Healed to Death, page 13
“And allowing someone with substance abuse problems to get through the program seems a little… shortsighted,” Zachary added.
“He was rehabilitated,” Simon repeated, spreading his hands apart. “What are you supposed to do about that? If he was in recovery, and alcohol and drugs were no longer a problem, you can’t hold it against him. It’s wiped out. No longer a problem.”
“Except that not everyone in recovery is able to stay sober. People slip up all the time. Or sometimes it’s more than a slip-up.” Kenzie thought about Tyrrell’s recurrent binges. What if he had been a doctor? What if he was hitting the bottle again without anyone realizing it? When he had started drinking again, they had both asked him about it, and he had reassured them that he was not. But he had been, and had gone off on a huge binge within a few weeks.
Zachary nodded his agreement.
Simon sighed. “Well, I was told that—rather, I heard through the grapevine that he had gone through some retraining and addiction rehabilitation, and he was able to complete the program. He took an extra year to certify, and I’m sure that must have been an embarrassment to him, but he stuck with it and achieved his goal. So I thought, ‘Good for him,’ and was impressed that he had stuck it out through all those challenges. I thought it would make him a stronger, more compassionate doctor.”
There was silence as he sipped his water, and they considered his story. Kenzie had not yet heard anything to connect Hartfield to the Night Doctor. Was Simon just jumping to conclusions? What else did he know?
28
“So what happened after that?” Zachary asked. “You ended up working with him at the mobile clinic?”
“Yes,” Simon sighed. “Now that he’s a grown-up doctor in his own right and has a few years under his belt, he ended up volunteering for the mobile clinic, which is one of my babies.”
“Simon always had projects,” Kenzie told Zachary. “He was always trying out some new thing. Different ways of practicing medicine, new models, reaching out to different populations. Teens, immigrants…”
“Homeless or indigent,” Simon agreed with a nod and a slight smile. “We need to ensure that everyone has access to medical care. Everyone, not just those who can afford good care or those who have houses or refrigerators. We need to find ways to overcome those obstacles. So, one of my ventures was the mobile clinic.”
“How did Dr. Hartfield manage to get accepted to work there when it was your project and you knew his history?” Kenzie asked. She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine his being willing to take Dr. Hartfield on again when he had made such serious errors in the beginning.
“I was not involved in interviewing or accepting volunteers. I left the administrative stuff to my partner, Lilian Grace. So it was a shock to me when I signed on one day and saw my old intern was on with me.”
Kenzie imagined that moment and shook her head, smiling a bit.
“How did you handle it?”
Simon gave her a stern look. “I assumed that the school had done its job and that he was a competent doctor who no longer had a substance abuse problem.”
“And how was he about working with you, after you had fired him?”
“There was definitely some tension there.” Simon gave a rueful laugh. “It was not easy for us to accept each other and just get down to work. But we were there to serve the people, to act as healers for a population that has been marginalized and ignored for a long time. We were both quite passionate about it. So, for the first little while, things went well. We put our differences aside and focused on the people and their needs.” He took a sip of water. “And I asked Lilian not to schedule us together unless there was no other choice,” he said with a wry smile.
Zachary chuckled. “Good call.”
He nodded. “But I started hearing things from the other doctors who worked with the mobile clinic. That Dr. Hartfield had done this or that. Made a mistake that had to be corrected. Or a patient came back with a complaint about how he had handled their case or an adverse reaction or iatrogenic complication.”
Zachary’s eyes slid over to Kenzie for clarification.
“Iatrogenic means something caused by the doctor,” she explained. “If he leaves the sponge inside during surgery, prescribes the wrong medication, or infects a laboring mother by not washing his hands. Any kind of injury or disease caused by the doctor himself.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“So you started to hear things that suggested that Hartfield hadn’t been rehabilitated after all,” Kenzie summarized.
Simon nodded. “He was a bright student, I freely admit that. A brilliant mind. He could have been a fabulous surgeon. But he made too many mistakes. It wasn’t just bad luck or coincidence. He was making some serious errors. The mobile clinic doesn’t do a lot of serious procedures. We do wound care, simple orthopedics, prescriptions and renewals, birth control, and consulting on various conditions. We do not do surgical procedures or anything invasive.”
He sighed and shook his head. He had another sip of water and drummed his fingers on the outside of the glass.
