Un-Connected (23 page)

We had had a long day and especially Jim. He
was ready for a bed. We took him back to the airport to pick up his rental car.
He was going straight to the motel and get a quick bite there. He said tomorrow
night he would take us out for a good meal.

Deb and I were glad to help. I was especially
glad after so long to see things clearing up to the point we could tell what
was going on.

When we got home, I told Deb I was
emotionally drained and was going to bed. I didn’t like being so tired. And I
didn’t like going to bed without Deb, but tonight had to be an exception. She
patted me on the bottom and told me she was glad to get rid of me for a couple
of hours. As I anticipated, I went out like a light and slept about ten
straight hours.

Deb woke me in the morning with a kiss and a
command.

“Get up, sleepy head.”

She was sure bossy for being the smallest. She
asked if I was sick or just tired. I told her I was excited about finding out
things, but it was also draining. I didn’t think I was sick.

We met Jim at his hotel, and he brought us up
to date on what he and Marty had discovered. Someone was showing an IRS badge
around. They were pulling in lots of money, which was going into IRS accounts,
it seemed. They appeared to be the real thing. Jim and Marty began to see if
any of the people who died had autopsies.

Very few did and most of those were because
someone was suspicious and raised a stink. Often the cause of death was near
natural but maybe a little odd. In a few cases, the patients were taking
medications that were appropriate but would be necessary for the person to
live. It was as if they just quit taking their medication.

Jim wanted us to get someone inside a nursing
home to help us gather information. We all talked about the nursing-home person
we felt would be best. They would need to be a cool head who could act as if
nothing was going on when they had conversations with the doctor. Then they’d
need extra inspections of things like the meds that were given to the patients.
They wanted to see if they could put a medical student with the doctor when he
made his rounds. They wanted to do anything they could to determine what was
going on.

After discussing the pros and cons of the
person we wanted, we settled on Margaret as our first choice. I called her and
said we would like to have another talk with her face to face. I told her I had
my wife with me and wanted to know if we could buy her lunch. She had forty-five
minutes, so it would have to be somewhat close to the nursing home. We asked
her to pick the place, and she chose a pizza buffet. Deb and I met her there,
and after visiting a few minutes, I told her I wanted her to meet one other
person. I waved Jim in and told her who he was while he was entering. We didn’t
want to swamp her or be overbearing, and I told her so, but we badly needed her
help. Jim introduced himself, and Margaret was impressed with my rendition of his
resume.

“OK,” she said. “What do you guys want?”

Jim told her the FBI was suspicious that a
Dr. Robinson was not practicing with full integrity, and they needed her help
to verify one way or the other if he was.

“So you want to know if he’s killing people.”

 Deb kicked me under the table and showed a
suppressed smile.  We chuckled a little at Margaret’s candor and insight.

Jim smiled. “You’re a very perceptive person,
and we need your skill.”

She agreed to help us. Margaret said she
could look him right in the eye and smile and be her normal sweet self. But she
said she could pretty much tell me if it isn’t murder, it’s something close,
maybe neglect. Jim asked her how a doctor could make things happen the way she
had seen them happen.

She said substituting placebos for essential
medications would do it sometimes. For heart patients that were taking nitro,
just a little extra in the pill cup would do it. The pharmacist would dispense
medication in small paper cups that were thrown away. If someone added a few
extra, the nurse that carried the medication to the patient would not likely
notice.

We asked if it was possible one of the
pharmacists was doing something like that. Margaret said one of them for sure
wouldn’t. She said she grieves over every one who dies, and she double-checks
herself or has someone else double-check her almost every time.

The other pharmacists get aggravated by her
doing that sometimes, but she had double-checked theirs before and found
mistakes, so they owed her. She said there was one that might do it for some
extra cash. She used to always complain about needing a raise or overtime. She
hadn’t heard much from her about that in a while. We got that pharmacist’s name
and told Margaret we’d be in touch.

Marty found out Dr. Robinson and the pharmacist
were both getting additional deposits to their bank accounts on a regular
basis. Especially the doctor. Someone really appreciated whatever he was doing.
 So we were pretty sure we were on the right track and getting more insight all
the time.

Marty called back a few minutes later saying
there was something really interesting that just got connected. He said a
person on our suspicious-death list had a friend that got really upset when he
died. He caused a big stink and told the police that something was wrong. He
insisted and got an autopsy on his friend.

The nurses where he stayed didn’t know he had
a friend because no one came to see him. What they didn’t know is this friend
was in a wheelchair, and though he drove, it was really hard for him to get
out. Their patient and this guy must have talked on the phone about every other
day. Well, the police connected part of the dots by saying the guy in the wheel
chair was driving one day and drove off a bridge. The crash killed him. Finally,
a witness came forward and said they saw a black SUV run him off the road. The
FBI was sending a crime team over to see the van and see if the police missed
anything.

Jim asked Marty to contact the local paper
and ask them to notify the FBI daily of obituary announcements they received. Then
Jim told Marty he was headed to the courthouse to find out how death
certificates are handled and to find out how fast we could get notification.

Jim told us it would be a boring job and
probably take the rest of the day to ferret out what he needed, so he suggested
we go on home. We agreed and dropped him at his car.

Before he got out, he said he had forgotten
to tell me, but my fingerprints were in the FBI database as belonging to Sam
Adams, so I should be really safe now. Benjamin Raines had disappeared, and the
FBI had given up on finding him.

