Bonnie - Iris Johansen [51]
“Someone has to know where he’s at,” Gallo said. “He must have had contact with other doctors and patients and their families. Particularly if he went to the trouble of placing his other patients with competent professionals. He can’t just have disappeared.”
“Maybe he could,” Catherine said. “If he was paid enough.”
“You’re thinking that Temple’s payoff and Donnelly’s resignation might not be a coincidence?”
“Donnelly had his last appointment with Danner two weeks before Temple signed that death certificate. Something big was going down about that time.”
“You believe that my uncle may have told Donnelly something in a therapy session that Donnelly used as a bargaining tool?” Gallo asked. “That his confidentiality only went as far as his wallet?”
“I don’t believe anything right now. I’m just throwing ideas out there to see if they stick.” She paused. “But I located something else in Donnelly’s records. I had to dig because it was buried deep. Donnelly was involved in a court case about that time, a patient’s mother accused him of experimentation, of implanting false memories into her son’s mind.”
“What was the verdict?”
“I don’t know, the court records were sealed. He didn’t lose his license, but it might have spurred him to leave the hospital. Joe is talking to the head nurse in the psychiatric ward right now. The records clerk said she’d been here at the hospital for the last twenty years, so she’d have to have been familiar with Donnelly. I’ll let you know as soon as he comes back.” She hung up.
Eve pressed the disconnect and gazed at Gallo. “Well?”
“What do you expect me to say?” He turned away. “Am I scared and sick to my stomach about all this? Hell, yes. But all we know for sure is that my uncle lied to me, and he had a problem. We’ll have to see what Quinn finds out.”
“Yes. That hospital doesn’t appear to have a great staff, does it? First Temple, and now this Dr. Donnelly. Memory implant? That would be truly criminal to experiment on a sick man.” She dropped down in the chair. She felt scared and sick, too. She couldn’t forget the image of the gentle, kind man who had looked at Bonnie and told Eve what a pretty little girl she was. “But I don’t see how you could have been fooled. I was a stranger to him, but you must have suspected he wasn’t quite…”
“Sane? He was more normal than anyone I knew. Almost everyone I grew up with was a little twisted and lived in dysfunctional homes. It went with the territory.” His lips twisted. “When you live with poverty, vice, and drugs, you don’t expect normalcy. You know that yourself, Eve.”
Yes, she did. That’s why she had fought so desperately to get away from that life so it wouldn’t taint Bonnie. “You didn’t notice anything different about him when he came back from overseas when he was discharged?”
“No.” He thought about it. “It’s hard to remember. No, maybe he seemed a little quieter. But I was a teenager, and I was self-centered like most kids and might not have noticed. There wasn’t anything weird about him. He was a good guy, Eve.”
She didn’t answer.
His lips thinned. “It’s true. He was the best—”
Eve’s phone rang and she glanced at the ID. “Joe.” She punched the button. “What did you find out, Joe?”
“I found out that the people here who know Donnelly aren’t willing to talk about him. I talked to a nurse and two doctors on staff. The head nurse was wary about giving out any information at all. She said he was an exceptional doctor and had a great rapport with his patients. She knew nothing about any court case.”
“Good, then there’s a chance that Danner bonded with him,” Eve said. “Did you get an address?”
“No, she hasn’t heard from him in several years.” He paused. “According to her, the reason he quit was that he was suffering severe burnout. He was going to take a rest before he opened his own practice.”
“Where did he go? Can we trace him?”
“We can try. He was going to visit a cousin, James O’Leary, who lived in Ireland.”
“Ireland? What city?”
“Dublin. The cousin