The Mad Doctor Yates case : Tallahassee FL, April 2017

The Mad Doctor Yates case : Tallahassee FL, April 2017.
Characters:  Lena Barrett, Robert Hemming Dashwood, Mabel Pinos, Dr. Motta

A medical malpractice case has repeatedly made headlines over the last several months as further evidence has been brought against the defendant and more of his patients have come forward with further testimony. Dr. Lyle Yates, a neurologist, has been accused of medical malfeasance by the family of Steve Gordon, a former patient, whom he had been treating for migraines and vertigo. The family's claim is that Yates performed unnecessary procedures and experimented upon the plaintiff, directly leading to a mental breakdown and psychotic episode. Gordon has since been hospitalized and deemed a danger to himself after a violent incident.

Gordon's testimony described bizarre treatment, including unwillingly dental procedures, and other former patients of Yates' have since come forward with similar accounts. However, investigators have found no evidence to corroborate that the events occurred, and have even shown it unlikely that Yates would have access to the equipment his accusers describe him having.

What the papers do not report, and did not come up in the court hearing, is the fact that in 2011 an Optometrist in Pensacola was accused by a patient of abusive treatments, or that a gastroenterologist in Valdosta was sued in 1998 by a patient who believed he had operated on his teeth against his will

Story part 1:
The first time character's crossed paths on this case was in a borrowed office of the Federal Office building in Tallahassee. Special Agent Lea Barrett had finally gotten the green light to open an official investigation, and she submitted a request for additional manpower support. What she got was one fresh-faced agent three weeks out of Quantico; Agent Mabel Pinos. There, Lena laid out the information she had pieced together of similar events over the last decades in the region, discussed possible connections, and made arrangements to investigate Dr. Yates offices to see if they could find any leads. What they found was a very skittish doctor in the process of shuttering his practice and packing up the lush decor of the office.

He was very reluctant to speak with them, but eventually explained that he had been repeatedly harassed over the last week by men coming to his office claiming to be with the police, or investigators, and that he had been threatened. That, on top of the damage to his reputation from the legal suit, was ruining him. When he reported the harassment to the police, they had brushed it off as either paparazzi or intimidation tactics by the plaintiffs of the case. Agent Barrett started listing out rotors and patients from the prior cases she believed connected, asking if he was familiar with any of them or details of the situations. He said he didn't know anything about them, and neither agent could see any sign he was concealing anything. Without any other leads, Barrett and Pinos started to look into who had been questioning the doctor. Starting with footage from building security cameras, they widened their search from there...

It's the afternoon two days later when characters next cross paths. Bobby Dashwood is sitting in a car on a residential street, watching a house through a telescopic camera. After questioning the doctor, he had given up thinking Yates could have been responsible for driving his patient insane. He was too squeamish, and had almost fainted when Dashwod had barely begun to get intimidating. But if it wasn't the doctor, reasoned Dashwood, perhaps something in his home had driven Steve Gordon nuts...

He's judging which entrance would be his best way into the house to have a look around when he hears a sudden tap on the passenger side window, and looks over raises a woman in a suit standing next to his car. Special Agent Lena Barrett flashes her badge and asks him to step out of the car. She has some questions about why he had met with doctor Yates, and what he was doing at the home of the doctor's alleged victim.

A twist in the case comes that night, when Dr. Yates himself is hospitalized after injuring himself, and he is placed under psychiatric observation at Tallahassee Memorial. Most of the characters visit him under some guide or pretext, but the next time any of them cross paths is the following day back at the man's office.

Dr. Motta comes to the offices armed with forged insurance forms, posing as the current physician of a former patient in desperate need of copies of patient records. He persuaded the office secretary, poor sleep-deprived thing, to let him look through records in the waiting room. He is just sneaking into the back rooms when Agents Barrett and Pinos arrive at the office, and he hides in a side room. He listens as they, thinking they are alone, discuss their examination of Yates' personal effects, and how nothing appeared connected to his symptoms. He hears just enough about 'psychic trauma' and 'psychometric impressions' to know he's not dealing with normal police when one of them opens the door to find him.

