“I’m so sorry, Doctors.” Olivia was flushed as she tried to bar the detectives from entering.
“Oh for crissakes.” Austin waved Olivia away. “Call our lawyer. He should still be in the building. This is definitely harassment. We’ll have your jobs.”
Jake, Frank and Sam entered and waited for the receptionist to close the door. Jake placed a copy of the college newspaper on the desk. It was folded to a photo of Austin, Matt, and one other person. “What can you tell us about Gary Staples?”
“Who?” The two men leaned closer to the desk. “Hell. I haven’t seen him since college,” Matt said.
“I remember him. He was one of those hangers on. Always wanted to be with the in crowd. Followed us around like a lost puppy.” Austin shoved the newspaper aside. “He just didn’t fit in.”
“And you didn’t include him, I bet.” Sam didn’t have to think long and hard about life on the outside. “He wasn’t from a rich family, wasn’t the right image. And his size. Wow. Bet you were embarrassed to be seen around him.”
“He was in our fraternity but he was a nuisance, too. Don’t profess to know what we had to deal with. It isn’t easy being from a well-known family.” Austin glared when Frank barked out a laugh. “Hey, people took advantage of us, claimed to know us, try to make reservations or buy tickets using our name or just by mentioning our names. Can’t tell you the number of times someone ran a key along the side of my Beemer.”
“Poor baby.” Sam didn’t have one ounce of sympathy for these two. She placed a photo on the desk of Gary Staples after Beast had applied his handiwork. “Have you seen him hanging around?”
They each shrugged, a mirror image of each other. Matt asked, “Who is he?”
“Same guy,” Jake said. “Gary Staples minus a ton of weight.”
“You’re kidding.” Matt picked up the photo and studied it. “I’ll be damned.”
Austin blinked slowly, his silence speaking volumes. Jake said, “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“What?” Matt swiveled his gaze to his partner. “What does he mean?”
Austin shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away from the desk. He didn’t reply for several seconds, preferring to find something more interesting outside on the back lawn. He finally turned back to the desk. “He came to see me last year, just after we announced that we had sold our first franchises. He wanted in on the deal.”
“Where did he get the money to buy a franchise?” Matt asked.
“Oh, no. Gary didn’t want a franchise. He wanted to be a full partner in the business. Said we wouldn’t be where we were if it weren’t for him. I threw him out. Told him we weren’t looking for a partner and everything we had we built on our own.”
There was a knock on the door and then Mister Esquire in a three-piece suit pushed his way in. “All talking stops right now.” Edmund Einhorn slammed a leather briefcase on the desk and snapped it open. Frank didn’t notice the intrusion. He was too busy studying the lawyer’s threads and the Corinthian leather briefcase. Sam pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Your clients are helping us figure out who has been framing them for murder,” Sam announced.
“We are?” Matt snapped his mouth shut and looked at his attorney.
“Explain.” Einhorn rummaged through his briefcase and finally found a gold pen and notepad. He took a seat in one of the barrel chairs by the desk.
Jake condensed the conversation thus far for Einhorn’s benefit. He nodded toward the photo of a slimmed-down Gary Staples. “Sam saw Gary Staples the other day in a grocery store. She didn’t realize who he was until Miss Williams, a former professor, identified him in the college newspaper. Sam had one of our computer technicians do a composite of Staples trimmed down. However, we have been unable to locate him either through IRS or DMV records.”
“And you think my clients have something to do with his disappearance.” Einhorn raised his hand when Austin opened his mouth to speak. “Don’t say anything.” He turned to the detectives. “Unless you have proof, this conversation is over.”
“On the contrary,” Sam said. “I’m not accusing them of anything. We need their help with the killer’s M.O.”
“Killer? I don’t understand.”
Jake reminded the attorney about the four deaths and the recent attempt on Tamara’s life. “We have reason to believe Gary Staples targeted patients…”
“Clients,” Matt and Austin said in unison.
“Clients of Morning Glory in order to discredit them,” Jake continued. “The first death occurred a year ago, around the time Austin turned down Gary’s plea to be a partner in the business. When her body wasn’t found for six months and progress wasn’t made on her case, he started targeting other clients of yours.”
“What we can’t figure out,” Sam said, picking up the thread of the conversation, “is how he is able to, Number One, convince someone to commit suicide, and, Number Two, delay it until he calls them with some trigger word. I think that word is destiny. It is the one word Tamara Rios said after she walked in front of a bus last night. If it weren’t for Jake and Frank pulling her out of the way, she would have been hit full force. She doesn’t appear to have any serious injuries but the doctors say she is catatonic. I say she’s still under Gary’s influence. If Gary somehow programmed her to commit suicide, she may try again. You two need to de-program her, pro bono. The girl can’t afford your steep prices on her salary.”
“Wait. How can you be so sure all of these deaths are connected?” Austin asked.