“You wouldn’t think that there would be much opportunity for harm in such a situation, but if you mix up clonidine and clonazepam, it could result in a very serious situation. If you forget to find out a patient’s allergens before writing a prescription or advising them to take an over-the-counter product, you could kill them. An infection from an improperly cleaned wound could result in the loss of an eye, limb, or life. A mistake in reading a patient’s BGL before administering insulin could result in coma or death.”
Kenzie had a suspicion that these were not just random examples. Thinking of Dr. Evan Hartfield treating patients now with no supervision nauseated her.
“So you had him kicked off of the volunteer rotation for the mobile clinic?”
“Yes. But I knew that wasn’t enough. He was still practicing medicine and, in his day job, he could do exponentially more damage. I couldn’t let him just continue to practice when I knew the kind of harm he was capable of inflicting.”
Kenzie nodded in agreement.
“So, after doing the ‘right thing’ when he was my intern and reporting him… I had to do it again. This time to the medical board.” He sighed. “It was not something that I undertook lightly. I felt like I had reported him once before; I had done my job. If the school and medical board thought he was qualified to practice, I had done everything I was required to by reporting him the first time.”
“But if you didn’t report him, then you were party to the harm he caused.”
“I didn’t want to be personally liable for what he did. Or for the mobile clinic to be liable for what happened under its auspices. I wanted to grow the program, to get more vans, operate in more communities. I didn’t want it getting shut down because of one of Dr. Hartfield’s screw-ups.”
“Right. Yeah. So you had to fire him as a volunteer and go to the medical board.”
“I did. It wasn’t pretty. I asked them to keep my name confidential, but these things have a way of getting out. Or maybe Hartfield just knew it was me because it had happened before. Either way… there was lots of noise about how he was going to ruin me and ruin the mobile clinic program. He said he would go to the papers but, of course, he didn’t because he would have been outing himself. The story would have ended up being about him making serious mistakes.”
They all nodded, reflecting on the situation and where they were now. How to move forward now that they had this tidbit of information.
“What was he like?” Kenzie asked. “I mean… as a doctor, as an employee… did he come across as competent? He must have, or your manager wouldn’t have hired him in the first place.”
“He’s very friendly, very personable. Good bedside manner. Comes across as very competent and confident. I don’t imagine any patient would have any second thoughts about letting him perform a medical procedure. Why would they?”
“And how was he to you and the other staff? You said that it was awkward… did the others notice? Did you have to explain what was going on?”
“You know, you would have thought he was my boss, the way he acted. As far as he was concerned, the mobile clinic was his baby. He knew how it should be run. He was… Surgeons are noted for being arrogant. We have to have confidence in ourselves and know that we are doing the right thing, or we would be too tentative to do it. You can’t be concerned about what you are doing when you cut into someone. You have to know that you are doing the right thing and that you are going to heal them. Or at least give them a chance.”
“And sometimes that arrogance shows up in other parts of their life.” Kenzie suppressed a smile at this. Surgeons were well known for their egos. They saved lives. And they knew they were the only ones who could do it.
“Unfortunately, it does,” Simon agreed. “Put three surgeons in the same room to debate an idea, and they will have three different opinions, and none of them will back down or consider any other viewpoint. Dr. Hartfield’s vision of the mobile clinic was very different from mine. It didn’t matter that I was in charge and he was merely a volunteer. He obviously knew what he was doing much better than I did, and he was the one who should be making the decisions about the clinic’s direction.”
“And he thought you wanted him out of the way because of that,” Zachary suggested. “That you didn’t like him having a different opinion and wanted him gone because of it.”
Simon raised his brows. “That is very insightful,” he admitted. “I don’t think he ever considered the possibility that his work was subpar and that the reason I wanted him out was to preserve lives. And to keep the clinic from being sued. He really did think that it was over an old grudge.”
29
Kenzie got herself a drink of water from the kitchen and refreshed Simon’s. Zachary had a cup of coffee, but it was too late in the day for Kenzie to have caffeine. She settled herself again and turned her attention to the next question, which the discussion with Simon had not yet answered.
“What is it that makes you think that Dr. Hartfield is the Night Doctor?”