Character Interactions:

 * -Lena Barrett drew her pistol before the man could blink, the barrel trained on his chest. "Show me your hands." She demanded.
 * Dr. Motta raises his hands. "Show me your badge!" He demands, smirking at the gun. "Or do Hunters and psychics not do fake badges anymore?"Lena's eyes blazed. "Agent, show your badge," she instructed Pinos. "Who are you?" She demanded.
 * Dr. Motta has a perpetual smirk on his face. "Doctor Motta, here on official business to collect a patient's file. I would show you my medical license, but you seem fairly on edge. May I suggest a lorazepam prescription from your physician?"
 * Lena chose to ignore Dr. Motta's remark. Without taking her eyes off the man, she says, "Pinos, can you confirm that?" "Official business from whom, Dr. Motta?"
 * The smile leaves Dr. Motta's face. "You won't be able to confirm it. I am in a highly specialized field, and my company does not like to share information on their doctors or patients. Hence, Doctor Patient confidentiality. However, if you allow me to reach into my pocket, I can produce both my medical license, and a letter of my request for client information."
 * "Keep your hands where I can see them. I don't care about your forged documents. Who do you work for?" The only movement Lena made was to cock her gun.
 * Dr. Motta drops his hands, but they remain in view. "Look, Agent, I know you are here hunting the thing that is messing with people's teeth and driving them crazy. Put the gun away before I put it away for you. Stop acting like a cop, and start acting like a hunter, or I might mistake you for a Slasher."
 * "I am an FBI agent you just threatened me. I WILL shoot you if you do not give me answers NOW."
 * Dr. Motta facepalms. "They make the FBI denser every year. How can I spell this out simpler? I. AM. A. HUNTER. I. KILL. MONSTERS. LIKE. YOU." Dr. Motta enunciates and emphases every word.
 * Lena eyes him dangerously but lowers her weapon. She holds in front of her prepared to raise and fire if needed. "So who do you work for?"
 * Dr. Motta chuckles. "TRICELL, Inc. A pharmaceutical company. I am a licensed medical doctor and surgeon. I am actually here to get files for a patient of mine. But they are a patient because they have been touched by some kind of monster I am here to collect.
 * "Pinos, search Tricell Inc." Lena uncocks her gun and relaxes slightly, but continues to hold it in front of her just in case."What do you know of the monster?"
 * "You know, I have been answering a lot of questions, but you have given me nothing. What do YOU know of the monster?"

NOTE FROM ST ON INFORMATION CLARIFICATION:
Basic research (I.e. Google) tells you Tricell is a legitimate pharmaceutical company. Anything deeper would require either significant research time or use of Teleinformatics.

As for what you know, the victims have all been mentally traumatized in a severe way, but limited forensic evidence. Medical examination of Dr. Yates earlier that day revealed minor lacerations along the scalp (examiner on scene assumed self inflicted) and bleeding in the gums consistent with brute force trauma to the teeth or jaw (ditto). However, the Agents would have noticed bruising on the wrists and forehead that could match signs of physical restraints.
 * "Not as much as we'd like. Yates was assaulted though. His injuries are not self-inflicted. Perhaps the monster views him as a threat to eliminate. Aside from the obvious lack of forensic evidence, that is what we have. Your turn."
 * "How do you know they were not self-inflicted? Could have been forced to do those things, had his memory wiped of them, but also forced to harm himself. Could be possession. Otherwise, I know about as much as you do."
 * Agent Pinos takes a step back and watches the exchange between her superior and the man who just admitted he kills (monstrous) people.
 * Lena paused a moment, as if deciding whether to continue talking. "He had restraint marks on his wrists and forehead. These were not self-inflicted wounds." She paused again before holstering her gun and straightening. "Considering the lack of evidence either of us have, perhaps we should work together. We might get farther that way."
 * "Agreed." Said Dr. Motta, sliding a syringe from up his sleeve into his pocket.
 * "You said you needed patient files. What do expect to find in them?"
 * "Hopefully notes, or insight into what did this." Dr. Motta moves to retrieve the files.
 * Lena watches him intently, but allows him to retrieve the files.

