“What do you mean?”
“He might have been prescribing opioids to patients. Well, I mean, he didn’t prescribe opioids to patients, but he was apparently prescribing opioids to one patient.”
“Who?”
“Sharita Vance.” She took a deep breath. “I went into his office and found his scrip pad. It has carbon copies, like a checkbook. And he apparently prescribed Oxycontin to Sharita Vance every single week. A seven day supply of Oxycontin every week.”
Huh. That was weird. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes. I mean, her name was the only name on his scrip pad. The only one. But I’ll tell you what was weird.”
“And what’s that?”
“Well, I found this.” She handed me a bottle of Oxycontin. I looked at the name on the prescription bottle, and the name was Sharita Vance.
I furrowed my brow. “I wonder why he would have a bottle of her prescription in his office?”
“I don’t know,” Sally said. “That’s the question I had.”
I opened up the bottle and saw that there was one more pill in it. “Do you mind terribly if I took this bottle and this pill?” For some odd reason, I thought that it was important that I keep it.
“No, of course not. Go ahead and keep it. Maybe it will help you solve the mystery somehow.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I shook my head. “Weird. Well, thank you very much for being so cooperative.”
Sally smiled. “Of course. Of course I’m going to be cooperative. I want you to get to the bottom of this, the same as anybody else. Probably more than anybody else. I just hate thinking that Dr. Dunham died not because he was addicted, but because somebody wanted him dead. And I don’t think that somebody was your client.”
I had to think that was kind of odd that she would say that. “Now, why do you think that somebody wanted him dead?”
“It’s just a hunch I have. I can’t really explain it. It’s just something that makes the hair on the back of my arms stand up. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t know that he was entertaining a pharmaceutical rep, and now I found out that he was. And now I see that he was writing a scrip to Sharita Vance every week. I don’t know, it’s just that there’s something that’s just not right. And I hope that you can find it.”
I left her office after asking a few more questions, but my interrogation of her was just sticking with me. She was so sure that there was something more to Dr. Dunham’s death than what I was seeing, and I was just going to have to figure it out.
Chapter 18
I went back over to my mom’s, and she was lying on the couch.
“Come on in, don’t mind me, even though I’m feeling like death warmed over. Again.”
“What? You’re sick?”
“Yeah. I am. I had a bladder infection a couple of months ago, and now I’m feeling like an elephant’s sitting on my chest. I still got some of those antibiotics I got from the bladder infection, so I’m going to take them for this, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “Mom, you do know the first rule of antibiotic usage, don’t you? The first rule is that you take every single pill that is prescribed, even if you start feeling better. If you don’t, you’ll get sicker the next time, because you don’t kill off every bad bug. You just kill off the weaker bugs, leaving the stronger ones behind. That means that you get a super-bug the next time.”
Mom just shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t need your lecture, Dr. Damien. I felt better in a day, so I just started drinking cranberry juice. I ain’t gonna waste antibiotics, because you never know when you’re gonna need them again.” She started hacking and then lay back down. “Like now. If I didn’t have those leftover antibiotics, I’d just have to suffer. Ain’t no way I could afford to see a doctor again and buy more antibiotics. That crap’s expensive, especially if you don’t have insurance. And I ain’t got no insurance, so there you go. It’s all expensive for me.”
Missouri was a state that refused to expand Medicaid, so that meant that people like my mom, who was making $10 an hour at Wal-Mart, wasn’t eligible. Nobody was eligible for Medicaid in Missouri, except if you had minor children, which she didn’t. Unfortunately, since my mom worked only part-time, sometimes 30 hours per week, sometimes less, she made too little to qualify for Obamacare subsidies. She was in that donut hole - didn’t qualify for Medicaid, because she didn’t have minor children, making too little to qualify for Obamacare subsidies, and her job didn’t provide her health insurance.
That meant that she had two choices - don’t get sick or pay out the nose for care. I was always trying to help her out financially, but she would never take it. I quit trying after awhile.
“I’ll just come back,” I said. “When you’re feeling better.”
Mom rolled her eyes. “I ain’t catching, son. You can stick around. You came here to ask me stuff, so go ahead and ask me.”
“Mom, I-” I stopped, because I remembered reading something about false positives on drug tests. She took the antibiotics a few months ago? “Wait, were you taking those antibiotics the night they took your drug test? Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I was feeling like crap for days, not pissing like I should be, feeling like I always gotta pee but nothing would come out. Then I started pissing blood, so I went to see a doctor and she set me up with an antibiotic prescription. Why?”
“Let me see that bottle,” I said.
“Go and get it. I don’t feel like getting up off this couch.” She hacked some more, and I went into her bathroom and opened her medicine cabinet.
I saw that the antibiotic that was prescribed to her was Cipro.
I went back into the living room, where mom was laying on the couch. “Mom, how do you take this antibiotic?” I already knew that she didn’t take it correctly, as she apparently quit taking the drug before she was done with the course of treatment.
“What do you mean, how do I take it?”
“I mean, do you take it as prescribed - twice a day?” I looked at the bottle and saw that it directed her to take two a day, every day, for 10 days. I knew something about antibiotics and realized that mom must have had a serious infection by the time she saw her doctor. Usually the course is only 3 days.
