The Doctor is Out

Part One

By

UCSBdad

Disclaimer: Really? You think I own Castle? Rating: T Time: The future.

The door to the elevator opened and Rick Castle found himself facing his wife and her two lead detectives, Ryan and Esposito. "This must be my lucky day. I missed all the boring paperwork and it looks like you three are headed out for a murder."

Kate smiled and took his hand. "Babe, let's go to my office." She nodded to Ryan and Espo. "We'll meet you there."

Once in her office she stroked his face. "I love you more than anything. I love you more than I ever thought I could love. You know that, right?"

He nodded, looking serious. "I do, but now you're starting to worry me."

She bit her lip. "There's been a murder at St. Jerome's Hospital. According to the uniforms, the main suspect is a Dr. Josh Davidson."

"And you're going to investigate this personally because…?" Castle asked, still a bit worried.

"Josh did save my life, and for a while he was important to me. Even then, he wasn't as important as you were, but I wouldn't let myself act on that. If he's guilty, I want to make sure that everyone sees that I was completely impartial and professional in the investigation. If he's innocent, I'm the best one to prove it. Are you okay with this?"

"You know I've always been massively jealous of every man who's ever shown the slightest interest in you, or that you've ever shown the slightest interest in."

"Every man?" Kate said, raising an eyebrow.

"The pimply faced kid at the coffee shop who smiles at you when we go in will never know how close I've come to beating him to a pulp."

Kate looked at Castle seriously. "Josh was very jealous of you, you know."

Castle shook his head, puzzled. "Jealous of me? He was your boyfriend, not me."

"Sure, but whenever we talked about my day, your name always came up. "We talked to the witness and Castle asked this or Castle noticed that when we ran the vic's financials." And the publicity we got didn't help either. Josh's colleagues started teasing him that his girlfriend was openly sleeping with author Rick Castle. Before we went to LA, Josh and I had a big fight. He wanted me to kick you to the curb."

"He didn't know you at all, did he? You'd never cheat."

Kate laughed. "Can you control yourself on this?"

"I can do anything for you."

"I'm going to hold you to that."

Castle winked. "I'll hold you to something, too."

Because of a string of unrelated traffic accidents, Ryan and Esposito arrived at the hospital some five minutes after Lanie and only a few seconds before Castle and Beckett. As Beckett walked rapidly ahead with Ryan, Esposito slowed Castle down.

"You okay with this, bro?"

"Espo, she's married to me. I'm married to her. We're married to each other. Okay, I admit I was jealous when they were, you know, together, but I'm fine now."

Once inside the hospital they headed for the emergency room, where the murder had occurred.

"What do you have for me, Lanie?"

The ME pointed to a body lying on a gurney in one of the curtained off ER rooms. "Dr. Edward Gregg, age thirty eight, works here in the ER. Came in at midnight last night and was found dead at 5:09 by nurse Jessica Knowles. A painfully thin African-American woman raised her hand. "That's me."

"Where was he found?" Kate asked.

"Room F. All the way at the end. Mrs. Gomez is there. She was brought in unresponsive earlier. Heart failure. She was declared DOA. We were going to send her down to the hospital morgue, but we got busy and it slipped our minds I guess."

"Cause of death?" Kate asked.

"Scalpel in the back." Lanie replied. "Right between the T1 and T2 vertebrae and severed the spinal cord. He was dead before he hit the floor. And we have nothing but suspects who know how to use a scalpel and the best place to kill someone with one."

"I object to that!" Said a new voice. "There is absolutely no evidence that any of my staff are involved."

Kate looked over the speaker. Tall, portly, but well dressed and manicured, with a growing bald spot he was trying to hide. "And you are?"

"James Brecon, the administrator of St. Jerome's. I resent such unfounded accusations. I intend to see to it that the reputation of my hospital remains unblemished."

Kate smiled coldly. "Are you alleging that these people do not know how to use a scalpel, or that they wouldn't know how to find the upper thoracic spine?"

"Of course not." Brecon barked. Then reconsidered. "I mean, you have no evidence that any of my people are involved."

"That's why we call such people suspects, Mr. Brecon, and were you here during the time of the murder?"

"Of course not. I was at home. I just arrived and was told of this awful….incident. I rushed right to the ER."

"Then if you have no information on this case, I'd appreciate it if you'd stay out of our way."

"Are you telling me to stay out of my own ER?" Brecon said angrily.

"Of course not. Just don't interfere with the investigation." Kate turned to the uniforms who had been the first on the scene. "Were these other people all here when you arrived?" Both cops nodded. She turned to the doctors and nurses. "How about your patients? Could any of them have killed Dr. Gregg?"

Josh answered. "Mrs. Gomez was dead. Mr. Pierce was beaten up in a bar fight and was sedated at the time. He was too far out of it to have stabbed anyone. Jerry Kinman is twelve. Fell off of the back of his idiot brother's motorcycle. His injuries and size would have precluded him being the killer and I doubt he knows what a thoracic spine is. Mr. Johansson had a fractured skull from an auto accident and was on his way to X-ray with Grom, the orderly, while Gregg was standing here. That's it."

