Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe Read online

  "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.

  He leaned down and embraced his father. Mark couldn't remember the last time they'd shared a hug. Although they were close, neither of them had ever been big on physical signs of affection, much to the chagrin of the women in their lives. It had been frustrating for Katherine—and, Mark supposed, for Emily, too.

  "It's great to see you awake again, Dad."

  "Seeing how you're dressed, it must be a big surprise," Mark said. "Were you expecting to find me in a casket?"

  "I had to go to a funeral this morning," Steve said. "I haven't had a chance to change."

  Attending funerals was one of the regular and least enjoyable functions of Steve's job as a homicide detective.

  "No one likes it when a homicide detective shows up at their door looking like an undertaker," Mark said.

  "No one likes it when a homicide detective shows up, period."

  "Maybe they wouldn't mind so much if you were more avuncular," Mark said. "Like me."

  "Maybe I should learn some card tricks, too, just to keep the sociopathic killers entertained on the way to jail."

  "I could teach you," Mark said. "Got a deck of cards?"

  "You sound perky," Steve said. "How are you feeling?"

  "I've got the headache to end all headaches," Mark said. "And I'm a little hazy on some things."

  "Like what?"

  "The last two years of my life," Mark said. "But I have a feeling you already knew that."

  Steve nodded. "Emily is pretty upset. You really don't remember her at all?"

  Mark shook his head. "I don't mean to hurt her."

  "She knows that," Steve said.

  "Do you like her?"

  Steve nodded. "She's amazing. You're lucky you got her before I did."

  "So are you married with kids now?"

  "I know you haven't had a chance to look outside yet, but pigs still don't fly."

  "Are you still living at home with your father?"

  "Not anymore," Steve said.

  "Maybe I should take a look outside," Mark said.

  "I moved out after you got married," Steve said. "It was my wedding present to you and Emily."

  "If I'd known that was what it would take, I would have remarried long ago," Mark said with a grin.

  The truth was, he enjoyed sharing a house with Steve and his son knew it. Mark hoped their close relationship had endured despite the marriage and Steve's moving out. If it hadn't, that was something Mark would be sure to fix.

  "I found a place near the beach in Marina del Rey," Steve said.

  "Obviously, a lot has happened in the last two years. It's going to take a while to fill in all the blanks."

  "It will come back," Steve said.

  "Let's start with three days ago. Amanda told me someone tried to run me down in the parking garage. Have you got any leads?"

  "Not yet."

  "What about the case I was working on?"

  Steve frowned. "There wasn't one."

  "What do you mean? Amanda said I was working on something."

  "You may have thought it was something, but no one else did. It had to do with a patient of yours, Grover Dawson." Grover was a retired landscape architect in his early sixties, a widower who spent his free time fishing, traveling, and helping to raise money for his local church. He suffered from coronary artery disease and had nearly died of a heart attack.

  "He's been my patient for twenty years," Mark said. "What happened to him?"

  "He died in bed last week from a drug interaction," Steve said. "It was an accident."

  "What drugs?"

  "His heart meds," Steve said. "And Viagra. It's not the first time I've seen that happen. At least he died happy." The last time Mark remembered seeing Grover, the man was taking nitroglycerin as well as long-acting nitrates to treat his plugged arteries. Nitrates open up the blood vessels and cause a drop in blood pressure. So does Viagra. The combination of those drugs would have sent Grover's blood pressure crashing to a lethal level.

  "Was he still single?" Mark asked.

  "He wasn't married to anyone, if that's what you're asking. But he obviously wasn't sleeping alone. Whoever was in bed with him when he died left in a hurry."

  "That doesn't make any sense," Mark said. "Grover didn't believe in sex before marriage."

  "I guess that makes him either a liar or a hypocrite," Steve said. "Or both."

  "How do you know it wasn't murder?"

  "I looked into it. Grover didn't have an enemy in the world, and he'd willed everything to the church. Nothing suspicious or unusual happened in his life in the weeks leading up to his death. So that was the end of it for me. But I have a feeling it wasn't for you."

  Mark had to agree. He wouldn't have let it go, not until he could prove to himself that Grover had really been engaged in a sexual relationship.

  "Where did he get the Viagra?"

  "He didn't have a prescription. But there's a big underground market for those little blue pills. It wouldn't have been difficult for him to score a few."

  "Grover Dawson wasn't the kind of man who'd buy drugs off the street or on the Internet."

