Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe (3 page)

"You're talking about Jesse and Susan's wedding," Dr. Noble said.

"You've heard about it?"

She nodded. The color seemed to drain from her face. Mark wondered if maybe he should squeeze the call button and get a doctor for her.

"An Elvis impersonator performed the service," Dr. Noble said. "Then Jesse serenaded Susan with his own version of ‘Love Me Tender.' You started to sing along until Steve nudged you to be quiet."

Word had traveled even faster than he'd expected. Everyone at the hospital already knew. Jesse and Susan must have started calling people from their honeymoon suite at the Cote d'Azur resort casino. Either that, or Amanda had leaked the news after the ceremony. There weren't a lot of other suspects. Mark, Steve, and Amanda were the only guests at the couple's impromptu wedding, though it wasn't as rash a decision as it seemed. Jesse and Susan had been dating for years. The only surprise was the moment Jesse had chosen to ask Susan to marry him and his eagerness to do it right away.

"Did I have an accident on the drive back to Los Angeles?" Mark asked.

He would have been driving an unfamiliar car on the Pearblossom Highway, a notoriously dangerous two-lane stretch of road across the California desert that was lined with makeshift crosses and memorials honoring the scores of people who'd left their blood on the asphalt. If all he'd suffered in a collision was a concussion, he'd been very, very lucky—though trashing two cars—one on the way to Las Vegas and one on the way back—couldn't have made his insurance agent too happy.

But what if he hadn't been in the car alone? Mark felt his heart start pounding and heard his cardiac monitor beeping to the same beat.

"Was anyone else hurt? Was it my fault?"

She shook her head. "That's not what happened."

"Then why do you have that troubled look on your face?" Mark said. "There's obviously something important you're not telling me."

She sighed. "Their wedding was almost two years ago, Mark."

He stared at her, his vision blurring again. He blinked hard and tried to stay calm. Retrograde amnesia was common with head injuries. It could wipe away anything from hours to years, or in some very rare cases, an entire lifetime of memories. In most of the cases Mark had seen, the memories came back, albeit slowly and in maddeningly incomplete bits and pieces.

But not always.

Sometimes the memories never returned.

He was missing two years.

While a lot could happen in that amount of time, he figured it was just a small fraction of his sixty-three years. A mere blip on the time line of his life.

How much could have changed?

Mark hadn't lost his mental capabilities, so it wouldn't take long to adjust to whatever had occurred. He would simply devour the newspapers, magazines, and medical journals that had been published over the last twenty-four months, educating himself on what he'd missed. His life could go on as before—even if his memories of that brief period never returned.

He was alive. His mental capabilities were unimpaired and he wasn't paralyzed.

That was enough.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked softly.

"Dr. Emily Noble."

"If I wasn't wearing this name tag, or if the nurse hadn't mentioned my name before, would you have recognized me?"

Mark studied her. "Have we met?"

She sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand in hers, giving it a squeeze. This time it wasn't a neurological lest.

"Mark," she said, looking into his eyes, "I'm your wife."

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

There was an old James Gamer movie that Mark liked a lot. Gamer played an American major captured and drugged by the Germans, who fooled him into thinking he'd awakened from a coma in an Allied hospital five years after the Nazis were defeated in World War II. The truth, of course, was that it was all a clever Nazi plot to get the major to reveal what he knew about the upcoming D-day invasion.

The TV show
Mission: Impossible
used to pull variations of that same con all the time on dictators and mobsters to manipulate them into revealing their secrets or orchestrating their own doom.

Mark had even mounted a similar con himself by enlisting the aid of a Hollywood producer and using the sets of a TV medical drama to trick a murderer into incriminating himself.

In the movie, the TV series, and Mark's own experience, the key to pulling off the con was isolating the target, limiting his movements to one secure location, and controlling all the information and stimuli that he received.

Like keeping him in bed in a windowless hospital room.

