“With a doctor, we should get our victim’s address. No address on Smidge’s report.” She picked up the phone and called the office of the doctor listed.
As soon as she explained who she was, the receptionist replied, “I’m sorry, but all the patient files are confidential.”
“This patient is deceased,” Kate noted. “So we’re looking for an address.”
The other woman gasped.
“We have the breast implant number, but we don’t have anything else.” Frowning at the silence on the other end of the phone, Kate tapped on her desk. “So, if you have any contact information, we need it.”
“Oh my.” The flustered woman rambled off an address and a phone number.
Making her repeat it, Kate wrote it down. “Good enough. When was she last in your office?”
“Two years ago,” she stated, “so I don’t know if the address and phone number are current.”
“Her last visit was two years ago?”
“Yes.”
“Good enough,” she replied, before disconnecting the call.
Part of the information provided was also the insurance number for the medical plan she had used for some coverage of the original visits. With that, Kate tracked down some additional medical data. “She’s twenty-eight years old, and the DMV still shows the same address,” Kate told Rodney.
“Parents and two brothers, both back East. Address on Aspen?”
She quickly checked through what she had. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“You want to go to your address first or phone the family?”
“We should phone the family,” she muttered, but she hated to. Those calls were always the worst.
“I can make that call, if you want,” Rodney offered.
She looked over at him and nodded. “Do you mind? That would be great. Find out if there’s anything or anyone in her life.”
“I know the drill,” he added, with an eye roll.
She smiled. “I know you do. It’s just habit.” She got up and refilled her coffee cup, while he made the next-of-kin notification call. When she returned to the bullpen, he was still talking in a low voice, trying to calm down the family.
“I’m so sorry to bring you this news,” he repeated, “and any help you can give us would be appreciated.”
Once the call was done, and he’d scratched down all his notes, he turned to share what they had told him. “One of the two brothers is deceased, leaving just the one sibling behind. All the family lives in Toronto.”
“Interesting,” she noted, “so our latest victim had two brothers.”
“The other brother had been deceased for ten years, from a motorcycle accident.”
She winced. “Pretty hard to survive that kind of an accident.”
“It happens,” Rodney said. “But, more often than not, they don’t.”
She nodded. “Did they know anything about her current life?”
“She was working as a model sometimes. Other than that, she had a reception job at one of the offices downtown.”
“Which office?”
He gave her the name, and she immediately typed it in.