Wife's Bitter Revenge Against Neglectful CEO Husband-Chapter 167: Dot Dot

Alec handed me the file. "I remember her now. We were ready to hire Dr. Pacer until we ran her fingerprints as part of our vetting process. On paper, she was great, but the fingerprints didn’t match the profile."

He sat down beside me and urged me to open the file to the profile headshot. "Is this your Dr. Pacer?"

"I think so, yes."

"This woman is Dot Pacer. The real Dr. Pacer looks like this." Alec flipped to a blue tabbed divider in the folder. "They are sisters."

I looked from picture to picture. The women most certainly weren’t identical twins, but if I squinted, I guessed I could see some similarity. The real question was why one sister was playing the part of the second sister. What did this have to do with King?

"Why?"

"That was our question. Either way, once we called her on her deception, she walked away."

"And you didn’t report it or anything? Isn’t that something that should have been reported to the licensing board?"

"If we did, it would be in the file. We should have," Alec said.

We leafed through the folder. A lot of the information I’d already learned from CK and Stiff. I took snapshots of the information I didn’t have, such as the notes covering the interview. I sent the information to Stiff with a quick update about the sister switch.

For the sake of her patients, I hoped Dot at least had a basic understanding of psychotherapy.

"If Dot has taken over for her sister, where was the real Dr. Pacer? I mean, she’s been a practicing therapist here for years. It’s one thing to identify as someone else for a few hours or days, but years?"

"That’s a good question."

Alec returned to work while I continued my research on the Pacer family with the help of CK and Stiff. The more we learned, the more concerned I was for King’s safety.

In the couple of hours it took for the drug analysis, we learned that Dot had a long history with the police that traced back to sealed juvenile files. She’d started out as a schoolyard bully who had broken a boy’s arm when she was ten. By the time she was twelve, she’d escalated to extortion and gang leader. A year later, drug charges showed up on her records, and her mother accused her of domestic abuse. But it took putting a girl in the hospital with signs of torture to earn the Dot time in a juvenile detention center.

She spent the rest of her adolescence in and out of jail.

This was a bad girl.

Meanwhile, her sister was racking up awards and recognition as a stellar student with a bright future ahead of her. She received enough scholarship money to garner a full ride in university. Although it was the same university as King, King was a business and finance major while she studied psychology. King stayed active in a fraternity and collegiate sports. She studied. She had no club affiliations or part-time jobs. She studied, spending more time in the library than in the sunshine. She lived at home, so she didn’t even have a connection through dorm sisters.

The photos in the file folder helped confirm that the correct sister graduated with her doctoral degree, and the same girl entered into an internship with IPX as a researcher. IPX was a leading pharmaceutical research company. Knowing what we knew now, we checked the photos at the research company as well.

She worked at the company until it faced a class-action lawsuit after one of the trial medications faced major backlash and filed bankruptcy.

Well well, that was a connection worth following up on.

Dr. Alberson brought in the drug analysis. "This is one crazy cocktail. I’d say it was created to treat psychosomatic symptoms, but the side effects might cause more problems than they resolved. Once I narrowed down the chemical makeup, I was able to cross reference the chemical breakdown to a database of known medications. I determined this is a knockoff of a drug created by IPX."

Ah ha, IPX. I was right. That is the thing about researching the lives of other people. If you dig deep enough, there is always a connection between what happened yesterday to what happened in the deep past.

Alec asked, "You said it was a knockoff. What makes it different?"

"I’m getting there. The drug is the very same drug that led to the class-action lawsuit that led to IPX going out of business. It was used in test trials to treat people with anxiety and focus problems, such as ADHD, and for a while, it appeared to show a lot of promise, but then it was discovered the positive results were short-term. In the long term, it was causing memory loss and emotional instability. In some cases, the personality changes were so dramatic that the patient went through a transformation that resembled a multi-personality disorder."

"That tracks with some of what we’ve seen with the patient," I said, thinking back to the reticent man who conserved words like they cost money against the babble I’d heard from King lately. In fact, the whole obsession over me after ignoring my existence while married was out of character. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

I had no doubt that King didn’t really love me. He couldn’t. No one could love another person and think so poorly about their life choices. How often had King made it clear that logical thought was beyond me and devalued me to my face? No, the effects of drugs made a lot more sense than an emotional turnaround.

"Teela here is the most alarming part. The drug is laced with a type of methamphetamine that is beyond our current capabilities to combat. In essence, the longer a patient takes the drug, the more dependent they will become, and once they are addicted, they will have to continue to take them for the rest of their life. Failure to do so can not only drop them into a massive withdrawal spiral. It can kill him from the stress it puts on the body."

Joshua was right. It was my fault that King was in the hospital. As unintentional as it might have been, I could have killed him.

"Doctor, what can we do for him?"

Dr. Alberson sighed, "Not a lot, I’m afraid. I can contact colleagues who may still be working on a cure. After all, thousands were harmed with that test trial, but with the methamphetamine thrown into the mix, any cure they have would need further development.

"In the meantime, I’d recommend keeping him on the medication."

"Right now, he is taking an uncontrolled dosage. When he feels he needs one or more, he takes it. Dr. Pacer has led him to believe the proper dosage is whatever feels right to him."

Dr. Alberson nodded, "Which would only escalate the addiction. Hypothetically, it could escalate to the point that he can’t take enough drugs to treat the need. He would literally kill himself.

"He needs to be on the drugs, and he needs to be under medical supervision while an adequate dosage to maintain his condition is established. Since no one is monitoring his intake, a doctor would have to start off with a baseline of one or two pills and see how it goes. The patient may need the dosage increased several times before the right dosage is established, plus a baseline for how often the dosage is needed also must be established."

Alec said, "If Dot finds out you are on to her, do you think she will continue to refill the prescription? As far as we know, she is the only one who can refill his supply, right?"

Dr. Alberson said, "Now that I have the chemical formula, I can keep your patient supplied with the medication, technically, but Alec, it wouldn’t exactly be legal."

"I’d hate to put you in that position," Alec said. "But I don’t see better choice, do you? Not a safe one where we can ensure the quality of the product. And I’d feel a lot safer with you doing it than releasing the formula to someone who lacks your ethics."

I said, "We can’t trust Dot to continue to supply him a consistent dosage of the same drug. If she has created this medication, she can always change it if she doesn’t see the expected outcoming. It sounds like she wants to destroy King. If his condition doesn’t take a nosedive, she’ll know we are helping him."

"Good point," Alec said. "So now what?"

"Dr. Alberson, if you can work on a sustainable quantity of the meds, I’ll go to the patient’s home and scour it for whatever medication he has on hand. We can use it to get him out of a coma, hopefully. His brother is a doctor. He can help us with the monitoring and setting a baseline.

"Thank you so much for your help. You may have saved a life today."

"Any time, dear. Alec here is one of my favorite people."