Mom coughed some more. “Son, I was feeling like crap. So, I took five pills one day and five the next. Cleared it right up, although it did make me feel sick. Now I got the other 10 pills left, and I’m gonna take them for the crap I got right now.”
I closed my eyes. “Mom, did you take these pills before they gave you the urine test the morning after Tracy died?”
“Yeah, I did. I took those ten pills in two days, and they gave me a drug test that day, right after I took five of those pills. Why do you ask?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, let me check something real quick.”
I got on the Internet and Googled “False positives for opioids.” I looked at the chart that showed all the drugs that would cause false positives for various narcotics and saw that Fluoroquinolones was implicated in causing false positives for opioids. A quick check on Fluoroquinolones showed that Cipro was a type of Fluoroquinolone.
I nodded my head. “I think I know why you tested positive for opioids.” I pounded my fist on the desk. “Dammit. No way I can ask for a re-test now. I’m just going to have to attack the test in court.” I looked again at the drug test that was done on my mom, and saw that the threshold for a positive test was 2000 ng/ml, which stood for nanograms per milliliter. That was a high threshold, but some quick reviews of the medical journals on the topic of false positives for opiates showed that false positives happened in opioid testing even when the threshold was as high as 2000 ng/ml. Sometimes a poppy seed bagel would be enough to cause a false-positive, but at lower ng levels.
And my mom was taking more of the Cipro than was prescribed. Much more. That would have set off the drug test for sure.
Mom finally got off the couch, hacking away. “Damien, what’s going on?”
“Mom, I think that I can show the jury that you weren’t taking heroin or any kind of opioids. I’m probably going to have to get your medical records entered into evidence under the Business Records Exception to the Hearsay rule. Then I’m going to have to hire an expert who can come in and testify that Cipro can cause a false positive on a drug test. But that’s all that I can really do. It’ll be up to the jury to believe it or not. I don’t know mom, it might be a long-shot, as false positives happen rarely, even when you do take antibiotics.”
Mom shook her head, coughed some more, and went to lay back down on the couch. “Damien, I feel like crap. Give me some of that Cipro.”
“Mom, no. I’m not going to let you do that. You probably have a respiratory infection, which means that it’s a different thing from your bladder infection. I’m going to take you into Urgent Care and see if you can get a whole new prescription for what you have. In the meantime, I have to figure out what expert is going to come into court to testify about the possibility that you had a false positive on your drug test.”
Mom looked confused. “Damien, does that mean those bastards are gonna have to drop the charges against me? You show them that I ain’t taking no drugs when Tracy was here, and the prosecutors will say ‘never mind?’ Because that’s what I’m looking for.”
I sighed. “I can try that, but I don’t think it’ll work. For one, it’s a long-shot that your drug test was a false positive. For another, there’s the issue of your BP drugs actually being heroin, but I can challenge their chain of custody on that one.” Then again…”Well, considering you were taking, what, five times the dose that you were supposed to, it was probably a pretty high probability that the drug test you took is going to go off on opioids. What were you thinking?”
Because she was only supposed to take one pill every twelve hours and she apparently took five pills once a day, I figured that her blood had five times the amount of the drug than normal, at least if the test was done right after she took the five pills. An expert would be able to speak to that a bit better, however.
“Don’t lecture me, Damien. I felt like crap. I needed to get better quick, because I had to work. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I figured that if I took a bunch of the pills at once, it would knock the crap out my body that much faster. It worked. I always put more spices into my food than recipe books ask for, and it’s the same thing. A recipe calls for 1/4 tsp of rosemary, I put a tablespoon in. Always makes it better. The more the merrier.”
“Mom, these are not spices we’re talking about. We’re talking about a drug. If a doctor tells you how to take a drug, you take it just like they say. Now, we’re going into Urgent Care now to get you some new antibiotics for your apparent respiratory infection, which might just be a cold. If it is a cold, then no antibiotics are going to work for you.”
Mom coughed and then shook her head. “What do you mean, antibiotics don’t work for a cold? I always take antibiotics whenever I get a cold.”
“Colds are caused by viruses. So are viral flus and viral pneumonia. Any kind of virus. And how can you afford to keep getting antibiotics whenever you get a cold, anyhow?”
She shrugged. “I used to get them from Nicolle, my across-the-street neighbor. She had some kind of sickly kid and she had a bunch of leftover antibiotics. I’d get them from her. She moved away a few months ago, though, so I had to get my own prescription for antibiotics.”
I groaned. I was tempted to go off on her on how dangerous it was that she was just taking antibiotics, pell-mell, willy-nilly, but I figured that it would fall on deaf ears. Most of the things I said to my mother usually did fall on deaf ears. My mother wasn’t one to be reasoned with, I had discovered over the years.
Mom stood up and pointed to me while hacking. “You ain’t taking me nowhere, son. Listen, I gotta work in a couple of hours. I get into one of those Urgent Care circles of hell, and I’ll never get out of there anytime today. You ever been to one of those places? Nothing but hacking kids and old people sleeping in the chairs. It’s November, there’s going to be lots of those snot-nosed brats, too, screaming and crying. No, thank you. I’ll just take the rest of this Cipro, and I’ll be fine.”
