by Alec Peche
“Wow, thirty years after his death,” Haro was awed by the science of forensics.
“Let’s go back to the suspicions about Dr. Phillips’s death,” redirected Van Bruggin. “The only reason we are doubting the heart attack is because of the connection to Our Lady?”
“Yes and just as importantly is the lack of personal or family connection to heart disease. I have never seen someone go from being perfectly healthy to death from heart disease in their forties without history or symptoms. Even with electrical malfunctions, there are symptoms. So there are two good reasons.”
“What is the doctor’s name that accompanied Dr. Phillips on that fateful snowmobile trip?”asked Van Bruggin.
“It’s Dr. Bradley Lewis. He is a surgeon. Oh and he has won several state United States Practical Shooting Association tournaments.”
With this last statement, the two detectives let out a whistle.
"Dr. Lewis has won awards for accurate rifle shooting?" asked Haro.
"Exactly, there are some really interesting loose ends with this case.” Jill pointed out.
"Obviously, you and your team have done more research on Dr. Lewis,” declared Van Bruggin. "Care to tell us more? At what point in this investigation were you going to discuss the circumstances surrounding Dr. Lewis?"
"Without the attempted murder of Helen, you would've thought I was a crank investigator. Heck at this stage we don't even know if Dr. Phillips was murdered; we just have a lot of suspicious circumstances at the moment."
With a huge sigh Haro asked, "Is there anything else about this case that we should know? Your team seems to be steps ahead of us. Speaking of your team, what are they currently researching? Because I'm sure they're up to something based on how fast you have arrived at some solid conclusions about Dr. Phillips."
Jill ignored his question and asked a few of her own, "Are you done here? Are you waiting for the crime scene technicians to arrive? Are you even going to treat this house as a crime scene when there is no clear-cut evidence yet that an attempted murder was committed here? The hospital will likely get toxicology tests results in about another hour from now and you may have some answers then, or in the best of all worlds, Helen will wake up."
"Dr. Quint, would you agree that we need to rule this house as a crime scene?” Van Bruggin questioned. “Certainly if we found Dr. Lewis’s fingerprints in this house, we would have to bring him in for questioning. However, if he is behind the murder of Doug Easley and Randall Phillips, then he's a very smart killer and I can't imagine he would be so dumb as to leave evidence around this house. Frankly if certain surfaces are wiped clean of fingerprints; that in itself, is an answer to whether someone attempted to murder Helen. Are we done here? Yes. Will the crime scene technician come here when she is done with Helen at the hospital? Yes."
"Good, I believe this is a crime scene and you're correct that my team is continuing to do more research on Dr. Lewis. One of our favorite areas of investigation, because it is so often the source of murder, is looking at the finances. That was how we were alerted to Dr. Lewis to begin with. We were looking at the angle of greed, what could Doug Easley do or decide that might affect someone's income? In order to figure out the answer to that question we needed to know the full range of decision-making positions he occupied at the time of his death. That was when we discovered that he was interim chair of surgery. We also know that Dr. Lewis's height and weight on his driver’s license likely matches the height and weight of the shooter that we caught on video feed. When you're done here, you're welcome to return to Marie's house and see what we're up to in terms of the investigation. I can also help you move forward with requesting the exhuming of Dr. Phillips’s body.”
"How did you get it the data off of Dr. Lewis’s driver’s license?” asked Haro.
"Let's just say, you don't want to know my source. I invite you to look up his driver's license yourself and verify what I've said.”
"You just want to cover your own unauthorized entry into the State’s driver’s license database,” accused Haro.
Jill just looked at the two detectives blank faced and unblinking. She had got farther in the investigation then they had, they knew they needed to ignore her acquisition of certain pieces of data and so they would, for now.
Jill just thought of another problem, "Do you have an officer guarding Helen at the hospital? She may be in great danger. We know that Dr. Lewis only practices at Our Lady and I don’t believe Helen’s ambulance took her there. However, if he is our killer, it would be easy for him to sneak in and harm Helen while she lays unconscious.”
“We did have an officer who accompanied her to the hospital and I’ll assign an officer to her until we have some resolution - she wakes up, we confirm this was an overdose, or we issue an arrest warrant for someone in this case.”
Jill relaxed. “Thank you. Perhaps we have a serial killer on our hands and just the thought of that gives me a few more angles to research. If you detectives are ready to leave, I need a ride to Marie’s house. If you’re not, let me know and I’ll get a friend to come get me.”
“We need to speak with the crime scene technician and then stop in at the hospital. I would advise that you have a friend come get you.”
Jill was glad to see them concentrating on the murder and she was perfectly fine calling her friends for a ride. She was sure they were dying to know what had happened at this house and how it might change the direction they were going with their investigation. She waited less than ten minutes before Angela appeared. She hopped in and they were off.
“Okay, we’re all dying to know. What was inside that house? Since an ambulance took off, we’re thinking that it wasn’t a dead body.”