Story part 2:
After Dr. Motta showed the agents his credentials, the three of them spent an uneasy hour looking through patient files trying to find anything that might be related to the madness that overcame Dr. Yates or his patient, with no success. They also found no common thread between the various victims they believed to be involved in this case, and the only interpretation of facts that they could agree on is that Yates himself was not responsible as he wouldn't likely harm himself. With that in mind, they started believing the cause might be environmental.

At that point, agent Barrett let Dr. Motta leave the back rooms of the office with a simple warning not to interfere further with the investigation. Motta was leaving the building when he noticed the secretary ata coffee shop on the first floor of the building. In a last ditch to gather information, he offered to buy her coffee by way of thanks for being so helpful to him earlier. She accepted and they got to talking while they waited. After sipping hers by mistake, they sat and talked about the hard times she had seen over the last weeks.

Over the conversation, she really opened up to him about what working in that office had been like, and was soon letting slip little complaints about the building, like the bad wiring and flickering lights, or the air conditioning sometimes making it too cold. The longer they talked, the more Motta was convinced that this mystery wouldn't lead to anything of interest to him. After the coffee, he bid the lady farewell, and returned to his hotel to prepare for his next journey.

Meanwhile, agents Barrett and Pinos proceeded to take inventory of everything left in the doctor's offices and rooms, hoping to find something with a trace of the victim Steve Gordon. Of course, Dr. Yates personal effects had already been moved to his home. As they were leaving to go to his house, Barrett noticed that many of the decorations and some furniture from the waiting room was gone. She pointed this out to Pinos, and the pair split up: Barrett went to look through the doctor's possessions at his home, and Pinos left to track down the removed furniture.

Little did they know that Robert Dashwood was already a step ahead of her on that trail, and had started that search the day before. Dashwood had found no leads related to Steve Gordon, so he began researching the older cases. None of the doctors who were accused had anything tying them together- different backgrounds, in different fields, from different schools, working in different towns.

But during his research, he found the defunct website for Dr. Hughes, the optometrist that was sued in 2011, and a photo caught his eye. The homepage had a very welcoming photo of the doctor sitting in his office, degrees on the walls behind him, everything very elegant and expensive looking. The picture gave an air of being plush and high-class, but what caught his attention was a painting on the wall. It took Robert a few moments to realize where he'd seen it before; Dr. Yates' waiting room just a few days before.

From there, it only took so long to piece together the provenance with some simple research and a few well placed questions. It turned out that Hughes had bought the painting as part of a bulk purchase of furniture and decor at an auction when he was opening his practice in 2007. Before that, several of the pieces of art and decorations had been in a storage facility for about 8 years, and went up for auction after the storage unit's owner stopped making payments. It took some digging and bribery, but Robert found out that the owner was none other than Dr. Dolson, the Gastroenterologist from Valdosta who went out of business after being sued in 1998.

With that, Robert had a clear enough idea of what was happening, and set out to find out what had happened to the office furniture. He quickly found out that it was the building management, not Dr. Yates himself, who had furnished the office. When he closed his office, they reclaimed their property and had it moved to storage, where they planned to sell it at auction, just like they had acquired it.

Story part 3:
Robert had been at the storage facility for about an hour when Agent Pinos pulled up. It normally wouldn't take him that long to search a place for anything odd, but the unit was cramped, and whoever had packed up the contents of the office and stowed them there had not had order or easy access in mind. But he was mostly done when Agent Pinos approached the unit behind him. She wasn't able to find the front desk clerk to guide her to the right unit (He was out on an 'extremely' long smoke break, counting the cash Robert had slipped him), but her instincts lead her to the right place.