Jake glanced briefly at Sam. His logic was beginning to waver but to try to explain how Sam gathered her information was still something he did not care to share. “It is still an ongoing investigation. The only common thread is that each of the victims received a phone call prior to committing suicide. Each call lasted just four seconds, all from a disposable phone so we couldn’t I.D. the caller. Sam happened to encounter Gary Staples in a store. We ran his prints but he’s not in the system. So if the doctors here aren’t responsible then it has to be someone who is framing them.”
“Is it easy to make someone forget the hypnotic suggestion as well as who did the hypnotizing?” Frank asked. “And to even wait months before implementing the call. You would think a victim would remember talking to someone, wouldn’t you?”
Sam thought back to her dream, of the man on the walking path in the park, the car key clicker, the bottle of water. “Drugs.” Sam looked at each of the doctors. “Why not a date rape drug, something where the victim doesn’t remember anything that happened yet they are pliant enough for Staples to hypnotize and plant a one word trigger. Is that possible?”
Matt and Austin each slowly took a seat, Austin behind his desk, and Matt in a barrel chair next to his attorney. “I must warn you,” Einhorn started.
“It’s okay.” Matt shut him down with a wave of a hand. “Rohypnol is the date rape drug, but the effect might be a little more, shall we say excited, than someone would want, if you wanted the victim to be pliant. Revitrol is a knock-off version. It has the same effects but isn’t available here in the U.S.”
“What about Midazolam Hydrochloride or Versed?” Austin suggested. “It’s a powerful sedative/hypnotic in the same family as Rohypnol. Gary, for all of his failings, was a genius, a straight A student. He could have finished college and grad school together in three years if he wanted to.”
“Gentlemen,” Einhorn cautioned, “you are giving the police all the ammunition they need to arrest you just by admitting you know about these drugs.”
“Oh for crissake, Edmund.” Matt glared at his attorney. “We’re doctors. Of course we are going to know a lot about drugs. We have clients who are dead and someone is trying to shut us down.”
Einhorn checked his watch, but Sam wasn’t quite done with the doctors. “What did Gary have on you at college?”
“What do you mean?” Einhorn asked.
Sam told them about Viola Williams and how the grades had been changed. “She lost her job.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“What difference does it make now?” Austin told his attorney. “Yes, Gary taught us about hypnosis but we never used it anywhere but at parties. Gary came to us after Miss Williams was fired. Said he changed our grade for us, did us a favor. Now we owed him. We never asked him to do that.”
“But you never came forward so Viola wouldn’t lose her job.”
“Gary said if we told anyone what he had done he would say we were in on it. That would have been hard to deny since there were witnesses that we had visited Miss Williams and people knew we were pretty good with hypnosis.”
“But nowhere near as good as Gary,” Matt added. “We tried to distance ourselves from him. Once we graduated, we never saw him again.”
“Until last year.” Austin shook his head as he studied Gary’s photo. “So Gary picked our clients in order to point the finger at us and ruin our business?”
Jake said, “We think he kept trying to point the police in your direction. Even the argument you had with the waitress at Bailey’s. He was there and witnessed it. It’s possible he killed her hoping witnesses would remember your altercation with her making you the likely suspect.”
“But she didn’t commit suicide,” Austin pointed out.
“Maybe his hypnosis didn’t work on her. There weren’t any drugs in her system,” Frank started.
Matt waved him off. “Drugs were never Gary’s forte. His hypnosis was effective enough to not only plant the suggestion but make them forget whatever he wanted them to forget.” He remained silent for several seconds, his hand raised as though signaling a waiter. He turned to Austin and said, “Remember how Gary used a gimmick to verify his subjects were under? He would give them a glass of water and told them it was ice cold. One idiot gulped it down and scalded his mouth.”
“Yeah, I remember. How about the time he gave that one girl a jalapeno pepper and told her it was a dill pickle. She ate the whole damn thing, then had to go to the emergency room.” Matt turned to the detectives. “It was Gary’s way of verifying his guinea pigs weren’t faking it. He was very effective that way.”
“Wow,” was all Austin could say as the intensity of Gary’s revenge hit him. “Then the body at the golf course, that was Gary’s doing? To involve my father just to get the finger pointing at me?”
“What else would he use?” Sam asked, thinking back to the remote key Gary used. “I remember hearing a continuous clicking sound, like a metronome. When I saw him in the grocery store, he was using his key fob, clicking it in and out in a rhythm. I thought it was a nervous habit.” Sam didn’t want to mention that she also heard and saw it in her dreams.
“Yes. Gary was big on repetitive sounds,” Matt replied. “Although all anyone needed to see were his eyes. I swear sometimes the guy never blinked. Do you really believe he’s still in town?”
“We’re pretty sure.” Jake stood and grabbed the paper and photo from the desk. “He’s clever and he’s dangerous. And right now we don’t know who his next victim is.”