Kate nodded. "You were all here then at the time of the murder. Introduce yourselves."

"Dr. Jerry Breen. I'm an intern."

Breen was good looking and apparently knew it. He was doing his best to make eye contact with Kate.

"Sylvia Davies, ER nurse." She was a stocky brunette in her late thirties. Kate noted she seemed to have the upper body strength to plunge a scalpel into someone's back.

"Master Sergeant Charles Kane, US Army."

"What are you doing here, sergeant?" Kate was very curious about this.

"I'm a Special Forces medic. I got training here a couple of years ago on treating trauma patients. I know Drs. Gregg and Davidson from the Sahel, that's the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, ma'am…."

"I know what the Sahel is." Kate said.

"War is God's way of teaching geography to Americans: Ambrose Bierce." Castle said. "But Mark Twain said something like that as well."

"Yes, sir." Kane said drily. "Anyway, a group of doctors and nurses from St. Jerome's, St. Paul's and St. Michael's had volunteered for Doctors Without Borders. I was asked to come and share my expertise in trauma care, ma'am."

"I'd think a New York ER would have lots of experience with gunshot wounds." Kate said.

"Most of what you get here are low velocity pistol or submachine gun wounds and the occasional shotgun. In Africa they'd be dealing with higher velocity AK 47 rounds, rifle rounds, machine gun, and mortar wounds. Not to mention mines and IEDs. They do a hell of a lot more damage than what they see here. Plus a little explanation of local customs and beliefs always helps. You'd be surprised how many male western doctors just can't get it through their heads that they can't examine a Muslim woman. Ever."

Kate turned to the next doctor. "Dr. Ralf Semmes." He said. Semmes was thin and older than the other doctors and seemed to be more tired. Kate wondered how he managed the strain of ER work.

"Janet Hayes, ER nurse." Hayes was a bottle blonde. Kate could clearly see her dark roots. Her scrubs were tighter than they should have been for comfort and her shirt was cut much lower than the usual nurses' scrubs, showing of a spectacular cleavage.

"Josie Anderson, ER nurse." Anderson appeared to be of African American and Asian descent with darks skin and a pronounced epicanthic eye fold. She was strikingly pretty, but seemed to hold herself aloof from the rest.

"Peter Grom, orderly. But as they said, I had left when Dr. Gregg was still….Um, here." Grow was tall, slender and pretty obviously didn't want to have anything to do with the murder investigation. Kate wondered if that was because he had something to hide, or not.

"I see you have security cameras. We'll need to see the video."

Brecon cleared his throat. "There's a problem." He stopped and stared at his feet.

"A problem?" Kate asked coldly.

"We had some work done and the contractor….accidentally cut the power to the cameras everywhere but reception and the nurses' station."

"Do you have those?" She asked the uniform.

"Officer Lebowski, Captain. We got those." The senior uniform spoke up. "Dr. Gregg went out of the camera's range at 4:39 and was found dead at 5:09. In that time frame only Sergeant Kane was on camera the whole time. Nurse Anderson was on camera for all but about five minutes. Mr. Grom left at…"

"Thanks, Lebowski. I'll get their statements."

"Yes, Captain."

Kate nodded. "Sergeant Kane, if you don't mind, I'd like to talk to you first. Can I use that office?" Without bothering to get an answer, Kate headed for the small office off the main ER. The sergeant followed.

"I saw Dr. Davidson glaring at you several times. Is there something you wanted to tell me?"

The sergeant smiled. "Yes, ma'am. Drs. Davidson and Gregg didn't get along. I wouldn't say they hated each other, but they fought, verbally, quite often."

"It never got physical?"

"Not to my knowledge, ma'am."

"Why didn't they like each other?"

"Dr. Davidson is constantly looking to get laid. In Mali he was having sex with an Irish doctor named Mary O'Day and a French doctor of mixed French and Berber descent named Claudine de Gaudet. The Berbers were the original inhabitants of North Africa before the Arabs came along some thirteen hundred years ago. Both women left the Doctors Without Borders in Mali at about the same time. Rumor said they were both pregnant by Dr. Davidson. Gregg was angry because it's the next best thing to impossible for a male doctor to treat a female Muslim and those two were the only female doctors they had."

"And what was Davidson's problem with Gregg?"

"He thought Gregg was a hot dog. An adrenaline junkie. He heard that there were some pre-Islamic cave paintings and carvings up north, off towards the Hoggar Mountains. He bribed a Mali Army officer to go on a patrol with them, took a DWB truck and a half a dozen local employees. They got ambushed by local jihadists, mostly got out okay, but Gregg lost the truck, all the medical and other supplies on it and got one local killed and two others badly wounded. Dr. Davidson blew up at Dr. Gregg. Gregg insisted he was doing his job, taking medical care to people who could get to the hospital. Davidson said he was just trying to get some pictures for a magazine article to make himself look like some kind of Renaissance man."

"Do you think that's reason for one doctor to kill another?"

Sergeant Kane shrugged. "Dr. Gregg did get someone killed and local women may have died because of Dr. Davidson. People get killed in my world for a lot less."

"We're not in your world, Sergeant."

Kane smiled. "But maybe someone brought some of that world back here."

TBC