Fatal Rounds, page 28
I could’ve done without that spotlight, but my mother’s enthusiasm and good mood were a welcome change. They also made up for the fact that she didn’t use my name and probably didn’t even realize I was her daughter. Something heavy presses on my heart, but Dr. Lightfoot cuts the feeling short.
“Don’t you have a neighbor who spent time in prison?” he asks. “You mentioned her the last time we met. Months ago.”
His abrupt topic shift surprises me. I also didn’t miss the way he stretched out the word months. “Sorry I took so long to make an appointment, but yeah, April is my neighbor. The drugs were her boyfriend’s though.”
“Is he still her boyfriend? Do they keep in touch? Is he still in prison?”
I open and close my mouth, not sure how to answer his flurry of questions. I settle on, “No, he’s no longer her boyfriend.”
“But she can reach him if she wanted, right? He must have all sorts of connections on the inside—prison or jail.”
My satchel is next to me. It’s a new one, a soft leather carryall with plenty of compartments to organize my stuff. I finally went to Nordstrom with Megan. Well, technically, anyway. She traveled to the department store while I, with my healing rib fractures, stayed home and watched her through FaceTime. She marched from purse to purse, holding each one up to her phone’s camera. Although I refused them all, we finally agreed on my new satchel. I wish she’d let me reimburse her for it, but she refused. She said all my colleagues chipped in for it. “Believe me, Liza,” she said over the phone. “A weird man-bag is the least we can do for you.”
I pull a bottled water from my weird man-bag and drink. When I recap the beverage, I finally respond to Dr. Lightfoot’s last comment. “I don’t know what April does in her spare time. It’s not like we hang out much. She makes me baked goods. I pitched in with her rent. Watched her kid overnight once.”
“I’m sure she’s very grateful to you. Might even feel like she owes you.”
“What are you trying to imply, Dr. Lightfoot?”
“I’m not trying to imply anything.”
I check my watch. Our time is almost up. I want to get out of Boston before afternoon traffic hits. Although I’m still in no shape to punch the heavy bags at Brian’s Gym, I could probably manage a light spin on one of the cycles.
“Do you want to answer my question now?”
I sink slowly back into the chair. “Still a nag, I see.”
He laughs. “That’s my job.” A sigh follows. “But Liza, can we finally address the elephant in the room?”
“Which is?”
“How do you feel about Dr. Donovan’s death?”
I take another long drink of water and shrug. The movement makes me wince. “If you’re asking me if I care that someone shanked him behind bars, the answer is no. Karma at its finest, in my opinion.”
“Some people…” Dr. Lightfoot pauses, seemingly measuring his words. “Even though the man was a murderer, some people might have an emotional response to his death, especially if they were the one who set it in motion.”
“He set it in motion,” I retort. “Not me.”
“Well, yes, that’s true,” my shrink says, “but had you not switched your residency rank list last minute and put Titus McCall first—your own admission to me earlier—he never would have been caught.” When I don’t respond he adds, “Had you been seeing me regularly, we could have discussed this whole thing from the start. Worked through some options about how to best approach finding a strange man in your pictures and each step thereafter. As I’ve told you in the past, with your dad gone, I think you’d benefit from weekly sessions with me again. Someone to help you navigate life’s more difficult choices.”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
He leans forward. “Most people wouldn’t switch residency programs on a whim, and most people wouldn’t personally investigate a man to such extremes. Do you understand that, Liza?”
My belly sparks that familiar flash of fury. “So I was just supposed to let it go? Some guy stalking my family? Stalking others? Just let him go on killing?”
“Of course not. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Though you didn’t know he was a killer at first, you had every right to explore why he was in your photographs. But who knows how it could have turned out? You’re lucky his attempt to kill you failed.”
“Maybe so, but I still got him.”
“I’m just asking you to acknowledge that there were other avenues to take. More rational avenues.” He scoots to the edge of his chair and rests his elbows on his thighs. “Look, I’m not saying what you did was right or wrong. I just want you to think about the other ways you might have approached it, that’s all. Just as we’ve been doing for years.”
The heat in my belly starts to dissipate. “I get that, but in this case, I think my way worked out just fine.”
Dr. Lightfoot lets it go at that, but only after adding, “Let’s readdress this next week, okay? We’ll walk through the last couple months step by step and discuss other ways each action on your part might have been handled differently.”
