Free Ill Will by J.M. Redmann Page A

I reassured her. “And there is no magic trick. Some experience, some knowledge, but it’s mostly doing the things you could do if you have the time and resources. I’ll go knock on their door. If they don’t answer, I’ll go knock on the neighbor’s doors and see if they know when the person might be around.”
    “And people just tell you?”
    “Mostly. If they say he’s such a nice guy, I tell them I’m looking for him because an uncle left him a small bequest. If they bitch about him always parking right in front of their house, then I say he owes major parking fines.”
    “You lie,” she said, in an appreciative tone.
    “I consider part of it protecting client confidentiality, not revealing the real reason I’m looking for the person. I’m ethical enough to only use negative reasons for people who are scumbags anyway.”
    “What do you do if the neighbors don’t tell you anything?”
    “It depends on what other info I have. With your patients I have just about everything I could wish for. I can track them using various databases—the Internet has really made it much easier to find people. There are some pretty powerful ones that you pay to use—which I do. The magic is if one method doesn’t get results, I try another and then another until I get the results. I probably know a few more ways to search for people, and it’s my job, so I can put a big part of my day into searching, unlike most people.”
    Of course we talked about our days, what we did. But it had been a long time since Cordelia asked me these kinds of questions, wanted to learn more of what I did and how I did it. I was enjoying the chance to show off to her. She was the doctor, highly trained, well respected for what she did. Sometimes my career felt insignificant compared to that. She saved lives. I found husbands who had decided to ditch their wives and start over in Vegas. It felt good to see the admiration in her eyes as I talked. I was glad I said yes to this, welcoming the chance to use my skills to help her and prove that what I did could do more than just locate errant spouses.
    “I guess it seems magical because you do it so well,” she said. “It actually takes a pretty special skill to just knock on random doors, talk to people and get the information you want from them.”
    “You do it with your patients,” I pointed out.
    “Yes, and to my credit, I’m pretty good with that. But it’s different. They’ve come to me with the structure in place and expectation that we’re going to talk about their health. I’m their access to care, prescriptions, a diagnosis. That’s different from being someone on the street. I can do what I do; I don’t think I could do what you do.”
    Annoyingly, our food arrived and interrupted her singing my praises.
    She sparingly poured the dressing on her salad. I covered my French fries with ketchup.
    But before she took a bite, she covered my hand with hers and said, “Hey, I kind of like us working together. It’s nice to see you this way.” Then she stole a French fry.
    “It is nice,” I agreed. “Let me pay for this and I can call it a business expense.”
    Just to make sure it was a legitimate expense, I asked Cordelia questions about the patients. I got the expected lecture on sickle cell disease, HIV, and TB. She is actually good at explaining these things. I suspected she’d dealt with enough patients who lacked formal education that she was well versed in breaking things down into easy-to-understand terms.
    Once she had finished telling me more than I really wanted to know about TB—I’d spend the next six months wondering if everyone who coughed behind me in the grocery line might infect me—I asked, “Did you treat either of them?”
    “No, not really. I briefly saw Eugenia when she came in for a blood draw. She had some bruises that appeared for no reason. I told her mixing alcohol and TB meds could cause bruising. She swore she hadn’t been drinking, but I got