  "He would if he didn't want his friends at church or his doctors to know that he was having sex and suffering from erectile dysfunction."

  "So if you don't thin
k the attempt on my life was related to me poking into Grover's death, what's the approach you're taking?"

  "I'm checking to see if anybody you helped send to prison is out on the street again."

  "It's not likely," Mark said. "Most of them got life sentences. Or worse."

  "Which means one of their relatives, loved ones, or sicko followers might have tried taking you out as revenge. We're checking out that angle, too. But it's tough. You've got a lot of enemies for such an avuncular guy."

  "Amanda said you have a videotape of the car trying to run me down," Mark said. "Have you been able to enhance it to get the license plate or a shot of the driver's face?" "We didn't get the driver's face, but we got the plates," Steve said. "The car was reported stolen a few days ago. We found it abandoned last night in Chatsworth. There was still blood on the grille. The crime lab is going over it now." "Blood?" Mark said, his brow furrowed in confusion. "But Amanda said I wasn't hit by the car."

  "You weren't."

  "Then who was?"

  Steve took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Jesse."

  Mark's chest tightened with anxiety, and the pounding in his head increased its agonizing intensity as he had a sudden realization.

  Emily and Amanda were wearing black, too.

  The answer to his next question was obvious to him before he asked it, but never in his life did he want more to be wrong.

  "Is he okay?'

  Steve looked at his feet and shook his head. "His funeral was this morning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was as if he'd lost his own son. The news of Jesse's death was almost too painful to bear. The fact that Jesse was killed while saving Mark made it even more horrible. If given the choice, Mark would gladly have sacrificed his life for Jesse's.

  There was nothing more to say to Steve and nothing more he could say if he'd wanted to. He was stunned speechless, so overwhelmed by grief that even tears wouldn't come.

  Steve may have said more, but if he did, Mark didn't hear it. His ears were ringing from one concussive piece of shocking news after another. It was too much. He didn't want to see or hear anything else. Not now. He didn't have the strength. Fatigue washed over him and he embraced it, sinking into the comforting numbness of sleep.

  But it was a cruel trick. There was no escape from his pain. His dreams were all about Jesse, like a loop of home movies of their experiences together over the years. They were happy images set against a deeply mournful sound track.

  When Mark awoke later that night, there were tears in his eyes. For a moment it was possible to believe that it had all been a nightmare, that his reality was only beginning now. But when he saw Emily sitting in the chair beside the bed, reading her John Irving paperback and picking at a box of chocolates in her lap, he knew that the nightmare was real.

  The intensity of his grief for Jesse made the emptiness and lack of emotion he felt for his wife even more stark and disturbing.

  Emily glanced over the top of her book at him. "Don't worry. I left you the caramel-filled ones."

  "My favorites," he said.

  She set the book aside but left the box of chocolates in her lap. "How are you feeling?"

  "Physically, pretty good. Emotionally, I'm in critical condition."

  "That makes two of us."

  They looked at each other in silence for a long moment, their sadness the only bridge between them.

  "Could I have a chocolate?" he asked.

  "Consider it a prescription from your doctor." She smiled and picked out a caramel for him, placing it in his hand. "I think the proper dosage is two candies every hour."

  "Looks to me like you've been doing some self-medicating," Mark said, tipping his head towards the other opened boxes of candy.

  "Are you going to rat me out?"

  "I don't think a husband can be compelled to testify against his wife."

  She seemed to brighten a bit at his casual acknowledgment of their relationship. It was intentional on Mark's part, a peace offering of sorts.

  Mark chewed on the candy and was surprised to find that it did make him feel better. It was something familiar. Something blissfully unchanged.

  He held out his hand for another piece. "How did we meet?"

  She searched the box for more caramels, gave him one, then took one for herself. "We collided in the hall."

  "Was one of us on roller skates at the time?"

  She nodded, smiling at the memory. He envied her that. "It wasn't me. I never wear my skates to job interviews," she said. "I'd just arrived that morning from Houston to interview for the post of chief of pediatric surgery. We were both late for the meeting with the board. I was running and you were rolling. After I met with the board, you took me to lunch at Barbeque Bob's to make amends. And that's how it started."

  "Did you get the job?"

  "I got a lot more than that," she said.

  "How long have we been married?"

  "Almost as long as Jesse and Susan," she said, her voice trembling a bit. Bringing up Jesse was clearly painful for her, too. "This is my second marriage. I've been divorced for fifteen years. I don't have any children. My patients have fulfilled whatever mothering instinct I have and then some. I see so many kids. One of the greatest things about being a pediatric surgeon is that you don't just save a life, you save an entire lifetime."