“Her condition is not good, she is unconscious. Her employer is Our Lady and the police don’t like the coincidence. I’ll explain it all at once when we reach Marie’s kitchen. I’m curious to hear what you guys found as well. I haven’t looked at my email to see if Nick sent us anything. Have you guys heard from him?”
“Yeah, he sent you an email with a question in it and when he didn’t get an immediate response, he called me to get his question answered and find out what was going on.”
“What was his question?”
“He was able to break into the hospital’s administrative system, but he doesn’t really know where to look, so he was hoping to get some specifics from you. When he called us to ask the question we didn’t know enough about what you were looking for to assist his search. He’s gone to sleep as it is past midnight in Amsterdam but he said to send him what you need and he’ll get up and work on it.”
"It's really nice of Nick to give up sleep to help us. I'll have to sketch out what he should be looking for. It's hard to explain but I'll give him an explanation of what data looks like if he ends up in the right spot in their administrative system.”
“Also, we have an appointment with Michelle later this evening. She wants to get out of her house, so she is meeting us at Captain’s Walk Winery in the upstairs parlor so we can question her. We thought of interviewing her at Marie's house, but then we would have to hide the murder board and any other stuff and really that parlor is a very soothing room with good wine. She sounded very exhausted on the phone. It’s going to be painful interviewing her.”
Angela and Jill entered Marie's kitchen. Marie and Jo looked up from where they were each seated in front of a computer obviously searching for information about their victim and the mysterious Dr. Lewis.
Chapter Twelve
"Jill, tell us what happened at the house," Marie requested. "Our imaginations have been working overtime conjuring up all kinds of crime scenes inside that house. So what really happened?"
Jill had to smile and said, “Marie, you sound like a narrator of a made for television drama with your questions! So I will add a little drama to my answers just for the fun of it. Guess where the occupant of that house works?"
Marie and Jo looked blankly at Jill. They were not e
xpecting that question. Jill could see that they were trying to reboot their heads to the question that she had asked. After a few more seconds, Jo blurted out, "Our Lady of Guadalupe. Oh my, I can see that your far-fetched, in the next galaxy, murder suspect in Dr. Lewis, might be looking like a solid lead.”
"Bingo, jackpot goes to Jo! At this time, in that house, police are investigating an attempted murder of an employee of our favorite hospital. The employee has not recovered consciousness to tell police what happened. She works for a wonderful supervisor who freaked out when, for the first time in over twenty years, she failed to show up for work. He called the police to report the situation and they told him he had to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report. He said ‘thank you very much but I'm going over to her house and break-in; you may as well send an officer to charge me with burglary’. It was a good thing he was such a passionate supervisor as he found her with a poor respiratory effort and began mouth-to-mouth until rescuers arrived to take over. It's too early to tell if she'll ever regain consciousness but our friends, Detectives Van Bruggin and Haro, invited me inside the house as they did not like the coincidence of two tragedies striking two employees of Our Lady within a few days of each other. Like most members of law enforcement, they don't like coincidences.”
With a sly smile, Marie asked, "and what did they say when you told them there were three employees from Our Lady involved in terrible tragedies?”
"Is it a personality defect that has me gaining pleasure when we can out-think law enforcement? I guess I have a small mind, but it was so satisfying to utter the word ‘three’ when they kept saying ‘two’ employees of Our Lady. But I have my small pleasures and I'm ready to move on and try to be helpful. They're coming over to talk to us after they finish directing the crime scene folks.
“Let me back up and tell you one more thing about the employee found in that house – she was the director of quality. Her death would have been made to look like a suicide but whoever staged it did a poor job. She was dressed as though ready to go to work, with her purse on the sofa seemingly just waiting for her to walk out the door. That's just not the behavior of a suicidal person. They're doing toxicology screens to see what kind of drug is in her system, but if Dr. Lewis is related to this event, then more than likely, it's an anesthesia drug he might have access to either in his private practice or in the operating room. I spoke to the detectives about exhuming Dr. Phillips’s body. I think in a strange way they are grateful that we're working on this case because we're cooperative and we understand the medical world more than they do."
"Green Bay is feeling like a creepy little town if this Dr. Lewis has done all the crime we potentially think he might have done.” Angela was mourning a bit over the loss of innocence for her town.
"Wait till you hear about what we have found on Dr. Lewis on the internet,” Jo imparted. “It will add more weight to the theory that Lewis plays some kind of a role in this murder.”
"I want to hear what you guys found and then I need to send an e-mail to Nick about what kind of information we're looking for in the administrative files at Our Lady. I need to do that outside of the presence of the two detectives so let's be quick about this. If we don't finish before they arrive, you may see me spend longer than usual in the bathroom while I compose an e-mail to Nick. I slipped up while I was talking with him earlier and said that Dr. Lewis’s height and weight likely matched the gentleman we could see in the video feed at the time of the shooting. They asked me where I got the information and I just stared him down refusing to answer. It's a minor concern of theirs in light of one murder, one attempted murder, and potentially a second murder from several months ago in another county."
