The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(95)

“You ready?” I asked my erstwhile surgical assistant for that day.

“Let’s save an eyeball,” Mickie said.

We were lucky. We did not need to remove the lens, and there was minimal scar tissue. We finished the surgery in just over an hour. As we stripped from our surgical gear, Mickie gave me a wink. “Nice work, Dr. Hill.”

I removed my surgical hat as I entered the waiting room, where Trina Crouch sat, looking worn and tired. “She did great,” I said. “I’m very optimistic she’ll recover full vision.”

Crouch burst into tears. After a moment, she took my hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what to say. I wish you would let me pay you something.”

“That isn’t necessary,” I said. Mickie and I had donated our time, and the hospital administrator at Mercy cut the cost of the operating room and the instruments as much as she could.

Trina pulled an envelope from her purse. “It’s a thank-you card, for the person who paid the hospital bill.”

I’d told Trina that Daniela’s benefactor wished to remain anonymous. “I’ll be certain he gets it,” I said.

Ernie had insisted on paying. He’d helped his father grow Cantwell Computers exponentially, and he had become a wealthy man in the process. He said there were new opportunities on the horizon, something about a new platform that would allow people to view pages on a computer like pages in a book, one hidden behind the other, as well as other technology that would someday allow us to send information from computers on our desks to other computers around the world. To me it continued to sound like a Star Trek fantasy, but then I’d never thought I’d be able to put a phone in my car, either.

“Would you like to see her?” I asked. “She’s coming out of sedation, so she’ll be groggy, but I think she’ll feel better having her mommy in the room.”

When Trina stepped into the recovery room, Daniela’s head was swathed in bandages, and her eye was covered with a protective cup and gauze. It was heartless of me, I knew, but it was an image I wanted burned into Trina Crouch’s own retina so that it would hopefully never again come to fruition. She held Daniela’s hand and kissed the bandages around her forehead. There was not a dry eye in the room.

Later that afternoon, Trina sat in a chair in Daniela’s room, sipping a Diet Coke, and we talked while Daniela slept. Trina looked at me and said the words I needed to hear. “I’m ready to end this. I don’t ever want to see my daughter like this again.”





9

Concerned David Bateman was stalking his ex-wife, I arranged for a meeting at my office to make it appear to be a normal follow-up. Mickie and Dr. Pat LeBaron, the emergency room doctor who had initially treated Daniela, sat in the conference room, along with Merilee Montoya from the San Mateo County Department of Justice’s domestic violence unit. Ernie’s father had arranged for her to be present. Montoya was a petite Hispanic woman with gray hair, the gravelly voice of a smoker, and a no-nonsense demeanor.

Once seated, I began by expressing my suspicion. “The medical evidence, in my opinion, does not comport with a blow to the head from a bike accident,” I said. “The incidents of detached retinas in children this young are rare.”

“But it does happen?” Montoya asked.

“In rare incidents, but the emergency room injuries also do not substantiate that Daniela fell from her bike.”

“Which were what?” Montoya asked.

LeBaron passed out her emergency room report. “Minor scratches. Some healed. I would have expected far more than a scrape on the knee if Daniela sustained a blow to the head of sufficient force to cause this type of injury.”

“But you can’t say definitively that he hit her,” Montoya said.

“No,” LeBaron and I said in unison.

Montoya’s brow furrowed.

Trina, who had largely kept her gaze on the conference room table, raised her eyes. “Daniela can,” she said.

This caught everyone’s attention.

A tear trickled from the corner of Trina’s eye, and I again became concerned she might back out, but the floodgates opened, and the words came in a rush. “She says her daddy hits her.”

After a moment for Trina to compose herself, Montoya said, “But you’ve never reported any prior incidents of abuse—is that correct?”

“Would you have?” Mickie asked.

Montoya raised a hand. “I’m not judging. I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying and what you’re not saying,” Mickie said. “Everyone in the room knows it. Her husband’s a psychopath, and he’s a cop. Who was she going to report it to?”

“He’ll deny it,” Montoya said.

“Don’t they all?” Mickie asked.

“It makes a more difficult case, and these cases can be difficult enough as it is. Without corroborating, contemporaneous evidence, it’s her word against his,” Montoya said, and I began to understand why child abuse cases were so difficult to prosecute.

“I kept a journal,” Trina said.

Montoya sat up. “What type of journal?”

“A calendar. I wrote the days Daniela visited her father and the injuries she came home with. There was also an incident in which she broke her arm. He said she fell from a swing at the playground, but Daniela said he never took her to the playground. I took her to the hospital.”