Free Killer Nurse by John Foxjohn Page A

usual ponytail, she would’ve made her way down the steps of her double-wide trailer (which sat next door to Saenz’s parents, Bennie and Kent Fowler). A large sign in front of a huge pine tree at the edge of the road announced the family’s affiliation with the Clawson Assembly of God Church.
    Deep in the woods of East Texas, the early-morning darkness would be complete—no lights anywhere as Saenz eased her way through a heavy dew that blanketed the driveway. The moisture, combined with the layer of fine red dirt that accumulated on the windshield, meant that her wipers smeared across the glass before eventually clearing enough for her to see.
    With her lights on bright, she would be able to see some of the wildlife that flourished in the dense forest that lined the edges of the rough, pothole-laden blacktop. The twisting road mostly held dense trees and underbrush, but was occasionally interrupted with pockets of human habitation—from run-down trailers, to wood and brick houses, and even a scattering of mansions sitting off the road on hilltops.
    Because of the darkness and the rough condition of the road, it took Saenz almost fifteen minutes to travel the four miles from her home to Highway 69, the main thoroughfare through Pollok, an unincorporated community in the northwest corner of Angelina County.
    After turning right on the highway, she could speed up, passing Central High School on the left and a couple of churches on the right—one of them her own. Her quick trek took her past a Polk Pick-It-Up, a convenience store and meat market. At that hour everything was closed except the convenience store.
    Minutes after turning on the highway, she came to the loop around Lufkin. She turned right, traveled through two traffic lights, and arrived at the DaVita Lufkin Dialysis Center. A fellow DaVita employee said she saw Saenz sitting in her car with her eyes closed and her head back for several minutes. She said she was about to go back and check on Saenz, when her coworker’s car door finally opened.
    The atmosphere Saenz encountered at DaVita on April 28 was extremely tense, as it had been for some time. All throughout April 2008, the clinic had existed in what is called a comorbid state. There were simply too many unexplained patient deaths at DaVita Lufkin and too many patients suffering serious health complications.
    From April 1 to April 28, the facility had had to transport thirty-four patients by ambulance to hospital emergency rooms. This number was three times the amount of patients taken to the hospital in March. Even more disturbing to DaVita officials were the nineteen patients who’d died in a five-month span from December 2007 to April 2008.
    This was the atmosphere of the clinic that Kimberly Clark Saenz walked into on the twenty-eighth of April 2008. Anxiety was already high, and things began to go wrong immediately. One of the patient care technicians had to call in sick, so Amy Clinton, the head investigator who had taken over the operations of the clinic, called an off-duty RN by the name of Dale Stockwell to come to work.
    Clinton never thought calling Stockwell in would cause any problems. But looking back, it may have only highlighted a problem that already existed.
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    Amy Clinton was a professional, smart, and vivacious woman in her early thirties, with a classic beauty. Not the beauty queen type of looks, but the kind that proclaims breeding and class—the type that makes men look twice, and then a wistful third time.
    Clinton earned her bachelor of science degree at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas (pronounced Nak-uh-DOE-chez), and became a registered nurse. She worked in a busy hospital emergency room for a year before starting to work as a dialysis nurse in 1997.
    Owing to her intelligence, hard work, and ability to lead and interact with her coworkers and subordinates, she soon climbed the corporate ladder. People who worked