Chapter 11 #2
“We’ve had cases like this before, probably not at this level.
You wouldn’t believe the people who practice without the benefit of medical school, let alone a license.
That’s probably not the case with this guy, with such a successful high-end practice.
It sounds like he may have bought a load of counterfeit products and didn’t know it, and now they’re coming back to haunt him.
The silicone issue is another story, if it’s not cleared by the FDA.
If he didn’t have the women sign a release, I hope he’s got great malpractice insurance.
The fake diplomas are fraud, of course. I’d like to get a background on him so we know what we’re dealing with.
Some people just think they’re above the law.
And I wonder if he got himself in trouble of some kind in Florida.
Send me the file digitally, and I’ll get the ball rolling from here.
We probably won’t get much over the weekend.
I’ll let you know if we do. Otherwise, I’ll call you when we’ve got something.
Let’s find out what Dr. Alexander Addison the Fourth has been up to,” he said, and Jason liked the sound of him.
Dan Kelly was taking the matter seriously, and he hadn’t even seen the horrifying photographs of the women yet.
He didn’t know if his victims had sent their letters and photographs to the police, as they had threatened to do.
Jason left his office at six and got home minutes after Billie returned from her meeting with her sister. She looked shaken and he could see that something was wrong.
“Hard day at work?” he asked her. She took it to heart sometimes when they had bad news for the doctors to deliver to their patients. There was a story behind each one, and a real live human being.
“I just had a drink with Mickie,” she said quietly.
“Oh? How was that?”
“I didn’t give away any secrets. I just said that I’d been hearing things about Alex and I’m concerned.
She went nuts and accused me of being jealous of her.
She said someone is considering investing twenty-five million dollars in his practice.
She told me to stay out of her life. She hasn’t changed a bit.
Same old Mickie. I don’t know why I thought it would be different with her this time.
She’s vicious when you get in her way. She doesn’t want anything interfering with her life with Alex. ”
“I think you ought to steer clear for a while. Things could get messy,” Jason said carefully.
“We turned the investigation over to the police today. We need their help. It’s in the hands of the fraud unit now.
They’ll do a national search on Addison.
They’re very efficient.” He was sorry that Billie’s sister had beaten her up, although it didn’t surprise him.
There was something about her that affected him viscerally.
Mickie was young, but he had the sense that she was a bad person, somewhere deep inside her, there was something evil lurking.
Billie was so innocent she didn’t see it, or maybe she did but didn’t want to believe it.
They made dinner and streamed a movie and went to bed early, and had a quiet weekend. Jason wondered how soon the police would get back to him and Joe, and what they’d come up with. His instincts told him that there was a lot more to Alexander Addison than they knew so far.
Mickie and Alex spent the weekend talking about their dinner with the investors from Hong Kong, and how to make their concept work.
The scale was so large that Alex couldn’t see how to do it yet, but he wanted their money.
Mickie was more enthusiastic about Hong Kong than he was, but he was determined to find a way.
They drove to Santa Barbara on Saturday and spent a night at the Biltmore.
On Sunday, they went to the pool at the Coral Casino, and came back to L.A.
that night. They’d been talking about the Chinese investors all weekend.
Mickie paid no attention to what her sister had told her when they met at the Bel Air Hotel on Friday.
She didn’t care what she thought. Alex was a brilliant doctor, and he had a booming business, and a fantastic future ahead of him.
He took good care of her, and she was convinced that Billie was jealous.
Mickie didn’t need Billie anymore. She wasn’t fourteen years old now.
She didn’t need her help. She could fend for herself.
She had exactly the life she wanted with Alex, and she wasn’t going to let anyone interfere with that, least of all her pathetic sister and her pompous, judgmental boyfriend.
They meant nothing to her. Alex was the main event in her life now.
The only event. And if he could figure out how to do it, he had twenty-five million dollars coming his way from Hong Kong, and maybe more.
Mickie planned to be right there with him when he got it.
She wasn’t going to let Billie change that or rob her of the opportunity by lying about Alex.
She didn’t even care if some of the rumors were true about him.
He was making a fortune, with a bigger one in his future. That was all she cared about.
On Monday, life went back to normal. Alex saw patients and Mickie went shopping.
Billie went to work and tried not to think about her sister and the things she had said.
Jason had an article to write. Alex was obsessing about Hong Kong, and he had put the five ugly letters in his locked desk out of his mind.
He had convinced himself that the women who had written them weren’t going to do anything about it.
Nothing could stop him from the success he deserved.
They were nobodies and didn’t matter, as far as he was concerned.
And those women were no great beauties to start with, in his opinion.
They had no right to impede his progress.
On Tuesday morning, Lt. Dan Kelly sent Jason a text and asked him if he was free to come and see him at eleven. Jason said he’d be there, and Kelly sent him the codes to get into the building.
He arrived on time, in the midst of the chaos of the fraud unit, and was led to the lieutenant’s office by a female detective. Kelly stood to greet him. He was a big man, and he thanked Jason for coming.
“Of course. I take it you have some news of the doctor,” Jason said. There was a long printout on Kelly’s desk amid stacks of papers and files, and Dan Kelly looked serious as he waved Jason to the chair across from him.