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He eyed her skeptically, finally walking to the back door and opening it.“You be careful, too.”
She watched him pass back through the back door and knew she should have walked him out. But as badly as she didn’t want him to leave, she knew it would just make everything so much harder. So she sat back down in the glider and started to think carefully about how she could help. The idea was already there; it had come out of nowhere, almost as a joking thought while Jack had been on the phone with the judge.
She thought it might just work. She was just going to have to think outside of the box. And now, without a job to actually care about losing, she found that she was willing to take a risk.
CHAPTERSEVEN
The judge declining his request for the medical records was a terrible way to start the day, but at least he’d have the patient list to work from. And he already knew that could go either one of two ways: he’d be done in about an hour and have no connections or leads, or it could have the potential to blow up his day.
For Jack, the thought of just staying at Rachel’s house for the rest of the day was too alluring. He could make calls and receive emails fromhere, comparing patient lists. He could stay here and do all of those things until he absolutely had to get moving. Of course, that would not only be unprofessional but unproductive as well. So he’d looked past that tempting urge and pretty muchforcedhimself back through her house, out the front door, and into his car.
Because he had a bit of time to wait before the judge or the hospital sent over Dr. Leery’s patient list, he drove to the field office. He figured it wouldn't hurt for Anderson to know he'd been in the building at some point during the day. Plus, it would just be much more helpful to have the bureau’s database at his fingertips if the two doctors’ lists ended up providing a match.
He thought Rachel and the capacity she thought she might be able to help. He wasn’t worried about it, but he thought it over a great deal about it as he parked in his usual spot and made his way into the building to his office. What sort of help would she be able to provide, if any? He wondered if she had accumulated a few shady contacts during her time as an agent—maybe even a few people from on the inside. Would she be able to make a few calls and get him the medical records he needed? Or would her recent familiarity with hospitals and doctor’s offices pay off somehow? What sort of pan might she have up her sleeve?
He'd worked with her for long enough to know that she was always full of surprises, and though he hoped she didn't endanger herself or cause any unnecessary trouble, he found that he was fascinated to see what she thought she could come up with.
As he waited for Doctor Leery's list to come through, he checked his email to see if there were any updates on the white van case. There was some chatter back and forth, and it seemed the team now had two suspects they were heavily pressing on. No one was in custody yet, but it looked like things were rolling along nicely.
He had just sat down with a cup of coffee when the email from the judge’s secretary finally came through. There was no message at all, just an attached PDF document. He opened it up and found a list of patients on the dates on which they'd been seen at Leery's office over the past eight months. He printed the list out and brought it to his desk, setting it beside the lists of Matthews’ patients he had taken from the hospital last night.
It was clear to see from a single glance that Matthews was the more popular of the two doctors. In an eight-month window of time, he had seen nearly double the number of patients as Leery. This made some sense to Jack, though. Matthews, after all, worked in Richmond’s largest hospital. Leery, on the other hand, worked at a sizable private practice that specialized in family medicine and cardiology.
Because there were so many names on Matthews’s list, the side-by-side comparison took a bit longer than Jack had anticipated. After roughly twenty minutes, though, he had circled five different names—three males and two females. Knowing nothing about their medical records or histories, he was unable to draw any other conclusions from them.
Armed with those five names, Jack then ran a bureau database search on each one. There was only a criminal history for one of the names—one of the men, named Harry Jansen, which, on its face, seemed like a strong enough bit of proof to go after him. But the fact that there were four other names that didn’t show up made him uncertain. He opened up another database and ran a more basic search, needing just staple information on the other four. He knew it would take a few minutes for accurate results to come back, so he spent that time looking over the FBI’s file on the one for sure hit.
Harry Jansen’s criminal record was brief but interesting. There were three dings on it, but they were impressive. Eleven years ago, at the age of thirty-five, he’d been arrested for his involvement in a protest and small riot pertaining to a Second Amendment rally where a few people had been badly beaten. He’d gotten out on bail just three days later.
The second hit to his record came from just two years ago. His license had been suspended when he failed to pull over when an officer had pulled up behind him, flashing sirens and lights. Jensen drove on for two more miles, finally pulling over and revealing that he was drunk beyond belief. His blood alcohol level was at a .18 when he was forced to take a breathalyzer. He spent a week in jail for the offense.
None of these dings indicated a man filled with enough rage to kill doctors in a brutal fashion. But as it stood, he was the only real lead he had. But it was the third ding on this record that made Jack sit up a bit straighter and take notice. Last year, the police had been called to the hospital where Jensen was being seen for a follow-up (the records didn’t indicate what the follow-up was for). During the treatment, he had a terrible panic attack or paranoid frenzy (again, the report didn’t say which) and lashed out violently. A nurse was punched in the face, and another was about two inches shy of having a syringe plunged into her face.
There were no repercussions for this, as no one pressed charges. Jensen did spend forty-right hours under psychiatric observation afterward, though.
“Well, there you go,” Jack said, suddenly finding Harry Jensen to be much more along the lines of what he was looking for.
As he ran a quick search for a current address and phone number for Jensen, he checked his other search. Of the four other names, he got matches for two of them: Nancy Algiers, aged seventy-nine, and Robert Fenix, aged forty-four. Neither were in the criminal database, but for now, this small link would have to do. It was odd not to get hits on the other two, but at least he now had three names to go by. Honestly, probably just two because he didn’t see how a seventy-nine-year-old woman would be capable of killing a man with such viciousness.
He sent an email down to Records with the names of the other two matches from the lists, asking for help trying to dig up information on them. To not find a match in any database was rare, but itdidhappen. There were several reasons, all varied and unique. With the email sent, Jack then went back to the address and phone number to search for his first hit of interest, Harry Jensen.
As he dug through all of this, he was once again reminded of how incomplete everything felt without Rachel around. She somehow even made it so that sifting through records and databases wasn’t unbearable. He currently felt like he was just slogging through it all, chugging down his coffee and trying to stay motivated while sitting behind a laptop.
However, with an address for Harry Jensen, he at least had somewhere to go. His home address was listed as Chesterfield, a twenty-minute drive, and his work location was on Broad Street. He figured it was just early enough in the day for people not to yet have left for work. He’d go by Jensen’s home first and then try his work if he wasn’t there.
It wasn’t a hot trail for a smoking gun by any means, but at least he was moving. And with a morning that had started off with a judge’s refusal for records, he’d take what he could get. Hell, if Rachel had been with him, he may even be somewhat excited at the prospect of going after what now looked to be a promising lead.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Harry Jensen’s house was a small, quaint two-story dwelling in a lackluster neighborhood. Like a lot of the neighborhoods in the area, the entire street looked like it had been stuck in time somewhere in the late 1980s. White homes were coated in light layers of dust and grime, and the yards, though mostly well-maintained, showed signs of overgrowth and wear. Jensen’s was painted a lazy shade of brown, sticking out sorely among his white and beige neighbors.
The porch was little more than a concrete slab with black iron rails and a slanted overhang. Still, with two wicker chairs out front, and ferns hanging from posts along the ceiling, it was quite pleasant. There was one car in the cracked, cement driveway, a good indication that Jensen was home.
Jack knocked on the front door, which was adorned with a decorative wreath of golden and orange flowers. He heard footsteps right away, approaching quickly. When the door opened, Jack found himself looking at a woman of roughly forty years of age. Her dark hair hung limply around her face, and her dark eyes seemed to swim behind her eyeglasses.
“Yes?” she asked. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m looking for A Mr. Harry Jensen.”