"Let's focus on Dr. Lewis then," Marie prompted. "Dr. Lewis was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother was young and hooked on drugs so he was given up for adoption almost immediately. His mother was found dead perhaps a year or two after she gave birth to him. Lewis is his adopted parents’ surname. He seemed to have a normal childhood with four younger siblings birthed by his adopted parents. He went to public schools and then on to St. Louis University for pre-med and then medical school at the University of Wisconsin. He met his first wife while he was in medical school and they married shortly after graduation. He had two children through that marriage which lasted about ten years when she died unexpectedly.
"I look through obituary records and newspaper articles but couldn't figure out what she died from. He married his second wife two years after the first wife's death. He's had three children from that marriage which has lasted close to twenty years.”
Marie continued after Jo gave the basics of his background. "If you look him up online, he has very favorable patient comments. He accepts all the major insurance companies and he makes the occasional trip to Haiti to volunteer and do surgery for Haitians."
Jill inserted, "he sounds like a regular Boy Scout."
"On the surface, he looks like your average American doctor. Seems like he's been a good father to his children and he is well respected in the community. He has had some interesting legal problems. He has been picked up for two driving under the influence incidences. He's gone to court for both cases and got them tossed out of court. Even though he could not pass tests such as walking a straight line or touching his fingers to his nose, his blood-alcohol level was zero and he didn't test positive for any illicit drugs. As the District Attorney could not prove what he was driving under the influence of, she lost the cases.”
"He must be using prescription drugs that don't fall under testing protocols for illicit drugs," Jill theorized. "I hope he doesn't go into the operating room under the influence. It would be criminal if that was tolerated by the operating room staff or the anesthesiologist.”
"He's had additional legal problems in the financial area. He has lost two properties to the state for failure to pay taxes. Apparently, his first wife was wealthy. She created a will after the second child was born. She had some real legal eagles that set up a trust for the two children. All of the personal wealth that she brought into the marriage, upon her death, was directly deposited into a trust for the children. Her husband did not get a dime of her inherited wealth. She set up a separate executor and trustee to manage the children's trust. He tried to fight her will in court and lost."
"How about the current wife? Was she independently wealthy, as well, at the time of their marriage?" asked Angela.
"It looks that way to me. He was sued in small claims court about the time of his marriage for failure to make the installment payments on a diamond engagement ring."
"He must be blowing through large sums of money because he certainly makes enough as a surgeon to be able to afford an engagement ring for his wife,” Jo proffered the explanation. "So what's he spending his money on? Can you tell if he's a gambler? It seems that he doesn't have an illicit drug problem but even if he's got a prescription drug problem, where is he getting the drugs from?”
"Those are interesting questions, Jo, and I have not found the answer to them yet,” agreed Marie. “It would be helpful to have law enforcement's assistance to gain some information about Dr. Lewis. Does he have frequent trips to Vegas, perhaps indicating a gambling addiction? These financial troubles seem like they were many years ago: we need to find out what's going on now with his bank accounts. There have been no recent suits in the last decade against him.”
“All of these troubles seem like they might play out in his care of patients,” Jill remarked. “Either he might try to increase his income by rushing patients through his office or by rushing them through the operating room. Many insurance companies pay based on an episode of care. So you can’t take out someone’s gall bladder and then see them a bunch of times in your office and get reimbursed for that. Typically, you get one post-operative visit. Any additional visits are out of the physician’s own pocket. There are really no public rating systems of surgeon skills and few hospitals have developed a methodology to rank physici
an skill within a hospital department. There is a real lack of data, public or private.”
“So how would a hospital or a patient know if their surgeon is performing well?” puzzled Marie. “It seems archaic that they don’t have measurement systems”
Jill observed, “It’s not as easy a thing to measure as you would think. It’s often the patients themselves that make it difficult to measure. Let’s take two forty-five year old males having gall bladder surgery. One of them is normal body weight, gets regular exercise and takes no medication other than a multi-vitamin and an allergy pill. The other is morbidly obese weighing in at 375 pounds, is an insulin dependent diabetic, has poor mobility because of bad circulation in his feet. He has high blood pressure from the weight, diet, and lack of exercise. Which patient do you think is more likely to have complications? Will the surgery take longer because there are more layers of tissue to go through to find the gall bladder? Since the second patient had poor circulation to start with, he develops a blood clot after surgery and a surgery site infection again because of his diabetes and skin quality. Someone has to decide which part of these complications are attributable to the surgeon and what part is attributable to patient characteristics. Then let’s talk about support systems around the patient at home. Let's say the first patient goes home to a ranch home surrounded by his family and cared for by his wife who is, oh by the way, a nurse. The second patient goes home to low income housing. He is still not moving around much because of pain from the incision and because he hasn’t been moving around much for the past three years. He is seen once a day by a visiting nurse who changes his surgical dressing and does blood sugar testing which finds him high in sugar which is bad for wound healing. The point is that some patients can have social and medical conditions that affect their outcomes regardless of the hospital or surgeon. Statistically calculating those nuances is what can take so long to figure out if you have a quality problem. Sorry about that long-winded explanation, but I think it helps to understand why it may be hard to spot a bad physician.”