Simon cocked his head and nodded, admitting that it was a fair question. So far, all he had done was give her Evan Hartfield’s background, and Kenzie couldn’t see anything in it that connected up with the man who was now providing medical services to the homeless in Roxboro. Other than the fact that he had been doing the same with the mobile clinic, and had been kicked off of that team and the medical register.
“Well, the timing is one part of it,” Simon told them. “The Night Doctor showed up shortly after we released Evan from his duties with the mobile clinic. I heard about his arrival on the scene within days. And I could see he was doing things the way Evan—Dr. Hartfield had been saying that the mobile clinic should do things. I never saw him. He’s been quite careful not to show up in the same place as the mobile clinic. As if he knew where and how it was being scheduled. Of course, that might just have been observation; it doesn’t mean he had prior knowledge.”
“Do you have a complex schedule?” Zachary asked.
“No. It is pretty much the same each month.”
“And is it posted online so your patients know when you will be there?”
“Yes.” Simon shrugged. “Okay, it would be pretty easy for the Night Doctor to avoid us whether it is Dr. Hartfield or not.”
Simon ran his thumb back and forth across the arm of the armchair, staring down at it intently. “I have treated a few people after the Night Doctor or heard about what he has done from other patients. It seems like he is making similar mistakes to what Dr. Hartfield made both while he was at the mobile clinic and when he was an intern.” He looked up from the chair to Kenzie, meeting her eyes. “I don’t want you to think that I am accusing Dr. Hartfield or that I have any proof that he and the Night Doctor are one and the same. I haven’t seen or encountered him in person. I have only heard second- and third-hand rumors. But… I figured you having one more lead wouldn’t hurt. I don’t know how much information you have already. Maybe I’m not telling you anything new.”
“We didn’t have any tips as to who it might be,” Kenzie admitted. “We’ve been trying to get a name or maybe a phone number for him. But the guy might as well be named the Phantom. We’ve been grasping at wisps of smoke.”
“Well, I hope this is the break you need. When I heard that Jack had been seen by the Night Doctor the very night that he died, I knew I needed to get you what information I could.”
“I appreciate it. I wasn’t sure where to go next.”
“I know it is still under investigation, and you haven’t gotten back all of your lab reports yet… but is there anything you can tell me about the cause of death? Did Evan make another mistake? Was it something he did?”
“I don’t think so,” Kenzie reassured him. “Of course, he should have taken Mr. Lane directly to the emergency room or called an ambulance, but I don’t have any evidence that he did anything to cause his death. And the kind of shape he was in… I don’t think anyone could have saved him.”
“Really?” Simon’s voice went up in tone.
Kenzie nodded. “Really. There are several different causes of death right now. Hard to figure out which of them got him first. If you had treated him previously, you probably know what kind of shape he was in.”
“Are you, as the medical examiner, asking me for his medical history?” Simon asked.
Kenzie nodded. “Yeah,” she said in a firm tone, smiling at him. “Tell me what you know.”
“He’d been a hard drinker for a lot of years. He was jaundiced, which indicated liver damage. He complained about black, tarry stools, which indicates internal bleeding. Obviously, the bleeding was not severe at that point, or he would not have lasted more than a few hours.”
Kenzie nodded. “Yes, both of those conditions showed up on autopsy.”
“And if there were other organ failures, we are probably looking at kidneys, spleen, maybe an aortic rupture or something equally devastating.”
Kenzie nodded again. “As I say, I don’t think there was much that could have been done, even if the treating doctor had gotten Mr. Lane into an operating room. With how fragile his health was, surgery would probably have failed and he would have just suffered a few more days in pain.”
“Well,” Simon blew his breath out slowly. “Thank goodness for small mercies. I’m glad Evan didn’t kill him. If I were only confident that he wouldn’t kill anyone else…”
There was a grim silence as they all contemplated this.
“There’s nothing else you can do,” Kenzie told Simon. “You’ve already reported him to the medical board. I guess the only thing left is reporting him to the police. From what I’ve seen, they aren’t too eager to do anything about it.”
“Whyever not? He could cause severe harm. Right now, we’re just talking about an old alcoholic who would have died in weeks anyway, no matter how he was treated. But he could kill a child. A mother of five. Someone who fled here from a war-torn country who has spent years looking for safety.” Simon was emphatic, his voice loud.