That sounds about as much fun as shopping with Megan. “Okay, but I can’t make it here until five thirty at the earliest.”
“That’s no problem. I can extend my workday for one of my most, shall we say, interesting clients.” He smiles, stands up, and fist-bumps me. “Until next week, Liza Larkin.”
As often happens when I leave Dr. Lightfoot’s office, I mull over what we talked about. It’s this reflection that has kept me in therapy for so long, at least until I let things lapse last fall, because if I spend time thinking about our exchanges, they must be helping, right?
Whether I need to return to weekly sessions long-term, I don’t know, but I won’t ever go so long without seeing him again. He’s right. Without my dad around anymore, a shrink is my best voice of reason, and these past several weeks suggest I probably still need one. Despite what others might think, I do want to fit in as well as I can. I love my job and want nothing more than to study the brain inside out. Doing so requires functioning as close to normal as possible.
You are not a list of symptoms, Liza.
But what’s done is done. I can’t—nor do I want to—go back now.
An hour of traffic and a doughnut stop later, I return to my apartment. With my pastries and a bottle of Belgian beer in hand, I plop down in front of my desk. While my computer powers up and loads its programs, I circle back to Dr. Lightfoot’s question.
Do I care that Dr. Donovan is dead?
No.
Do I care that I’m the one who started the trajectory that led to it?
No.
I pull up the one remaining photograph I kept of Shelly’s crime scene. I deleted all the others, just as I promised Megan I would, but this is the defining one, the one that set the Rube Goldberg machine into motion, the one without which the police would never have gotten a search warrant. Without a warrant, they would never have found the evidence I planted in Dr. Donovan’s car. And without the evidence found in his car, the seven patient murders would never have been investigated. My father’s death would never have been avenged.
Therefore, Dr. Lightfoot, whether or not the steps I took are the same ones other people would take matters nothing to me. What matters is I took them, and by doing so, justice was served. Dr. Donovan was a murderer. He admitted it to my face. Admitted to killing my father and others. He killed people to feed his own godlike ego, and from one psychopath to another, he got what he deserved.
Oh yes, let’s not mince words. Dr. Lightfoot might not write the terms “psychopath” or “sociopath” in my file. He might not even write the medical name, antisocial personality disorder, since schizoid personality disorder is a better fit for me. But I’m sure it’s crossed his mind. History of aggressiveness? Check. Deceitfulness? Check. Societal nonconformity? Check. Anyone who looked at his case files on me, which surely are copious by now, could probably read between the lines. After all, it’s not my schizoid personality that made me prone to violence in the past. Those acts had psychopath written all over them.
I don’t care. Though in many ways Dr. Donovan and I are alike (minus the charming demeanor he had in surplus but I lack), my father was right. I am not a list of symptoms. I am me. I don’t purposely hurt people. I don’t want to see them in pain. I will always stand up for those who are victimized. As Ned said in my hospital room, consequences be damned.
So I’ll make no apologies for wanting Dr. Donovan dead. Were he still alive, his fancy lawyers would tie up his case for years. They’d call everything that has to do with the seven former patients circumstantial. They’d explain away the partial fingerprint in the Taurus as insufficient. They’d argue the photograph that led to the search warrant was doctored and that he’d never set foot at Shelly’s crime scene, even though he had no alibi for that timeframe.
He’d be charged with his attack on Dr. Silverstein, of course, as well as his hit-and-run on Shawna if they could prove it. Both would send him to prison and ruin his career, but they might not put him away for life.
Plus, according to the information Tam gleaned from the detectives, Dr. Donovan was insisting I was the one who intended to harm Dr. Silverstein with potassium chloride, even with her testimony otherwise. He claims either my advisor was drugged and therefore confused about what really happened inside her home or she was siding with me. He asserts that in my delusional state, I cooked the whole thing up, and if he hadn’t followed me to Dr. Silverstein’s house, she’d likely be dead. He only injected me with the potassium chloride in self-defense, right when the police came in.
These ridiculous claims seem a fool’s errand for sure, but when one sees himself an omnipotent god as Sam did, he probably thinks anything is possible. And with a team full of high-billing lawyers, maybe it is because, according to Tam, after Dr. Donovan met with his lawyers in jail, they presented all of these statements as truth.
