Deadly Dose Read Free Page A

respected Sergeant Fluck for his thoroughness and attention to detail. In that first week of the investigation, Fluck’s team had begun immediately searching computers. They scoured Eric and Ann’s work and home computers for anything that might help them solve the case. While computer forensics takes time; documents the author thought had vanished into the black hole of cyberspace can be retrieved. Hence the famous adage about not writing anything down you don’t want someone to read applies to computers maybe even more than it does to paper and pen.
    Finally, there was a carrot dangled in front of Morgan. Sergeant Fluck asked Morgan’s squad to interview doctors and nurses at Rex Hospital, where Eric Miller died. Morgan was eager to get involved in the case in any way he could, and he would soon find out that Eric Miller’s death at the hospital was neither where the case began nor where it would end.

MEDICAL MINDS
    While Eric Miller’s preliminary autopsy report did not show high levels of arsenic in his body at the time of his death, he’d been hospitalized earlier, in mid-November, and some of those test results from Rex Hospital were showing massive amounts of arsenic in him at that time. Everyone Morgan consulted with told him that the levels were simply too high to have been the result of an accidental or environmental exposure.
    Experts also told Morgan that arsenic stays in the bloodstream for only a short period of time and then dissipates if the person is not exposed again in a short time frame. But more detailed tests, using hair samples, can reveal intermittent exposure to arsenic over a prolonged period of time.
    Morgan says the staff at the hospital was cooperative and genuinely broken up about Eric’s death. “They were sorry this happened and they didn’t know what to make of it,” says Morgan. He was not going after them; quite the opposite. Morgan recalls that the attending physician, Dr. Mehna Mohan, seemed sincerely sad about Eric’s passing. He remembers Mohan as very emotional at the mere mention of Eric’s death. Unlike most doctors he knew, who preferred professional detachment, Mohan was not afraid to cry real tears when she talked about Eric and how he had suffered before he died.
    Morgan suspected that no one at the hospital had ever had any experience with arsenic poisoning before. Why should they? Morgan himself had never personally come across an arsenic death in his quarter century of police work. Given the rarity, it was no surprise that arsenic was not immediately suspected by doctors as the cause of Eric Miller’s illness.
    It was also no surprise that each interview included hospital attorneys, considering the litigious nature of the world today and how it has adversely affected medical institutions. The presence of the attorneys neither intimidated Morgan nor hindered his efforts. He was not someone easily ruffled by men in suits with bigger paychecks than he could ever dream of earning. But the lawyers let him do his job, and he let them do theirs.
    “I guess they had already gotten the feeling there was a little bit of blood in the water; turned out they were right,” Morgan says caustically.

THE TRAIL
    Morgan learned that Ann Miller first took Eric to Rex Hospital on the night of Thursday, November 16, 2000. Although Eric had been to the doctor’s office for minor symptoms over the past few months, this was his first visit to the hospital. On this night he complained of severe stomach pains following a bowling outing with a group of Ann’s colleagues the previous evening. Investigators learned that he then spent hours in the emergency room waiting to be seen, and it wasn’t until the early-morning hours of Friday, November 17, that he was finally admitted to a private room.
    Doctors and nurses told Morgan that Eric’s condition continued to worsen after he was admitted. Given this turn of events, they made the decision to transfer him to the intensive care unit the