’t want to be downrange from the sign, so we veered off a little more toward the mountains. About two miles in, we came up to a rise in what was otherwise mostly flat land until you got to the mountains. There the land rose with an angle of 30 percent and then to 45 percent or more as you got higher.

  The mountains were almost like a row of icicles turned upside down and sticking up into the air off a flat table. The rise we found was not very high. Maybe it was five feet higher than the rest of the flat land, but sitting on top of it, we could see quite a bit farther. Standing up in the Jeep, we had a good long view. We liked it and believed we found our land. We got out Deb’s GPS and got the coordinates written down.

  We decided ice cream was in order and headed for town and then home. She patted me on the bottom while walking into the house and then said something smart aleck.

  I told her that mouth would get her in trouble. I chased her around with her screaming and throwing pillows and anything she could find, which wasn’t too hard. She made a mess but to no avail. I got her cornered.

  We agreed to get up early in the morning and head for Phoenix. We could get a good breakfast en route, and then depending on whether or not we heard from Jim, we could go by another nursing home.

  The next morning at breakfast, we heard from Jim. He would be arriving in about an hour and wanted to know if we could pick him up.

  We said we might be a little late but would get there as soon as we could.

  He would be going to baggage claim,
so it would be about right.

  It was good to see him again. I was beginning to be excited about finally connecting enough dots that we knew what was going on and could begin to sort out the perpetrator of my discomfort.

  Jim was excited about our research on Dr. Robinson especially and thought we should focus on him. “I have done some background on him and found some conflicting information that might or might not mean he was covering up something.”

  Jim had Dr. Robinson’s office number and address. Jim called there to say he was following up on the lady who Deb had talked about. He said Deb worked for him.

  “Deb is ready to turn her over to you,” Jim said. “But I need to know for sure if you’ll be taking her case before I pull Deb off her care. We as a nursing care provider have a form we need to be filled out. I’ll be passing by your office sometime today and wanted to know if I could make about a two-minute appointment to run in and get a signature confirming acceptance of her care.”

  The doctor would wait on them before making his rounds as he was currently in the office. He said he was very happy to take over her care.

  We agreed that Jim and Deb would go in, and I would stay with the car.

  When they returned Deb said, “Yuk. That man is as slimy and crooked as a snake. He was so willing to take over my client. He made me sick. It was like I was turning my friend over to a serial killer for safekeeping.”

  “We have a criminal of some kind here, I’m sure,” Jim said. He called into the Phoenix office. He had told them he was coming to work on a case and would be in touch.

  Now he needed someone in the office to help him and asked if someone was available.

  A guy we’ll call Marty got on the phone and said he’d been told to help Agent Jim if he could. Jim told Marty he was very glad to meet him on the phone and would like to drop in today or tomorrow to meet him in person.