  Emily continued talking about pediatrics, and why she loved the field, but Mark was only half listening. He had hoped that hearing her story would stir something in him, some connection. Instead, all he felt was his grief for Jesse and his anger at the circumstances of the young man's death.

  "Did I tell you anything about the case I was investigating when Jesse was killed?" Mark asked abruptly, interrupting her.

  If Emily was offended by the interruption, and what it revealed about the scant attention he'd been paying to what she was saying, she didn't show it.

  She shook her head. "You kept it from me."

  "Why would I do that?"

  "Your compulsion to investigate murders isn't something I understand or that I'm comfortable with. So I'm not part of your crime-solving team."

  "It didn't stop us from getting married."

  "It's not like we're talking about a drinking problem or a gambling addiction. We were both single for a long time and aren't about to change each other. Besides, there are tradeoffs in every relationship. You're not too happy with how often I'm away. I'm on call nationwide. In fact, the day you were hurt and Jesse was killed, I was in St. Louis performing emergency fetal surgery on triplets, two of whom were sharing one heart."

  No wonder she traveled a lot, Mark thought. There weren't many surgeons qualified to do that kind of risky, experimental surgery.

  He knew about the rare disorder known as twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. In most cases, one of the twins died, killing the other. If both twins died, the third fetus would likely perish as well. To save one or more of the fetuses, Mark knew that Emily would have had to operate in the womb, using a laser to separate the blood vessels between the two fetuses who shared the same heart.

  He'd never witnessed a surgery like that—unless, of course, it had happened in the last two years and was one of the many memories he'd lost

  "How did it go?" Mark asked.

  "We saved two of the fetuses," she said. "I walked out of ten hours in the OR and got the call about you. I took the next plane back and have been right here ever since."

  "I'm okay now," Mark said. "You can go home."

  She put her hand on his. "Home is wherever you are."

  "I'd feel better if you got some rest," he said, hearing the professional detachment in his voice. The fact was, he felt nothing for her beyond his newfound respect for her surgical abilities. "We're both going to need our strength in the coming days to get through this ordeal."

  Emily let go of his hand and rose from her seat.

  "No matter what you're feeling now, or not feeling, you're still Mark Sloan. You fell in love with me on
ce and you will again."

  "I hope so," he said, uncertain whether he really meant it.

  "I love you, Mark."

  She kissed him on the forehead and walked out.

  He watched her go. At that moment, the prospect of resurrecting his love for her seemed like an impossible task. But there was one set of lost memories within his reach, one that was only a few days old: the investigation he was conducting when Jesse was murdered.

  Instead of trying to recover two years, he would start by reclaiming the last week, retracing his steps from the moment when he learned about Grover Dawson's death right up until he was nearly hit by a car in the Community General parking structure.

  That decision felt right, unlike anything else since he'd regained consciousness. It gave him an immediate, achievable goal instead of the prospect of aimlessly wandering in the vast desert of his lost memories hoping to find a familiar landmark.

  He would rediscover what he'd learned before, piece together the clues, and find Jesse's killer. And maybe, along the way, he'd find some of himself again, too.

  Mark slept for a few more hours, then awoke before dawn, too keyed up and anxious to lie in bed for another minute. He used his authority as a doctor, and as chief of internal medicine, to intimidate a nurse into helping him remove his IV and catheter.

  When he got out of bed, he was a little dizzy and his head throbbed, but he hid his symptoms from the nurse and made his way carefully to the doctors' locker room. He traded his hospital gown for surgical scrubs and a pair of tennis shoes from his locker.

  He went to his office, where he put on his lab coat over his scrubs, grabbed a Diet Coke from his icebox, and sat down at his desk. The drink was so cold it was nearly frozen, just the way he liked it. He took a few sips and felt revived.

  A wedding photo faced him on his desk. It was taken in Hawaii. Mark and Emily stood side by side on an impossibly green lawn against a backdrop of palm trees, crashing surf, and craggy shoreline. She was beautiful in a white wedding holoku, a long, form-fitting mu 'umu'u and a Haku lei of white dendrobium orchids, baby's breath, and roses on her head.

  Mark studied himself in the photo. He wore a white aloha shirt, white linen pants, and a green-leaf lei around his neck. There was a big smile on his face, broadcasting his happiness and pride.