That's the approach Mark took when he ran the con—and what he suspected was happening to him now that he was the target of one.

He had to get on his feet as soon as possible. Once he got outside of this hospital, if that was really where he was, it would be impossible for anyone to sustain the con. If the con men lose their rigid control of the environment, the deception crumbles.

But why were they doing it? What information or secrets did he have that would justify going to such extremes? He didn't know any military intelligence, security codes, bank vault combinations, or important formulas. He wasn't hiding his own guilt in some terrible crime. He didn't know the location of any hidden treasure.

So what were they after?

When he sent Dr. Noble away, asking for some privacy, she looked genuinely hurt. Her face reddened as if he'd struck her. He had to admit that she gave a convincing performance. It would take an accomplished actress to pull that off—but Los Angeles was full of them, out of work and desperate for cash.

Mark, I'm your wife.

While he was thinking about that, he noticed the gold wedding ring on his left hand. Curious, he wriggled the ring up towards his knuckle. There was a pale band of skin where the ring had been.

A tan line. That's a nice touch, Mark thought. They'd considered everything. He took the ring off and set it on his bedside table.

He wondered if he'd really been out for days or merely an hour or two, helped along by a steady flow of drugs in his IV to help muddle his memory—or loosen his tongue. Perhaps the flowers and candy were simply clever set decoration, like his wedding ring.

Mark was about to test his theory by pulling out his IV tubes when Amanda Bentley walked in. She was dressed in black, her ID clipped to the belt of her slacks. Judging by her formal attire, he guessed she'd just come from testifying in court as part of her duties as an adjunct county medical examiner.

"Tell me you weren't about to yank out your IV," Amanda said as if she were scolding her toddler son.

"I wasn't about to yank out my IV."

"Are you being a surly, difficult patient?" Amanda said. 

"I wouldn't dream of it," Mark said.

"Then why did Emily come out of here looking like she'd taken a beating?"

The woman in front of him looked and sounded like Amanda, but he had his doubts. The agents on
Mission: Impossible
wore incredible masks that they could peel right off, like a surface layer of skin. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain did it all the time. Even Tom Cruise did it in the movie version. He narrowed his eyes at her, trying to see if he could spot a seam along the edge of her face.

"You know Dr. Noble?" Mark asked. He couldn't spot any seams. His vision must still be too blurry.

"Of course I do," Amanda said, giving him the same stricken look that Dr. Noble had just a few minutes ago. "She's your wife. You know that, right?"

"Not really."

"Oh Mark, I'm so sorry," she said and sat down on the edge of the bed where Dr. Noble had been.

How do they make those face masks, he wondered. After all,
Mission: Impossible
was a fanciful TV show, a very old one at that, that tested a viewer's incredulity every week. Did such technology even exist?

It had to, because this lady in front of him was wearing an Amanda mask right now.

"I don't believe any of this," Mark said. "I haven't forgotten my wife—I'm not married."

Amanda studied him. "So what do you think is going on, Mark? Some kind of big con?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"Like that terrible movie with James Gamer."

"It was a
great
movie," Mark said.

"We have this argument every time the reruns come on," Amanda said.

"Maybe if you'd watched it you'd know it's the playbook for what's happening to me now."

Even as Mark said it, he knew how ridiculous he sounded. If she was part of the con, she knew it was a con. What was the point he was trying to make?

Mark closed his eyes. His head was pounding like it was an egg and some enormous creature was anxious to break its way out.

Amanda slid closer to him. "If this is all a big con, how do you explain me?"

He opened his eyes and his vision blurred again. He blinked hard, trying to focus. "A mask."

"Dizziness and disorientation are common side effects of a concussion," Amanda said. "But paranoid delusions could be a sign of something far more serious."

"Let me feel your face," Mark said.

She leaned over him. "Be my guest."

He pulled at her skin and felt around her hairline. Her face was definitely flesh and not a mask. This was Amanda, unless someone had undergone an extreme makeover to replicate her features. It was possible.

