Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Half an hour later, after I'd finished
the rest of the interview and written a note, I paged the psychiatrist on call
for the emergency room.

Dr. Gatien answered promptly. "I'm
teaching the medical students. I'll be down in a minute."

"Great. See you then." I
wondered why I hadn't gotten called to the teaching too, but I couldn't
complain since I was starting the rotation late.

Twenty minutes later, I was still waiting
for Dr. Gatien, when Nancy, the psych nurse, wandered out of the psychiatry
office. She was a freckled blonde woman, the kind that you imagine playing
tennis and drinking lemonade instead of hanging around in a windowless
emergency room, talking to psychos. Still, the psych office was the only place
in the emergency room that looked like an actual office, with an L-shaped desk
and a rolling chair, so maybe she felt at home. She closed the door behind her
and said, "There's another patient for us to see, a frequent flyer."

"Okay." I checked my watch.
"Dr. Gatien said he'd be right down."

She nodded. "He'll be here before
lunch."

Nice life. Why did I want to be an
emergency doctor again?

The automatic emergency doors flew open,
and a medium-built man with a light French accent said, "Hello, Nancy. Dr.
Sze, I presume?"

I turned to meet Dr. Gatien. My eyes
widened. He looked like Face from the A-team, all tan and white teeth. In other
words, younger, more handsome and probably more conceited than I'd expected in
a shrink.

I shook his hand and nodded hello at the
medical students flanking him. Dr. Gatien introduced the two guys, a plump one
named Robert and a medium one named Gary, plus a thin girl, Marcella. Then Dr.
Gatien crossed to the nursing station and picked up the chart. "You've met
Mrs. Lee. So what's your diagnosis, Dr. Sze?"

Some staff doctors make a point of calling
you "doctor" once you graduate from medical school and get your
Doctor of Medicine degree. Sometimes it's a sign of respect. Sometimes it's to
up your status in front of the patient. And sometimes, like with Dr. Gatien,
you get the feeling it's just because they're more formal in general.

I cleared my throat. Time to improvise.
After all the talk about justice and murder, I didn't really have a diagnosis
for Mrs. Lee, but I couldn't let that show. Medicine can be like a circus
performance. You have to bark out the right answers and demonstrate the right
tricks (intubation, IV insertion), often in front of an audience. You never get
applause, mostly just nods of approval, but the criticism never stops.
"Ah, some sort of adjustment disorder—"

"After eight years?" He smiled
at the medical students. The three shiny, happy white young'uns in white lab
coats beamed back at him. I felt a pang. They were only two years behind me in
training, but I wished I could be innocent like them again. Even before I solved
a murder last month, the patients' suffering, the staff attitude, and the sleep
deprivation had sucked the naiveté out of my marrow.

My smile tightened. I didn't do psych
well. I wanted to be an emergency doctor, not a Face Man. "I know
adjustment disorders are usually due to a short-term stress."

"Within three months, not more than
six months, and not representing bereavement, if you read the DSM-IV," Dr.
Gatien supplied.

Gary whipped out his notebook and wrote
that down.

Dr. Gatien pretended not to preen.

"She's definitely suffering from
bereavement," I said, annoyed. "There's no question. Her daughter, a
former medical resident, died in a hit-and-run accident eight years ago."
I hesitated, then plunged ahead. "Mrs. Lee believes it was
deliberate."

"Ah." Dr. Gatien's index finger
stabbed the air. "There you have the heart of the matter. She has a
delusional disorder."

I shifted from foot to foot and glanced
at the medical students. Gary was nodding, fascinated. The other two looked
blank. I said, "I thought delusions were based on paranoia or erotomania,
that sort of thing." Everyone knows paranoia; erotomania is when you have
delusions that your partner is in love with someone else. I know a lot of girls
like that.

Dr. Gatien nodded. "Arguably, this
is a sort of persecutory delusion. The patient thinks she—or in this
case, someone close to her—is or was persecuted. Did you read her
chart?"

"Her old chart hasn't arrived.
Medical records are backed up today." I brushed imaginary lint off my
white coat while I debated whether to fall into party line or not. I'd started
this rotation one week late. I wanted a good evaluation at the end. But Mrs.
Lee's intelligent brown eyes pricked my conscience. "Are you saying that
for sure, the hit-and-run was an accident?"

He sighed. "We all miss Laura Lee.
She was an excellent doctor. But as far as we know—which means as far as
the police know—it was an accident. Or, at least, there's no proof
otherwise." He stopped. His eyes narrowed and he smiled, showing a quick
flash of his teeth. "Ah. That's right. You're the
'
detective doctor!'"

My cheeks flushed. I was still getting
used to my fifteen minutes of fame. In the olden days, after I introduced
myself, people stared at me in confusion, as if I'd sneezed instead of saying
my name, but now that I'd gotten some notoriety...

"That's right. I recognize you from
the
Gazette,
" said the chubby
med student, Robert. Both local papers had done an item on me after I solved
the murder last month of Dr. Radshaw, one of St. Joe's favourite doctors. I
nearly got killed in the process, necessitating the week of R&R.

Dr. Gatien said, "Well, I don't
think there's anything wrong with detective work. You need to be a detective in
medicine, putting all the clues together. A patient comes in complaining of
abdominal pain, you need to check the constellation of symptoms: location,
radiation, nausea, vomiting, blood in the stools, as well as reviewing the
systems—"

I knew that already. A wave of fatigue
sideswiped me. I clenched my teeth, bit my inner lip, and widened my eyes,
trying to fight it off.

"—because it could turn out to
be something completely unrelated to the abdomen, such as diabetic
ketoacidosis." He stopped and winked at me. "I imagine you thought I
had forgotten my medicine, being a psychiatrist and all."

