Read Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe for Free Online Page B

observation with me?"
    "There was this twenty-two-year-old woman named Sandy Sechrest who tried to kill herself by drinking a lethal cocktail of vodka mixed with handfuls of opiates and benzodiazepines. She came into the ER at Northridge Hospital flatlined, but they managed to save her. Three months later, she cleaned herself up, got into a counseling program, and even found a job. And what happens? She's taking a bath one night, her hair dryer falls into the tub and zap , she gets electrocuted and drowns."
    Amanda took another bite of her cinnamon roll and licked the frosting off her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing her story.
    "That was the case I was coming from when I saw you that morning," she said. "You thought it was odd and I said no, it's simply ironic, those kinds of things happen all the time. I gave you another example, too. A woman named Leila Pevney survived a quadruple bypass only to die from the common cold. She took too many decongestants. The amphetamines in the medicine caused a fatal change in her cardiac rhythm."
    "So let me guess," Mark said. "I challenged you to prove to me that cases like that ‘happen all the time' by putting together a list of people who died, accidentally or otherwise, shortly after near-death experiences. I asked you to go back, say, three years."
    "Yes, you did," Amanda said. "And dutiful fool that I am, I fell for it."
    "Fell for what?"
    "You getting me to do a load of research. There I was, thinking I was doing it for myself to prove a point to you, when in fact I was doing it for you to satisfy your idle curiosity."
    "I'm not that manipulative." Mark took another bite of his roll and licked his fingers again afterwards.
    "Sure you are," she said. "You hide it by being avuncular. That's your charm."
    "And did you do it?"
    "The list was the size of a phone book. There are roughly fifty-seven thousand deaths, excluding homicides and suicides, in Los Angeles County every year. Of those, about seven hundred eighty people survive life-threatening conditions requiring hospitalization within a year preceding their deaths. Of those people, about thirty-four die within ninety days of their release from the hospital."
    "And those figures have stayed pretty constant over the last three years?"
    "More or less, except for the people who've died within three months of a life-threatening episode. That's up from thirty-three last year to forty-eight so far this year."
    Mark did the math. "That's a forty-five percent increase. That can't be normal."
    Amanda shrugged. "There's no telling what's responsible for the uptick. It's probably just bad luck."
    "What about the autopsy reports on those forty-eight deaths? Did I ask for them?"
    "Of course you did, as if you hadn't already given me enough work to do. But most of the patients died of natural causes and weren't autopsied. Their deaths were certified by their family physician, which, in at least two of the cases, was you."
    "Which two?" Mark said.
    Amanda got up, went to her desk, and scrounged around until she found the files she was looking for. "Hammond McNutchin and Joyce Kling. Their deaths were sad, but not unexpected."
    Mark browsed through the files while Amanda returned her attention to eating her cinnamon roll.
    Hammond McNutchin was a seventy-three-year-old man who, when Mark last saw him, was brought in by paramedics with a collapsed lung, congestive heart failure, and prostate cancer. Mark managed to save his life. He died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack not long afterward. At least it was in the comfort of his own home, Mark thought, instead of in a hospital bed.
    Joyce Kling was a fifty-six-year-old lupus patient who came into the ER with chest pains. It turned out her pericardium was filling with fluid and Mark had to drain it. She nearly died on the table, but she pulled through, thanks to his valiant efforts, only to die of respiratory failure two months later while sitting in her recliner, watching