Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(8)

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and her eyes began to fill with tears.

“Please, I know this wasn’t your fault. I’ve done a lot of research, and I know you did everything you could do. There are some things that I have to know, though. I’m not going to do anything rash, but if my suspicions are true, I’m going to do everything in my power to see to it that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

“You’re talking about Dr. Fraturra.”

I nodded. “I know you said you haven’t been here long, but what can you tell me about him?”

“He has problems,” Jenny said.

“What kind of problems?”

“Substance abuse. Drugs and alcohol. And from everything I’ve heard, he’s an insufferable womanizer.”

“Has anything like this happened before that you know of?”

“Like what? A mother and baby dying because he was out drinking? No, I don’t think anything like that has happened before. But he’s been late before, he’s had other doctors in his group cover for him, he’s come in smelling of alcohol.”

“You’ve witnessed all these things firsthand?”

“Just a couple of times. He came in smelling like booze three weeks ago and then last week with your girlfriend. But the other nurses talk about him a lot. They hate him.”

“The day we were there, you said you paged him. How many times?”

“Three. I paged him when I was first made aware that you were on your way to the hospital. I paged him again about fifteen minutes later because I hadn’t heard anything back from him. I paged him again after I got Grace into the room and the monitors hooked up. And then I called him.”

“You called him? Did you talk to him?”

“No. It went to voice mail.”

“Did you leave him a message?”

“I did. I told him he had a patient who was within a half hour or so of giving birth. Then I called him again when the baby’s heart rate first started to drop.”

“Why does he still have a medical license?” I said. “Why is he still working if he does these kinds of things? Dr. Jenkins seems like a good man. Why would he put up with it?”

“My understanding is that Dr. Jenkins keeps him on because Dr. Fraturra’s father was Dr. Jenkins’s best friend. They started the medical group together. A few years back, Dr. Fraturra’s father died of pancreatic cancer, but before he died, he asked Dr. Jenkins to take care of his son. He knew his son was having problems. Dr. Fraturra was also married to Dr. Jenkins’s daughter, but she divorced him a couple of years ago. They have a five-year-old boy who is severely autistic. It’s complicated, to say the least. I think Dr. Jenkins is just trying to do the right thing by everyone, but Dr. Fraturra keeps getting worse and worse. From what everyone is saying, there could be some real problems over what happened to your girlfriend and your daughter.”

“Do you by any chance know what bars he hangs out in? Does he have a favorite that you know of?”

“I’ve heard a couple of nurses say you can find him at the Portal two or three times a week. I’ve also heard them mention Spanky’s.”

I’d heard of both bars. Spanky’s was a meat market in the Old City, frequented mostly by upperclassmen and graduate students at the University of Tennessee. The Portal was a high-end bar and restaurant in Turkey Creek.

I looked at Jenny and reached out my hand. She took it, and I squeezed and shook her hand gently.

“Thank you for talking with me,” I said.

“What are you going to do, if you don’t mind my asking? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but when you and Dr. Fraturra were talking in Grace’s room, when it got really tense, I thought I heard you threaten him.”

“I don’t really remember what I said to him,” I lied, “but I don’t think I threatened him. If I did, it was an empty threat. I’m not a violent person. I am a lawyer, though, and I think Grace and Jasmine—that was the baby’s name—deserve some justice. I’m going to talk to the district attorney general and try to have Dr. Fraturra arrested.”

“Arrested? For what?”

“Reckless homicide. Maybe criminally negligent homicide.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Reckless is a little worse. I think drinking while you’re on call, ignoring pages and telephone calls and messages from the hospital, and finally showing up drunk is reckless behavior, especially when a woman and a baby die because of it. I think he deserves to be punished.”

“So he could go to jail?”

“I hope so,” I said. “That seems like a more just outcome to me than an insurance company having to pay out a bunch of money.”

Just outcome, I thought. Here I was, the killer of four men, talking about “just outcomes.” But justice, to me, had become nothing more than a hypocrite’s word. Justice was a prettied-up term for revenge.

“Speaking of money, Jenny, do you happen to know what kind of car he drives? Guy like that probably drives something flashy and expensive.”

“Why would you want to know what kind of car he drives?”

“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”

“It’s one of the flashiest cars I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Brand-new Porsche 911 Cabriolet. I’ve heard him brag about it to other doctors. It’s some kind of turbo something or other. He said it cost him more than two hundred thousand dollars.”