Gary chortled on cue.

I forced a smile. "Dr. Gatien, about
Mrs. Lee—"

"Yes, of course. What I was going to
say is, you should indeed investigate all avenues, as we have done over the
past eight years. But be careful. We have a saying. If you have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. If you want to be a detective, everything looks
suspicious. Be careful not to fall into any delusions yourself, Dr. Sze."
He smiled. "You know what we call that in psychiatry?
Folie à deux
."

Charming. "You two would be cuckoo
for Cocoa Puffs" always sounds better in French. After more talk, we ended
up discharging Mrs. Lee and retreating to the psych office. I wrote another
page in her chart, while Dr. Gatien pontificated to the medical students. Then
I felt someone's gaze land and lock on my right cheekbone.

I swiveled in my chair to see who it was.
My breath seized up and blood rose in my face.

It was John Tucker, staring right back at
me. He was in the nursing station, behind Plexiglas, so he must have been
fifteen feet away, but I could still feel his presence.

I forced myself to smile and nod at him
like he was just another resident or friend or comrade. So what if he liked
sausages and beer. So what if I'd scanned the emerg a dozen times, checking for
his profile. So what if I had to fight the urge to lick my lips and straighten
my collar. It don't mean a thing.

But now that he was here, with his
intense brown gaze, crooked mouth and eyebrows lifted with a combination of
humor and disapproval, I couldn't lie to myself. All day, I'd been waiting to
see him.

He shook his head at me from across the
room.

I knew why. He thought I'd come back to
work too soon.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, but
in my mind's eye, I could imagine his strong, capable fingers, his short nails
and the slightly tanned skin. Not to mention his lean yet muscled body.

Down, girl.

I forced myself to concentrate on his
flaws, like his spiky blond hair. It looked as if he'd been attacked by '80s
hair gel this morning. But who was I kidding. Even that was endearing.

"Dr. Sze?" a man drawled.

If guys are too perfect-looking, you have
to wonder if they're gay or at least narcissists. And anyway, I like a hint of
non-conformity, that little F-U to the world of fashion police and humorless internists.
Bring on the hair gel. Bring on red socks. Bring on the sausages and beer. When
you've been in school all your life, even a tiny
soupçon
of revelry is a heady thing.

"Dr. Sze!"

Finally, I snapped my head around to
focus on Dr. Gatien and the grinning group of medical students. "I'm
sorry." I tried to hold my head up with dignity. No doubt he was about to
interrogate me on the symptoms of Rett's syndrome or some other rare disease
and make me look even more idiotic.

Instead, Dr. Gatien gave an almost
imperceptible smile. "Never mind. I'll send one of the medical students to
see the other patient,
detective
."

The girl, Marcella, giggled. I mentally
crossed her off my friend list.

Dr. Gatien waved over the psychiatry
nurse, Nancy, to tell us about the next case. By the time we finally emerged
from the office, Tucker had disappeared.

And a good thing, too. We were just
friends. I was on a strict, man-free, post-Alex diet. The fact that I couldn't
stop scanning the emerg like a rabid security guard meant absolutely zip.

Then Marcella pointed to a note affixed
to the Plexiglas above the psych counter. "Is that for you?"

I glanced at the note.
DR. HOPE SZE
. I snatched it and unfolded
it to read Tucker's spiky handwriting, scrawled with his signature blue fountain
pen.

5-7?
 
Page me. T
.

Chapter
3

Eight years ago

She
knows too much. She's dangerous.

So
I think,
Fine. I'll
leave
.

But
why should I run away again? I like my apartment. I like my girlfriend. I like
this corner of Montreal.

Then
I think,
blackmail
. She knows some shit about me, I'll find
out shit about her. If she coughs up some money to keep it quiet, I'll get some
cash flow out of it too. Chinese doctors always have money.

Only
problem is, I can't find any good shit about her. Her biggest sin is probably
picking her nose on Sundays, and I can't even catch her doing that.

So
I go with plan C: kill her.

***

Cinq
à sept
. Five to seven.
Before I came to Montreal, I used to call it Happy Hour.

Actually, I didn't call it anything
because I never went out. When I did med school in London, Ontario, we never
seemed to take the time. For the first two years, I was in lectures forty hours
a week and making love to my books when I wasn't sleeping. The last two years,
I rotated through the hospitals as a clinical clerk, doing everything from
trauma to mole removal. At the end of the year and each major rotation,
everyone partied, but it wasn't the same as taking the time to hang out in a
group as a part of life. So this was part of the
joie de vivre
I'd missed before I moved here. And if you think
about it, isn't it cool that in Montreal, you get happy for two hours instead
of one?

So when Tucker's note said
"5-7," I knew exactly what he meant. Even though he was probably
going to lecture me—again—about coming back to work too soon, I was
looking forward to seeing him. And, well, since no one else had mentioned a
cinq à sept,
it could be just the two of
us, sipping drinks under a patio umbrella.

Could be, but it wasn't. When I paged
him, he told me, "Tori and I are throwing you a welcome back party."
Sigh.

Still, after work, he was the only one
waiting for me at a picnic table beside St. Joe's main hospital building. He
waved as soon as he spotted me. I blushed and tried not to rush over to him.
Usually, the smokers commandeer the picnic tables, which offer a fine view of
the parking lot and the old brick nurses' residence that houses the Family
Medicine Clinic, but at the end of the day, most non-doctors had taken off, and
it was just me and Tucker.

He stretched out his long legs and
grinned at me. His blond hair caught the sun like a white halo. I never thought
I'd end up with a blond dude. Even if my sig other didn't end up being Chinese,
I thought he'd have dark hair.