“Because right now, they see him as a mysterious but benevolent figure. They don’t know who it is, so they don’t know if he is licensed. They don’t have any evidence he has harmed anyone, and they really aren’t looking to rein in some wildcard just because he is secretly treating homeless people.”
“Will they do something about it if you tell them who it is and that he is not licensed and might kill someone?”
“I’m doing my best. But you should file a complaint. You’re the one with firsthand information.”
“But only about his history, not what is going on right now. If I go to them and say I’ve reported this guy twice and now I want to do it again, they’re going to think that I’m just some crank with a grudge against him.”
Kenzie rubbed her forehead. “I know, but… someone needs to do it. You’re the one who knows his history. Here, let me give you the information for Detective Samuels, he’s the one working on Jack Lane’s death. I’ll give him a heads-up that you’re going to call and that he should take it seriously, okay?”
Simon nodded. “Okay. I appreciate that.”
30
After saying goodbye to Simon, Kenzie didn’t know whether she was exhausted or keyed up. She felt like she was on the verge of collapse, yet Simon’s story ran through her mind continuously. Her brain seemed determined to study it from every angle and analyze every word and shade of meaning, and she didn’t think she could sleep for hours.
“Well, what do you think of that?” She asked, sinking back into the couch after seeing Simon out. She settled into the warm spot she had previously occupied and tried to relax her muscles. Zachary watched Simon get into the van and eventually drive away.
“Did you re-arm the burglar alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Kenzie nodded and met his eyes. “I’m sure,” she told him firmly.
Zachary looked out to the street again, head swiveling back and forth.
“Why are you so worried?” Kenzie asked. “I know Simon. He came to share crucial information with me. I’m grateful to him for that. It can’t be easy for the poor guy; he keeps having to report Hartfield, but the guy keeps popping up again; it doesn’t seem to matter what Simon does.”
“That’s his story,” Zachary agreed.
Kenzie studied Zachary’s face. He was worried, which shouldn’t come as a surprise after the last few days. Ever since the meeting with Maria, he had been on the lookout for anyone who might be watching or stalking them. Simon was a magnet for his anxiety.
“What makes you think it might not be true?” she asked him.
“It’s an unverified story. It could just be what he wants us to believe until… whatever he has planned happens. This might just be a story to keep us looking in the wrong direction.”
“He was rehabilitated,” Simon repeated, spreading his hands apart. “What are you supposed to do about that? If he was in recovery, and alcohol and drugs were no longer a problem, you can’t hold it against him. It’s wiped out. No longer a problem.”
“Except that not everyone in recovery is able to stay sober. People slip up all the time. Or sometimes it’s more than a slip-up.” Kenzie thought about Tyrrell’s recurrent binges. What if he had been a doctor? What if he was hitting the bottle again without anyone realizing it? When he had started drinking again, they had both asked him about it, and he had reassured them that he was not. But he had been, and had gone off on a huge binge within a few weeks.
Zachary nodded his agreement.
Simon sighed. “Well, I was told that—rather, I heard through the grapevine that he had gone through some retraining and addiction rehabilitation, and he was able to complete the program. He took an extra year to certify, and I’m sure that must have been an embarrassment to him, but he stuck with it and achieved his goal. So I thought, ‘Good for him,’ and was impressed that he had stuck it out through all those challenges. I thought it would make him a stronger, more compassionate doctor.”
There was silence as he sipped his water, and they considered his story. Kenzie had not yet heard anything to connect Hartfield to the Night Doctor. Was Simon just jumping to conclusions? What else did he know?
28
“So what happened after that?” Zachary asked. “You ended up working with him at the mobile clinic?”
“Yes,” Simon sighed. “Now that he’s a grown-up doctor in his own right and has a few years under his belt, he ended up volunteering for the mobile clinic, which is one of my babies.”
“Simon always had projects,” Kenzie told Zachary. “He was always trying out some new thing. Different ways of practicing medicine, new models, reaching out to different populations. Teens, immigrants…”
“Homeless or indigent,” Simon agreed with a nod and a slight smile. “We need to ensure that everyone has access to medical care. Everyone, not just those who can afford good care or those who have houses or refrigerators. We need to find ways to overcome those obstacles. So, one of my ventures was the mobile clinic.”
“How did Dr. Hartfield manage to get accepted to work there when it was your project and you knew his history?” Kenzie asked. She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine his being willing to take Dr. Hartfield on again when he had made such serious errors in the beginning.