Deb told me on the way home she was afraid
someone would tip off the doctor, and he would disappear. I agreed, but we didn’t
call Jim. I was still drained and wanted a break.

“I would like to take a pretty girl to a
movie!”

“You have to take me instead.” She said.

After the movie we called Otis to see how
they were doing.  We gave him a short version of all that was happening. He was
glad to hear about it.

It sure was good to be home. This place with
Deb in it was an oasis in a crazy world.

We didn’t hear anything from Jim early the
next morning and we had a leisurely time at home. We had music on, and Deb and
I were reading. We would stop every little bit and bring up something we had
forgotten to tell the other or something we read and wanted to share. We might
discuss it or say the other one was wrong and sometimes laughed at that. One of
the discount department stores had a sale on something Deb said we could use. I
said I would pay for it if she drove. She said sure, even though being married
and pooling our money meant
we
were paying for it, not just me. It was
one pile of money. Large or small, it was ours.

We walked around hand in hand like we didn’t
have a care in the world. What a difference from a few months ago. They had an
oil change special on, and I told Deb I thought I would run out and see if the
Jeep needed an oil change. It did so we hung out there a little longer than we
had anticipated, but it was fun and relaxing.

We were on our way home when Jim called. He
had a lot of news. The FBI crime scene guys had found black paint on the van of
the wheelchair guy who went off the bridge.

He’d been pushed off.

Also there was a brand new death certificate
in Phoenix, and the body wasn’t cold yet. Jim had managed to get it to autopsy,
and we might find out what caused the person’s death. He was also getting the
medical history, so the autopsy results with the history might tell us how it
happened. He had put a rush on both and hoped to have answers by late this
afternoon.

Jim had also talked to Tex and Seth. They
were comparing notes. Jim had been behind them in figuring out what was going
on with this file up until Deb and I started digging, and Jim had come to
Phoenix. Now Jim was ahead of them with details.

Seth said the crime lab called. They’d
dropped something on the Fairfax case. They blamed it on some interoffice something,
but bottom line Rebecca had skin under a couple of fingernails. The samples had
gotten separated from the rest of her file, but they had DNA on it now. They
hadn’t been able to match it yet but had just started. But it didn’t match
Ben’s DNA so
he was cleared
though still a person of interest. Jim
suggested they “leak” that info and see if it caused anything to happen. They
all agreed that it was a good strategy, so Seth made one carefully chosen phone
call on his personal cell phone that was a standard unsecured phone.

Then Jim stopped and said he was checking his
notes and guessed that was about it. He asked if we were still being careful. We
assured him we were but not running scared half to death as we had been. We had
a security system at the house, and we were staying together and taking other
precautions. He said he wanted us to. The FBI was not looking for us, but he
was sure the black SUV killers still wanted to talk to me.

After we hung up, we both agreed we were
finding out a lot about this case but still did not have nearly enough
information to see who was behind it. We got home and had a pleasant and
relaxing time at home.

A couple of days passed with little
excitement, and Deb and I were glad for that. Deb drove Barbara and me to the
site we liked and we walk around on it for a bit. Barbara liked it and said she
would talk to Will and Otis and get back to us. Deb and I were getting excited
about building our first house together. We started driving around looking at
houses from the street and talking about what we liked and didn’t, and I took
notes while she drove.

We liked the idea of a courtyard that was
enclosed. A Spanish Style house worked well with that, but we weren’t sure it
was our favorite style.

Deb and I couldn’t be happier, but it seemed
we couldn’t get very far away from somber reality. But we had some great times.
We had made one of the bedrooms into our office. It was a truck dispatching,
bookkeeping, and house planning office. We had bookcases and a small file
cabinet. The main desk faced the window with the chair back to the door.

I remembered I’d been in there working one
day when Deb came in. She announced she just bought some new sweat socks she
was trying on.

“You need to look at my new sweat socks.”

“Just a second while I write down this
number.”  I said and then I turned around to see Deb in sweat socks. Just sweat
socks.

She pointed to her wiggling toes. “See my new
socks.”

I chuckled and then lunged for her.

She screamed and ran as fast as she could go,
laughing loudly.

I was gaining on her when she ran through the
master bedroom door and spun to shut the door in my face, but I caught it with
my forearm and pushed it back. I caught her in the next four or five steps and
picked her up, holding her with one arm under her legs.

We were laughing so hard we were about to
cry. A tear trickled out of her eyes. I lay her on the bed. We must have
laughed for a couple of minutes. Then I told her she was interrupting my work,
and then we’d begun to discuss her new very important sweat socks. 

After my break and a short nap we decided to
go out and look at a house I found online.  It wasn’t far away.  It was half
timbered two story with an enclosed courtyard.  It looked a little medieval or European
or something but we liked it.  The paint was not a color we would choose so it
was a little hard to get into at first but with the right colors we didn’t
think it would look dirty or dark.

We had gotten tired of looking at houses so
we only wanted to see that one and were headed home when Jim called. He said we
would never guess what happened and went right on telling us.

“Early this morning the Manassas Police
Department got a call about a black SUV that had been parked in an unusual
place since yesterday. When the police got there, it was like the ones you’d seen
with very dark windows. The doors were unlocked, and there was a dead man
inside dressed in black Spec Ops clothing. We don’t have the official cause of
death, but he had one bullet hole in the back of his head.”