Read Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe for Free Online

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.
    He didn't recognize anything about the photo except his face. Everything else about it struck him as a convincing forgery. It was as if someone had taken his face from one picture, his clothes from another, and artfully combined the elements, then inserted Emily Noble at his side and a generic Hawaiian backdrop behind them both.
    But Mark knew it wasn't the picture that had been altered. It was him.
    Jesse is dead. He was killed saving your life. Someone has to pay.
    He set the photo aside, facedown, and sorted through the papers on his desk. Most of them dealt with hospital bureaucracy and current patients. He didn't find anything relating to Grover Dawson.
    He sifted through a week's worth of phone message slips, discarding anything that seemed to be part of his administrative routine and keeping the rest. Next he turned to the yellow legal pad he kept by the phone. The pad contained random scribbles—names, phone numbers, doodles, lunch orders, and scattered reminders in no particular order. A few caught his eye.
    First Fidelity Casualty
    Wedding band
    Dentures?
    Kemper-Carlson Pharmaceuticals
    Cal-Star Insurance
    Sechrest + Pevney + ?
    The glass fish?
    The pearl necklace?
    He had no idea what the notes meant or if they were even related to the case. They were just scribbles.
    There were two lists on the notepad that he'd boxed and doodled around, which suggested to him now that he'd given them lots of thought. They read:
    Jesse
    Insurance records & hospital admittance forms
    Amanda
    Deaths/three years
    The notations were too general to glean much from them, except that he'd asked Jesse and Amanda to do some research. He would talk to Amanda and find out the details.
    He opened his date book and reviewed his schedule for the previous two weeks. The days were filled with administrative meetings and appointments with patients. There were three meetings outside Community General with doctors whose names he didn't recognize: Dr. Richard Barnes, Dr. Tanya Hudson, and Dr. Bernard Dalton.
    Mark looked up the three doctors on the Internet and discovered that Dr. Barnes was an epidemiologist, Dr. Hudson was a sociologist, and Dr. Dalton was a cardiologist.
    What had he wanted to talk to them about? Were they related to his investigation into Grover Dawson's death? Or were they people he was consulting as part of his day-to-day medical routine? Perhaps they were new friends he'd made in the last two years and he was seeing them simply for the pleasure of their company. He would need Amanda and