“He’s clammed up like a mute,” Tam said to me when she paid me a visit the day after my hospital discharge. “Everything’s going through his lawyers. Who knows? He might be out on bail before the week’s over.”
Had I seen more confidence in her body language, I would’ve been convinced such a thing could never happen, but even she worried he could possibly get off.
Then she gave me a start by locking eyes with me and asking, “That crime scene photo you gave us was real, right? No one else the cops questioned remembered seeing him there, and he wasn’t in any of the photographer’s pictures. You gotta promise me it was real, Liza, because if he gets off, after what he did to my wife?” Her face flushed crimson, and her jaw became hinged stone. “I swear, I’ll kill him myself.”
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. Another cellmate took care of that for her yesterday. For the rest of the world too.
I realize how lucky I am the detective didn’t question Megan, given she was at the crime scene as well. Otherwise, her deleted photos might have resurfaced and been compared to mine. Or maybe she was questioned but had my back and denied taking any pictures, not wanting an evil man like Dr. Donovan to get off. If that’s the case, I owe her big time.
So no, I don’t care that he’s dead. The thought of that evil, murdering, arrogant monster getting off for his crimes, especially after all I went through to ensure he was caught, would have been too much for me to bear.
Guess he learned he’s not the only one who can give or take a life.
I stare at the huddle of curious bystanders in Shelly’s crime scene photo on my monitor. Within the wooded area, Dr. Donovan’s face is partially hidden by both the baseball cap and the man in front of him.
Running my finger over his image on the screen, I feel nothing but relief. Because a digital forensic expert from Boston would have indeed studied the photograph once the Morganville PD sent it on. At the defense lawyers’ insistence, an expert would have tried to determine whether that was really Dr. Donovan at the scene or not. But now with him dead and with the other evidence the police have, including his attack on Dr. Silverstein and me, they’ll have no reason to analyze it further. At least I hope not.
It is him in the picture though, of that I have absolutely no doubt.
Because I’m the one who put him there.
It was that night I called Ned to come stay with our mom. Fueled by April’s peanut butter cookies and empowered by my Photoshop prowess, I got to work. I cut his face from the picture I took of him while I cased his house, the one I snapped when he returned from his jog in all his shirtless jackassery. Then I pasted it right over that of another bystander.
The job is so well done and the area so small that I doubt even if digital experts were to examine the picture, they’d find anything to prove it’s been doctored.
I delete the photo and bite into my vanilla-cream doughnut.
Match goes to Liza.
The opponent has been knocked out.
* * *
THE END
Author’s Note
Fatal Rounds is a work of fiction, and as always, liberties were taken to create it. The town of Morganville, Massachusetts and the businesses named within it stem purely from my imagination, including Titus McCall Medical Center.
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to my editor, Kevin Brennan, for his insights as well as for coming up with the book’s title. It was the perfect “punch” for the novel’s theme. Another huge thank you to story coach Kate Johnston for her invaluable beta read, to Officer Johnsen for reviewing the police details, to Dr. Baccon for the pathology insights, and to Dr. Miller for the psychiatry input. Any mistakes I made with these professional fields are entirely on me. Thanks also to Lance Buckley of Lance Buckley Design for the cover art. Furthermore, I wish to thank my wonderful and supportive online community. Our social interactions prove the internet can be a sweet and wonderful place.
Finally, as always, I want to thank you, the reader, for giving me your time in this busy world. Without you, writing wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
About the Author
Carrie Rubin is a physician turned novelist who writes medical-themed thrillers. She also has a cozy mystery, The Cruise Ship Lost My Daughter, published under the pen name Morgan Mayer. She is a member of the International Thriller Writers association and lives in Northeast Ohio.
For more information, visit:
www.carrierubin.com
Also by Carrie Rubin
The Benjamin Oris Series:
The Bone Elixir
The Bone Hunger
The Bone Curse
* * *
Other Medical Thrillers:
Eating Bull
The Seneca Scourge
* * *
Pen Name Morgan Mayer:
The Cruise Ship Lost My Daughter
One more thing…
A special shoutout to my sister, Jo’Rinda Johnsen, for allowing me to use a portion of her original song, “House of Misery,” in the Fatal Rounds book trailer. Music fans can check out her album on Spotify or other music retailers.
Carrie Rubin, Fatal Rounds
