Until Proven Guilty

by Rachel Sinclair

  I went towards the back, where Sharita was sitting at a table, sipping out of a cup. I recognized her, because she told me that she was wearing a light blue cotton dress, and a dark overcoat. She was an attractive black woman, with short braids. She was long and lean, and when she stood up, she was a towering figure.

  I shook her hand, and so did Harper.

  “I’m Sharita, and you must be Damien and Harper. I know that you talked to me over the phone about what you wanted, but I don’t really understand exactly what you’re trying to get at. I know you want to talk to me about my visits with Dr. Dunham. But I have to admit, I’m confused as to how it is I’m going to be helping you.”

  I was working through a theory, but I wasn’t quite sold on it. “Thanks for meeting us. I know it was short notice that I gave you, and I know you had to squeeze us in, so I do appreciate it.”

  She looked at her watch. “Yes, I did squeeze you in. I have two more sales calls to make this evening. I make sales calls in the evening all the time. In fact, I kind of work all the time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The money is good, though. If it weren’t, there’s no way that I would be busting my tail the way I am. I want to have a life, but it’s hard to do. So I’m glad that you wanted to meet me here at a coffee shop, because I really do need to take a little break and have a croissant and a cup of coffee. So, two birds one stone, as they say.”

  I sent Harper over to get two cups of coffee, and she walked over and placed our order. “As I was telling you over the phone, I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Dunham,” I said to Sharita.“Now, I understand that you were going to his place of business once a week on Wednesday. I looked at his calendar for this year, and it seemed that he scheduled you into his office every Wednesday evening at 7 o’clock. Can I ask you what was the nature of your business relationship with him?”

  “I was his sex slave.” Then she rolled her eyes. “I was selling him on drugs, which is what I do. What other reason do you think I would be seeing him? Sorry, he wasn’t my type.” She sipped her coffee and didn’t smile, but her eyes crinkled slightly in evident mirth.

  She was a bit sassy, but I kind of liked it. “Well, I figured that that was probably the case. It’s just that Dr. Dunham had held himself out as somebody who didn’t prescribe drugs to people. That’s why I was so surprised to see that you had seen him once a week, every week, for two years.”

  “Did you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, the good Dr. Dunham was lying to whomever it is who thought that he didn’t prescribe drugs? I mean, come on, the guy was a medical doctor. An MD. He’s not some farty doctor of naturopathy or something like that. Do you think that a guy who’s an MD, and who completed a residency in pain management, is never going to prescribe drugs? That’s the fun part of his job.”

  I felt I had to correct the record just a little bit. “You do know that a doctor of naturopathy is also an MD, don’t you?”

  Sharita shrugged her shoulders, and sipped on her coffee. “If you say so. Hey, I’m not knocking naturopathic doctors. They have a place in the medical establishment, same as anybody else. I’m just saying that if he wanted to become a naturopathic doctor, he would’ve done his residency in that particular area of medicine. He didn’t, so of course he’s going to prescribe drugs. As I said, that’s the fun part of this job.”

  “What new drugs did you introduce to him?” I asked her.

  When I asked her that question, she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and sipped on her coffee and her eyes did not meet mine. “Why do you want to know that? What business is that of yours?”

  “I was just wondering what drugs you introduced to him?” She was suddenly getting defensive, and I didn’t know why that would be.

  She raised an eyebrow. “If I don’t answer the question, what are you going to do to me?”

  I glanced over at Harper, and I saw that Harper was thinking the same thing that I was. I had unwittingly struck a nerve with Sharita. I had no idea why, but it was evident that she did not want to answer this particular question.

  “I can get you under oath, either in a deposition, or at trial.”

  “At trial? Why am I going to be a relevant witness? Listen, my dad’s a lawyer, and I know all about fishing expeditions. Seems to me that you’re going to try a fishing expedition with me, and I’m not having it. If you try to drag me into this case, I’ll get my lawyer to quash any subpoena that you try to give me. I know my rights.”

