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They worked together to clean up from breakfast, and by the time they were done, Jack was knocking on the front door. When Rachel answered it and noticed that Grandma Tate had slipped upstairs, she tried not to read too much into it. Maybe she was just giving them their privacy; maybe it had nothing at all to do with the brief conversation they’d had in the driveway.
“Where’s your grandmother?” Jack asked as he stepped inside.
“Upstairs.”
“Oh.” He instantly wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, and kissed her deeply. When he broke it about ten seconds later, he smiled and said, “Sorry. That’s never going to get old. Anyway… got your laptop?”
Still swept up in the kiss, it took her a moment to get her thoughts back on track.“It’s on the kitchen counter.”
“Good. Because the gods are smiling on me this morning, it seems. Both emails popped into my inbox in the fifteen minutes between our call and now.” As Rachel made her way into the kitchen, he started tapping away on his phone and said, “I’m forwarding it all to you now.”
“Not that I’m complaining,” she said, “but don’t you think Anderson would rather have you doing this at the office?”
“Probably. It doesn’t really matter, though. He knows I’m here.”
“What?” They settled down at the kitchen table as Rachel brought her laptop to life.
“He checked in with me around seven o’ clock this morning. Asked about the case and then about you. I figured I’d sort of test the waters, so I admitted to telling you about some of the case details. He seemed fine with it—even said that you might be a valuable asset for the case. he didn’t come out andtell meto let you have a look at the medical records if I managed to get them, but he didn’t tell menotto, either. One of those things.”
“Well, that’s good. Wow, things really are looking up for us.” She then told him about the minor confrontation she and Grandma Tate had out in the driveway.
“I told you she doesn’t like me,” Jack said.
“No, it’s not that. She just knows you’re linked to my work. And I think she’s confused overt whether to see you as suitor or a threat to taking me away from what’s important right now.”
Jack chuckled as he put his phone down on the table and sat down next to her.“I don’t know if I’ve ever been referred to as a suitor before.”
Rachel opened upthe email he’d just forwarded to her and found two separate PDF documents waiting for her. She opened them both up, resized them a bit, and then had them sitting side by side on her home screen.
“We’re going to need to figure out a way to find out who Donna Newsom might have come into contact with over the past few weeks, too,” Jack said. “And that’s just going to require some good old feet-to-the-pavement investigating. Which I don’t really have time for right now. But I’m afraid it might come down to that.”
“Just find out who she worked shifts with at the hospital,” Rachel said. “Just ask around about significant events or trauma she may have witnessed or been a part of.”
“Yeah, that’s where I’ll probably start. But for now… what can we tell from all ofthis?”he asked, gesturing to her laptop.
“I guess it’s just like what I was able to help out with by taking those pictures… this is just a much bigger picture. And at the risk of seeming like I’m trying to bully through a theory, I do think we should pinpoint patients that are listed as terminal or even those that had been given bad news.”
“And if we find matches here, try to match them up with anyone that was involved in any way with Donna Newsom,” Jack added.
“Exactly. I mean, it can’t really be that many, right?”
So that’s what they did. Because Jack was the only legitimate, active agent assigned to the case, he handled the task of calling the hospital where Donna had worked. While Rachel looked through the records from Matthews and Leery, she listened to Jack speak to several different administrative employees and then a department head. When he finally had the correct person on the line—someone with the authority to provide details of an employee’s rounds and lists of patients now that a judge had given Jack permission—he explained the situation and requested that someone essentially be on-call for them.
All the while, Rachel had started making a list of matches from the lists. She started from as far back as a year ago, recalling her own journey. She knew it would make their list longer, but she figured theymight as well be thorough now that they had the information they needed. By the time Jack had someone at the hospital assigned to take his call when they had needed, Rachel had made her way through nine months of patients for both doctors and had come up with seven matches. In every single case, the patients had gone in for a second opinion or even at the advice of the other doctor.
There were cases of glioblastoma, breast cancer, lung cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Each time she read over such a diagnosis, there wasa slight feeling of evil and voyeurism that she couldn’t escape. And in a few cases, when the seven names stopped appearing on the list for the doctor they had settled upon, she couldn’t help but wonder if they’d passed away.
A chill went through her as she realized she could very well be getting an intimate glimpse of her future.
“Looks like you’re making good progress,” Jack said, stepping behind her and watching her work. He began to lightly massage her shoulders as he also started to study the last few months from each list. It took only another ten minutes to get through the rest of the calendar year, and it netted one more name—a man that went to Leery just seven weeks ago and then paid a visit to Matthews ten days later. Oddly enough, it was not a name that had come up in Rachel’s photographs despite its recent date.
“This is what we have,” Rachel said. “Eight names. If any of them can also be linked to Donna Newsom, those are our suspects.” And then, giving him a sincere look, she added: “And you’re sure you’re comfortable with this theory?”
“Yeah. I know you wouldn’t just use your… well, you current situation in order to get involve in a case. If you feel this strongly about it, I’m going to agree with it.”
With that, Jack called his assigned contact at the hospital. The call was answered right away, and Rachel intently listened as he listed off each name and waited for a response or confirmation on the other end. While she waited, Rachel poured cups of coffee from what was left in the pot from breakfast—a substantial amount seeing as how she and Grandma Tate had gotten some while out to drop Paige off at school.
On the fourth name, he got a hit. He placed the phone on speaker mode as the woman on the other end was speaking.“…to confirm that Donna did indeed have a James Dickerson on her rounds. This would have been six months ago, correct?”