No, it's not, he thought. Get a grip on yourself. What is the most likely possibility? That you had a concussion and forgot two years of your life or that someone has mounted a con of such massive proportions that people were willing to have plastic surgery to pull it off?

"Feeling foolish yet?" Amanda asked, as if reading his thoughts.

He dropped his hands and looked at her sheepishly. "Foolish doesn't come close to describing what I feel." What he felt was numbing shock. The real emotions, whatever they might be, would come later when the enormity of his situation sank in, though one sentence was worming its way into his psyche.

Mark, I'm your wife.

"I'm sorry, Amanda," Mark whispered.

"It's okay. It's a lot of information to process for a guy whose brain is already pretty scrambled."

"Thanks," Mark said. "I think."

"I don't blame you for being skeptical. If you weren't, I'd think something was seriously wrong with you. I might wonder if you were really Mark Sloan."

He smiled. She was definitely Amanda. No one else could make him smile at a time like this, except, perhaps, Jesse, who never let anything get him down.

"It's all going to come back," she said. "You know that. Temporary amnesia is common in cases like this."

"Like what, exactly?" Mark asked. "What happened to me? How did I get hurt?"

"Maybe we ought to wait for Steve to get here. I'm sure he'd like to tell you himself."

"I want to know now."

She pursed her lips, thinking it over, then finally nodded, more to herself than to him. "It happened three days ago, in the parking structure here. You got out of your car and were walking into the hospital when someone tried to run you over. Jesse saw the car coming and tackled you out of the way. You hit your head on the pavement."

"Remind me to thank Jesse for that," Mark said.

"I will."

Mark considered what she had told him. "Are you sure it wasn't an accident?"

Amanda shook her head. "He was heading straight for you. We have it on security camera video."

"Did the driver get away?"

"Yes, but Steve's chasing down some leads," Amanda said.

"Why would someone want to kill me? Was I investigating a case at the time?"

Amanda patted Mark's arm and stood up. "We can talk about it tomorrow, when you're rested."

"I've been resting for three days," he said. "Or so I'm told."

"There will be plenty of time to catch up," she said. "There are more important things you should be concentrating on right now anyway."

She handed him his wedding ring, kissed him on the cheek, and walked out.

Mark looked at the wedding ring for a long time and then slipped it back on his finger.

The nurse served Mark a cheese sandwich, fruit juice, and a chocolate chip cookie that tasted like it was freshly baked on the last day he could remember. He began the task of grounding himself in the present by finding out the date, what day of the week it was, and the current time of day. It was midafternoon on a Thursday.

He asked the nurse to get him a copy of the day's
Los Angeles Times
to see if Earth had tilted off its axis while he was away.

Away.

That's how it felt to him, as if he'd been traveling and some doppelganger had been living his life for him in the meantime. He believed that everything that Dr. Noble—no,
Emily
—had told him was true, but he still couldn't accept it. He couldn't connect intellectually or emotionally with the startling news she'd shared with him.

Mark searched within himself for some feeling for Emily and came up empty. There was nothing there. He felt no more for her than he would a complete stranger.

Maybe if he saw her face again, heard her voice and felt her hand on his, some twinge of recognition would return. At the same time, the thought of seeing her again filled him with anxiety.

How could he be so deeply in love with someone and not feel anything for her now? What kind of trauma could cause that?

He still remembered his first wife, Katherine, still felt the pain of her death as if it had happened yesterday instead of years ago.

So how could he have forgotten Emily?

He believed that love was stronger than mere memory, that it was rooted in the soul. Had he lost part of that, too?

Steve came in wearing a black jacket, black slacks, and a black tie. Either he'd been to a funeral or he'd teamed up with Will Smith to fight aliens. He was in his forties, but he hadn't yet been able to shake the tan, the sun-bleached hair, and the casual swagger of his surfer youth.