  I cocked my head, and looked over at Harper. She was as curious as I was.

  “With all due respect, Ms. Vance, you’re acting like somebody who has something to hide. I’m going to find out what it is, just so you know. And I have a feeling that once I find out what you’re hiding, it’ll be no problem at all trying to show a judge that you have relevant information. Which means that you will be a party to the case. I mean, not a party, but a witness. In trial. Now, you can simply tell me what drugs you introduced to Dr. Dunham, right here and now, or you can tell me in a deposition or trial. Either way. You choose.”

  Sharita shook her head. “You’re not going to get me like that. If I tell you what you want to know, you’re just going to drag me into the case anyways. But if I don’t tell you, good luck trying to find out. And I mean that in the best possible way – good luck.”

  I tapped my fingers on the table. This conversation had taken a really odd turn, to say the very least. “Ms. Vance –”

  She stood up, and I saw that she had her satchel in her hand. She threw down a $20 bill, took a sip of her coffee, and walked away without another word. I saw her go out the front door, and I turned to Harper.

  “Well, looks like we’re going to have to do some digging to find out what that was all about. I mean, all I asked her was what drugs she pitched to Dr. Dunham, and boy, did she get nasty. Very defensive. So there’s something to that, obviously,” I said to Harper.

  “Yes, there is something to it. But how are we going to find out what it is that she’s hiding?”

  “We’re just going to have to somehow get a read out of Sharita’s client list and the drugs that she has pitched to her clients. That shouldn’t be too hard to do for Anna. Assuming that the Osiris company keeps that kind of thing on the cloud. And I would imagine that they probably keep it on the cloud, as the team leaders usually have to see what their team members are doing as far as what they’re selling, and to whom. If we can get a copy of Sharita’s client lists, and what she sells to her clients, then we can find out what it is she’s been selling to Dr. Dunham.”

  Chapter 16

  20 minutes later, after Harper put in a phone call to Anna, Anna did her due diligence. Which meant that she accessed Sharita Vance’s client list from the cloud. In it, Harper and I found our answer.

  Dr. Dunham wasn’t one of her clients. We looked very carefully on the list. We even uploaded it to the computer, and did a search for the term “Dunham.” But it didn’t come up anywhere on her list.

  “That’s weird,” I said to Harper. “To say the least. She was paying a visit to Dr. Dunham every week on Wednesday evening, he had her penciled in, but he wasn’t one of her clients. Combine that with the fact that she got so defensive when we asked her about that, and I’m going to go out on a limb and state that something is very wrong here.”

  We were sitting in my office, me behind my desk, and Harper in the big leather chair that was in the corner of my office. She didn’t seem relaxed, though - her feet were on the ottoman, but she was wiggling them to and fro.

  She was playing with a Rubik’s cube, mindlessly. That was something that she did to focus her mind, and was something I did to focus my mind as well. We had that in common.

  “Maybe she was having an affair with him?” Harper said to nobody in particular.

  Truth be told, that was the first thing I thought, as well. But then again, it didn’t make much sense to me. “No. I don’t think so. Why would he put her on his calendar every week? Why would she try to play it off li
ke she was paying him professional visits?”

  “It’s pretty obvious. The guy was married, so Sharita had to come up with a good answer as to what she was doing in his office every week. Maybe she’s just really weird about adultery. Maybe she’s embarrassed. Ashamed. People do all kinds of things when they’re embarrassed and ashamed, including lie.”

  I thought about that for a few minutes, but it just wasn’t ringing true to me. “No. I think it’s something else. I think it’s something much more nefarious, but I just can’t put a finger on what. She’s got a game going, and I just don’t know exactly what that game is.”

  Harper got up from the chair, and went over to the window. She put her hands on the window ledge and stretched her legs. She looked a bit like a ballerina, and I thought that maybe she was doing it unconsciously. Harper wasn’t acting like she was very comfortable, and I didn’t really know why.