“I was not involved in interviewing or accepting volunteers. I left the administrative stuff to my partner, Lilian Grace. So it was a shock to me when I signed on one day and saw my old intern was on with me.”
Kenzie imagined that moment and shook her head, smiling a bit.
“How did you handle it?”
Simon gave her a stern look. “I assumed that the school had done its job and that he was a competent doctor who no longer had a substance abuse problem.”
“And how was he about working with you, after you had fired him?”
“There was definitely some tension there.” Simon gave a rueful laugh. “It was not easy for us to accept each other and just get down to work. But we were there to serve the people, to act as healers for a population that has been marginalized and ignored for a long time. We were both quite passionate about it. So, for the first little while, things went well. We put our differences aside and focused on the people and their needs.” He took a sip of water. “And I asked Lilian not to schedule us together unless there was no other choice,” he said with a wry smile.
Zachary chuckled. “Good call.”
He nodded. “But I started hearing things from the other doctors who worked with the mobile clinic. That Dr. Hartfield had done this or that. Made a mistake that had to be corrected. Or a patient came back with a complaint about how he had handled their case or an adverse reaction or iatrogenic complication.”
Zachary’s eyes slid over to Kenzie for clarification.
“Iatrogenic means something caused by the doctor,” she explained. “If he leaves the sponge inside during surgery, prescribes the wrong medication, or infects a laboring mother by not washing his hands. Any kind of injury or disease caused by the doctor himself.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“So you started to hear things that suggested that Hartfield hadn’t been rehabilitated after all,” Kenzie summarized.
Simon nodded. “He was a bright student, I freely admit that. A brilliant mind. He could have been a fabulous surgeon. But he made too many mistakes. It wasn’t just bad luck or coincidence. He was making some serious errors. The mobile clinic doesn’t do a lot of serious procedures. We do wound care, simple orthopedics, prescriptions and renewals, birth control, and consulting on various conditions. We do not do surgical procedures or anything invasive.”
He sighed and shook his head. He had another sip of water and drummed his fingers on the outside of the glass.
“You wouldn’t think that there would be much opportunity for harm in such a situation, but if you mix up clonidine and clonazepam, it could result in a very serious situation. If you forget to find out a patient’s allergens before writing a prescription or advising them to take an over-the-counter product, you could kill them. An infection from an improperly cleaned wound could result in the loss of an eye, limb, or life. A mistake in reading a patient’s BGL before administering insulin could result in coma or death.”
Kenzie had a suspicion that these were not just random examples. Thinking of Dr. Evan Hartfield treating patients now with no supervision nauseated her.
“So you had him kicked off of the volunteer rotation for the mobile clinic?”
“Yes. But I knew that wasn’t enough. He was still practicing medicine and, in his day job, he could do exponentially more damage. I couldn’t let him just continue to practice when I knew the kind of harm he was capable of inflicting.”
Kenzie nodded in agreement.
“So, after doing the ‘right thing’ when he was my intern and reporting him… I had to do it again. This time to the medical board.” He sighed. “It was not something that I undertook lightly. I felt like I had reported him once before; I had done my job. If the school and medical board thought he was qualified to practice, I had done everything I was required to by reporting him the first time.”
“But if you didn’t report him, then you were party to the harm he caused.”
“I didn’t want to be personally liable for what he did. Or for the mobile clinic to be liable for what happened under its auspices. I wanted to grow the program, to get more vans, operate in more communities. I didn’t want it getting shut down because of one of Dr. Hartfield’s screw-ups.”
“Right. Yeah. So you had to fire him as a volunteer and go to the medical board.”
“I did. It wasn’t pretty. I asked them to keep my name confidential, but these things have a way of getting out. Or maybe Hartfield just knew it was me because it had happened before. Either way… there was lots of noise about how he was going to ruin me and ruin the mobile clinic program. He said he would go to the papers but, of course, he didn’t because he would have been outing himself. The story would have ended up being about him making serious mistakes.”
They all nodded, reflecting on the situation and where they were now. How to move forward now that they had this tidbit of information.
“What was he like?” Kenzie asked. “I mean… as a doctor, as an employee… did he come across as competent? He must have, or your manager wouldn’t have hired him in the first place.”