She came up behind him and asked what he was doing. They danced around it for a few minutes - first he pretended to work for the owner of the unit taking an inventory, and when she said she knew this wasn't true he questioned how she would know. After a minute or so she flashed the badge and he got quiet, but only until he noticed she was alone, without a warrant, and realized she was acting off the books too. He admitted that he was investigating what he thought was a chain of odd events, and that he thought something in that unit was the link.

And that was when the lights started flickering.

The rest happened pretty fast- Mabel stepped back to call Barrett and report. Robert looked around and found one of the only boxes he hadn't opened yet. In the time it took him to cut the masking tape and open the box, the room got chilly enough that their breath started to fog. Robert barely has time to look down and register the books in the box before a figure manifests in front of him. It was a man, late middle aged and stark white in pallor, with a ragged suit and a bug-eyed glare of rage.

The man slammed Robert with a back handed slap to the chest that sent him crashing through boxes and furniture, and left him buried in a pile of broken wooden chairs. Mabel reacted quickly, drawing her gun, but paused in confusion as she registered the figure. Her eyes darted around, trying to see where he had come from, and shakily called out for him to put his hands up. The ragged pale man wordlessly turned toward her and started to approach. He ignored her shout to stop, and she fired.

When the shots did nothing, passing through him like air, she stared in shock. She backed away as he continued moving toward her, which turned into running when he seemed to flicker in the dimming lights of the hallway. She cleared fifteen yards, her mind racing to interpret what she had just seen and what to do before the lights in the hallway started flickering again and the pallid man appeared now in front of her. he grabbed her and slammed her to the thin sheet metal wall of the hallway. She struggled as best she could, but after a moment some force pinned her arms and legs to the wall. She saw the man reach into his coat pocket, drawing out a long handled pick, and screamed.

Robert pulled himself up through the pile of furniture and boxes with a groan of pain. A shaft of wood from a broken chair impaled his thigh, and he was sure that at least one rib was cracked. He saw them both running away down the hall, and turned back to the box of books he had uncovered. Scrabbling through the contents, his eye was drawn to a set of books at the bottom; fine, aged leather bindings with gold gilded pages and covers. They were a set of medical and anatomical encyclopedias, one of them primarily detailing the skull and the brain.

Flipping through pages frantically, Robert found that many of the diagrams in this rich, expensive looking tome had hand written notes scrawled in the margins. Scraps of paper with notes and hand drawn pictures of medical tools and parts of the brain were pasted into the book, and the erratic nature of the handwriting unnerved him. Flipping to the end, he saw a name written on the inside cover- "W. Freeman".

That was when he heard the drum of Mabel crashing into the sheet metal wall down the hall. A moment later she screamed. He drew a butane torch lighter from his pocket, and set pages of the book to blaze. As the flames from the book grew, he tossed it down into the box with the rest.

Mabel was screaming as the spectre put a hand on her forehead, forcing her still, and brought the pick up level to her eye. She didn't feel pain, there than from the vice-like grip on her head and limbs, but a sudden stab of cold and confusion left her vision swimming. A minute that feels like hours passed before her eyes would focus again. When they did, she saw the pallid man backing away from her, grimacing and shaking silently. His faded form went nearly translucent before he was suddenly engulfed in a wash of light and flames. In seconds, the man disappeared in a burst of fire that washed over Mabel with a fleeting sense of heat before the force binding her stopped and she fell to the floor.

Robert and Mabel came back together outside the storage unit, both staggering from their injuries. He tried to explain what had attacked her, and what he had done, but cut off as the fire started to spread through the unit. Robert pulled the nearest fire alarm, and after they split up to look for an extinguisher, they did not see each other again. Agent Pinos, once the fire was out, regrouped with Agent Barrett to report what had happened. Dashwood, after dressing the would in his leg, returning home with scorched remains of leather binding as a trophy.