Ordinarily, I would throw up my hands in frustration when my mother stonewalled me on something like this. But I had leverage this time, and I was going to use it.
“Mom, either you come with me to the Urgent Care place, or I’m going to withdraw from your case and you’ll have no attorney at all.” I crossed my arms. She wasn’t eligible for the Public Defender’s Office, as she was out on bail, and it was the policy of the PD’s office to not take clients on if they had the money to put up for bail. I had faith in the Kansas City Public Defender’s office, but mom wasn’t eligible, and that was that.
“Go right ahead,” Mom said. “I’ll just go down and get me one of those public defenders. I hear those lawyers are pretty damned good.”
I shook my head. “You don’t qualify. You made bond, so you theoretically have enough money to hire your own attorney. They won’t take you. Now, you can certainly try to defend yourself in court, but boy, if you do that, you’ll have a huge fool for a client. You won’t even know how to defend yourself, so don’t even try.”
Mom waved her hand at me dismissively. “You won’t leave me high and dry. I’m your momma. You’re too high-falutin. If you admit to your muckety-muck friends that you got a momma in the joint, you won’t get invited to your fancy parties no more.”
I sighed. “Mom, I don’t go to fancy parties. And my friends, the only ones I care about, anyhow, were all in prison themselves until just recently, or did you forget about that? I hardly think that they’re going to care that you’re sent up the river yourself. Now, you’re making excuses and it’s time to stop. You need to come with me and get some antibiotics that are geared towards a respiratory infection, if that’s what you got.”
Mom shook her head, but then she made a fist and looked like she was going to haul off and hit me. “Damien, do you ever get tired of trying to run my life? From where I sit, you’ve made a pretty good mess of your own life, so where do you get off trying to tell me what to do?”
Mom was really good at throwing my past in my face, I gave her that.
“Mom, you’re right. I’ve made a mess of things in my personal life. No doubt about it. But that has nothing to do with this. You need to see a doctor and try to get well. Personally, I suspect that you probably have a regular cold, so you won’t be able to get antibiotics, but if that’s the case, then that’s the case. You’ll just have to rest and wait it out, just like the rest of the world. But what you cannot do is just take the rest of your Cipro and call it good. Now, either you come with me to the Urgent Care or you can represent yourself in your murder trial. Your choice.”
I had her there and she knew it. She could try to call my bluff, and, truth be told, I had no idea what I was going to do if she did.
To my relief, she got up and went to her coat closet and put on a coat. “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
I smiled. “I knew you would.”
Chapter 19
After I took mom to the Urgent Care - it was just like Mom said it would be, with a waiting room filled with sniffling kids and old people falling asleep - and the doctor informed her that she tested positive for the common cold, therefore she wasn’t going to get antibiotics, after which my mom apparently threw such a fit that she ended up coming away with a prescription for Amoxicillin anyway, I went home to see my kids.
I resented my mom, because getting her to do anything was always like pulling teeth. It took forever to convince her to go to the clinic, and the only reason why I had to go with her in the first place was because of her stubborn insistence that she was going to treat herself with leftover antibiotics. I really should have been home with the kids instead of dealing with my mom’s nonsense.
I had dinner with the kids, and Nate was seeming more upbeat than I had seem him in a long time. I still had
n’t gotten the anti-depressants that I was supposed to pick up, and I felt that maybe I wasn’t going to need to after all. Nate seemed to thrive on the basketball team, and he managed to get to practice and back by getting a ride with a new friend, Austin McCray. I was happy that Nate was hanging out with Austin. I worried that he was too much of a loner and maybe he wasn’t fitting in at school. I was even more encouraged to find out that Austin was one of the more popular kids at Nate’s school.
After dinner, Amelia broke the news to me. “Dad, Nate’s gay. Austin is his boyfriend.” She said that so matter-of-factly that I thought that she had to be joking. She was like that a lot of times. She had a wry sense of humor that was remarkably well-developed for somebody who was only 9 years old.
“What are you talking about? He’s 11.”
Amelia shrugged. “So what? I have a gay kid in my fourth grade class. You don’t think that kids are gay at Nate’s age?” She snorted. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, dad.”
I nodded my head. It was all making sense. I wondered how long Nate had been struggling with this. Maybe his being gay was the reason why he had been so depressed for so long? I thought, all along, that it was some kind of chemical imbalance and that he had clinical depression. That wouldn’t have been out of the realm of probability, as Sarah always showed signs of mental illness, including depression, throughout our marriage. I just figured that Nate got Sarah’s bad genes.
But if he was gay and was struggling with it…
“How do you know Nate’s gay?”
Amelia got up from the dinner table, took her plate into the kitchen, and then sat back down at the dining room table. “I heard Nate talking to Austin on the phone. I can tell.”
“What do you mean, you can tell?” I asked her. She was being too vague for my taste.
“I can just tell, that’s all, dad,” Amelia said. “Can I be excused? I got homework to do.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Where’s Nate right now?”
Until Proven Guilty Page 13