“He’s very friendly, very personable. Good bedside manner. Comes across as very competent and confident. I don’t imagine any patient would have any second thoughts about letting him perform a medical procedure. Why would they?”
“And how was he to you and the other staff? You said that it was awkward… did the others notice? Did you have to explain what was going on?”
“You know, you would have thought he was my boss, the way he acted. As far as he was concerned, the mobile clinic was his baby. He knew how it should be run. He was… Surgeons are noted for being arrogant. We have to have confidence in ourselves and know that we are doing the right thing, or we would be too tentative to do it. You can’t be concerned about what you are doing when you cut into someone. You have to know that you are doing the right thing and that you are going to heal them. Or at least give them a chance.”
“And sometimes that arrogance shows up in other parts of their life.” Kenzie suppressed a smile at this. Surgeons were well known for their egos. They saved lives. And they knew they were the only ones who could do it.
“Unfortunately, it does,” Simon agreed. “Put three surgeons in the same room to debate an idea, and they will have three different opinions, and none of them will back down or consider any other viewpoint. Dr. Hartfield’s vision of the mobile clinic was very different from mine. It didn’t matter that I was in charge and he was merely a volunteer. He obviously knew what he was doing much better than I did, and he was the one who should be making the decisions about the clinic’s direction.”
“And he thought you wanted him out of the way because of that,” Zachary suggested. “That you didn’t like him having a different opinion and wanted him gone because of it.”
Simon raised his brows. “That is very insightful,” he admitted. “I don’t think he ever considered the possibility that his work was subpar and that the reason I wanted him out was to preserve lives. And to keep the clinic from being sued. He really did think that it was over an old grudge.”
29
Kenzie got herself a drink of water from the kitchen and refreshed Simon’s. Zachary had a cup of coffee, but it was too late in the day for Kenzie to have caffeine. She settled herself again and turned her attention to the next question, which the discussion with Simon had not yet answered.
“What is it that makes you think that Dr. Hartfield is the Night Doctor?”
Simon cocked his head and nodded, admitting that it was a fair question. So far, all he had done was give her Evan Hartfield’s background, and Kenzie couldn’t see anything in it that connected up with the man who was now providing medical services to the homeless in Roxboro. Other than the fact that he had been doing the same with the mobile clinic, and had been kicked off of that team and the medical register.
“Well, the timing is one part of it,” Simon told them. “The Night Doctor showed up shortly after we released Evan from his duties with the mobile clinic. I heard about his arrival on the scene within days. And I could see he was doing things the way Evan—Dr. Hartfield had been saying that the mobile clinic should do things. I never saw him. He’s been quite careful not to show up in the same place as the mobile clinic. As if he knew where and how it was being scheduled. Of course, that might just have been observation; it doesn’t mean he had prior knowledge.”
“Do you have a complex schedule?” Zachary asked.
“No. It is pretty much the same each month.”
“And is it posted online so your patients know when you will be there?”
“Yes.” Simon shrugged. “Okay, it would be pretty easy for the Night Doctor to avoid us whether it is Dr. Hartfield or not.”
Simon ran his thumb back and forth across the arm of the armchair, staring down at it intently. “I have treated a few people after the Night Doctor or heard about what he has done from other patients. It seems like he is making similar mistakes to what Dr. Hartfield made both while he was at the mobile clinic and when he was an intern.” He looked up from the chair to Kenzie, meeting her eyes. “I don’t want you to think that I am accusing Dr. Hartfield or that I have any proof that he and the Night Doctor are one and the same. I haven’t seen or encountered him in person. I have only heard second- and third-hand rumors. But… I figured you having one more lead wouldn’t hurt. I don’t know how much information you have already. Maybe I’m not telling you anything new.”
“We didn’t have any tips as to who it might be,” Kenzie admitted. “We’ve been trying to get a name or maybe a phone number for him. But the guy might as well be named the Phantom. We’ve been grasping at wisps of smoke.”
“Well, I hope this is the break you need. When I heard that Jack had been seen by the Night Doctor the very night that he died, I knew I needed to get you what information I could.”
“I appreciate it. I wasn’t sure where to go next.”
“I know it is still under investigation, and you haven’t gotten back all of your lab reports yet… but is there anything you can tell me about the cause of death? Did Evan make another mistake? Was it something he did?”