  “Well, I’m not really sure how it is that we’re supposed to get a straight answer from her,” Harper said. “We certainly can’t tell her that we illegally obtained her client list. And she’s right about one thing – it’s going to be tough to show the judge why she’s going to be relevant in this case. Unless we think that maybe she was the one who killed him, but that’s a long shot. We’re going to have to gather something else on her, something that we can sink our teeth into, before we can drag her into this case. If we drag her into this case, then we can obviously get her to answer questions under oath, but we’re going to have to come up with more.”

  “I can just depose her, and hope that she doesn’t come up with a motion to quash the deposition subpoena. After all, Rule 25.12 says that we can depose any person. It doesn’t say, obviously, that the person has to be material. And who knows, she might end up becoming material by the end of this.”

  Harper turned around. “I suppose it’s a good idea, to get her to answer questions under oath. I just wonder if she’s going to be the kind to actually tell the truth. Somehow, I think she’s not going to be.”

  Harper started to pace. She was making me a bit nervous, so I decided to try to talk her down.

  “Harper,” I began. “What’s going on? You’re as nervous as a cat.”

  She put her hand through her hair and pulled it. “You noticed. I don’t know, I’m still rattled over seeing Michael Reynolds in here. I’m just afraid that he’s gonna do something to me or my daughters. You have to remember, he hates me. He went to prison because of me. Well, no, that’s not necessarily true. He went to prison because he killed somebody, but he would’ve gotten off the first time if I didn’t do such a terrible job with his case. He blames me, because that’s just the kind of person he is. He’s not going to ever take responsibility for the things that he has done. And I know that he thinks that I put you up to suing him. I just think he’s dangerous.”

  “Harper, the guy killed somebody. And, he has raped at least one person, probably many more. I think it’s a safe assumption that he’s dangerous. And I’m sorry that I’m bringing him back into your life, in a way. I didn’t think that he was just going to show up here, although I probably should’ve figured that was going to happen.”

  “Damien, it’s okay. Really, it’s all right. I’m happy that you are bringing a lawsuit against him. It’s just that, I don’t know, seeing him triggers me. All I want to do is find a gun and kill him myself. Put him out of his misery, along with the world. The world would be such a better place if he wasn’t in it.”

  I started to think that maybe the whole bringing a lawsuit against Michael Reynolds was not such a good idea. Yet, I also felt that I needed to see it through. I started to think that Harper was going to need this as a kind of catharsis.

  She sat back down. “Don’t worry, Damien. I’m gonna be okay. Now, where were we?”

  Harper and I sat and mapped out a strategy about how it was that we were going to get Sharita to admit to why it was that she was going to Dr. Dunham’s office so frequently. But first, I figured it was important that I talk to my mother about it. I had a feeling that maybe she knew more about Tracy Dunham than what she was letting on. I also had a feeling that maybe she had an answer about the mysterious Sharita Vance angle.

  Chapter 17

  “Sharita Vance,” Mom was saying when I went to visit her at her trailer. It was just the two of us, as Harper had an emergency that she had to attend to. Something about Rina’s boyfriend breaking up with her, or something of the sort. All that I knew was that Harper took the call, and she was trying to talk Rina down. She was apologetic, but said that she had to get home, because Rina was apparently hysterical.

  “Yes, Sharita Vance. Did Tracy ever mention somebody by that name?”

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t know nobody named Sharita Vance, and I don’t know that Tracy knew somebody named that, either. Unless…”

  “Unless, what?”

  Mom looked like she was lost in thought. “Oh, I don’t really know. I do remember that one night, my car broke down, and I called him to see if he could come and give me a ride somewhere. I think I was feeling cooped up in here, and I had to get out a here or else I would run screaming into the night. So I go out and start my car, it’s deader than a doornail, my neighbor Vicki, she’s not around. So I called Tracy. He tells me he can’t come and take me nowhere, because he was meeting some woman there at his office.”