“I don’t think so,” Kenzie reassured him. “Of course, he should have taken Mr. Lane directly to the emergency room or called an ambulance, but I don’t have any evidence that he did anything to cause his death. And the kind of shape he was in… I don’t think anyone could have saved him.”
“Really?” Simon’s voice went up in tone.
Kenzie nodded. “Really. There are several different causes of death right now. Hard to figure out which of them got him first. If you had treated him previously, you probably know what kind of shape he was in.”
“Are you, as the medical examiner, asking me for his medical history?” Simon asked.
Kenzie nodded. “Yeah,” she said in a firm tone, smiling at him. “Tell me what you know.”
“He’d been a hard drinker for a lot of years. He was jaundiced, which indicated liver damage. He complained about black, tarry stools, which indicates internal bleeding. Obviously, the bleeding was not severe at that point, or he would not have lasted more than a few hours.”
Kenzie nodded. “Yes, both of those conditions showed up on autopsy.”
“And if there were other organ failures, we are probably looking at kidneys, spleen, maybe an aortic rupture or something equally devastating.”
Kenzie nodded again. “As I say, I don’t think there was much that could have been done, even if the treating doctor had gotten Mr. Lane into an operating room. With how fragile his health was, surgery would probably have failed and he would have just suffered a few more days in pain.”
“Well,” Simon blew his breath out slowly. “Thank goodness for small mercies. I’m glad Evan didn’t kill him. If I were only confident that he wouldn’t kill anyone else…”
There was a grim silence as they all contemplated this.
“There’s nothing else you can do,” Kenzie told Simon. “You’ve already reported him to the medical board. I guess the only thing left is reporting him to the police. From what I’ve seen, they aren’t too eager to do anything about it.”
“Whyever not? He could cause severe harm. Right now, we’re just talking about an old alcoholic who would have died in weeks anyway, no matter how he was treated. But he could kill a child. A mother of five. Someone who fled here from a war-torn country who has spent years looking for safety.” Simon was emphatic, his voice loud.
“Because right now, they see him as a mysterious but benevolent figure. They don’t know who it is, so they don’t know if he is licensed. They don’t have any evidence he has harmed anyone, and they really aren’t looking to rein in some wildcard just because he is secretly treating homeless people.”
“Will they do something about it if you tell them who it is and that he is not licensed and might kill someone?”
“I’m doing my best. But you should file a complaint. You’re the one with firsthand information.”
“But only about his history, not what is going on right now. If I go to them and say I’ve reported this guy twice and now I want to do it again, they’re going to think that I’m just some crank with a grudge against him.”
Kenzie rubbed her forehead. “I know, but… someone needs to do it. You’re the one who knows his history. Here, let me give you the information for Detective Samuels, he’s the one working on Jack Lane’s death. I’ll give him a heads-up that you’re going to call and that he should take it seriously, okay?”
Simon nodded. “Okay. I appreciate that.”
30
After saying goodbye to Simon, Kenzie didn’t know whether she was exhausted or keyed up. She felt like she was on the verge of collapse, yet Simon’s story ran through her mind continuously. Her brain seemed determined to study it from every angle and analyze every word and shade of meaning, and she didn’t think she could sleep for hours.
“Well, what do you think of that?” She asked, sinking back into the couch after seeing Simon out. She settled into the warm spot she had previously occupied and tried to relax her muscles. Zachary watched Simon get into the van and eventually drive away.
“Did you re-arm the burglar alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Kenzie nodded and met his eyes. “I’m sure,” she told him firmly.
Zachary looked out to the street again, head swiveling back and forth.
“Why are you so worried?” Kenzie asked. “I know Simon. He came to share crucial information with me. I’m grateful to him for that. It can’t be easy for the poor guy; he keeps having to report Hartfield, but the guy keeps popping up again; it doesn’t seem to matter what Simon does.”
“That’s his story,” Zachary agreed.
Kenzie studied Zachary’s face. He was worried, which shouldn’t come as a surprise after the last few days. Ever since the meeting with Maria, he had been on the lookout for anyone who might be watching or stalking them. Simon was a magnet for his anxiety.
“What makes you think it might not be true?” she asked him.
“It’s an unverified story. It could just be what he wants us to believe until… whatever he has planned happens. This might just be a story to keep us looking in the wrong direction.”