  “Is there anything else you can remember about this woman?”

  Mom went up and went to her fridge, and brought back two bottles of beer, one for me and one for her. I opened it up, and took a sip. It was Milwaukee’s Best, not my favorite - I preferred PBR when I was drinking cheap beers - but it was going to have to do.

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” Mom took a sip of her beer, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m thinking that Sharita Vance might be the name of the woman who was trying to get him drugs to push on his patients, but that was all she gave him. You know, they got those people that go to doctors’ offices and try to push different kinds of pills down the doctors’ throat. Then the doctors are supposed to push those same pills down their patient’s throats. Tracy, he told me that he don’t push pills down patient’s throats, so I asked him why he would have a pill-pusher lady in his office. He just laughed.”

  This was getting interesting. From the look on Dr. Dunham’s calendar, Sharita Vance was seen in his office every week for at least a year. If she wasn’t selling him on drugs, then what was she doing there?

  “He never told you why he had a pharmaceutical rep in his office every week?”

  Mom just shrugged, and took a sip of her beer. “I don’t know, I guess maybe she was pushing pill samples on him.”

  What did that mean? Maybe Sharita was dropping off pill samples of some sort to Dr. Dunham, but there was no way that she could be dropping off pill samples that would be germane to Dr. Dunham’s practice - opioids, being a controlled substance, weren’t offered by pharm companies in sample form.

  Curiouser and curiouser…

  “Why are you so hot onto this Sharita Vance woman?” Mom asked me.

  “I don’t really know. I just have a feeling that she’s going to be the linchpin of this entire case. I don’t really know how she fits into it, however.”

  Mom just laughed. “Damien, Tracy bit it because of heroin, not some namby-pamby prescription drug. That woman was pushing the hillbilly heroin, not the real stuff. Unless she had some business going on on the side.”

  Maybe that was the case. Maybe Sharita was a pusher of illegal drugs. That would actually make some sense in my mind. I thought about what she said, about how she complained about working all those hours, but she was happy with the money. What if she was looking to get out of the pharmaceutical sales game, and all of its long hours, and get into something that was much more lucrative with fewer hours?

  I didn’t want to jump the gun, but I wondered if Sharita was the illicit drug dealer that I was trying to find.

  If so, how was I going to pr
ove it?

  I decided that it would be smart to go in and see Tracy Dunham’s office manager again. I remembered that she was very helpful the first time I went to see her, and very good about answering questions to the best of her knowledge. So I made an appointment for Harper and me to go back over to the office.

  I also hoped that maybe she would let me go into Tracy’s actual office, so that I could maybe take a look around. I had hoped to maybe see if I could find if there were any pills lying around the office, as I knew that the police had not yet cordoned off Tracy’s office for investigation. I didn’t know if they were going to cordon off his office. I thought that they probably would not since this was not a typical murder case. It was a drug overdose case that was being treated as a murder. Because of this, the investigation had not yet extended to Tracy Dunham’s place of business. Until I got notice that his office was being treated as a crime scene, it was fair game, as far as I was concerned.

  When Harper and I went to see Sally Wallace, she was just as helpful as the first time. I was afraid that wouldn’t be the case, like maybe somebody had gotten to her, but she seemed to be open to whatever it was that I needed to do.

  “Now, what is it that you needed from me again?” she asked me.

  I cleared my throat. “The last time I was here, I wanted to ask you if you would allow me to go into Dr. Dunham’s actual office. And I was wondering if you would let me do that.” I was going to be looking for any kind of drugs that might’ve been left in the office by Sharita.

  I think that Sally read my mind, because she handed me a garbage sack that was filled with little boxes that had pills in foil packs. “Maybe this is what you are looking for?” She lowered her voice and looked around. “I don’t want anybody to know that I found this. I don’t know, I guess I was maybe wrong about what I told you about Dr. Dunham.”