Close to Home Recap: Getting In
As a routine plastic surgery operation goes horribly awry when the patient dies on the table, the anesthesiologist gets by with what amounts to a slap on the wrist. Luckily for the prosecutors, the husband of the dead woman doesn't want to leave it at that, and he brings in the medical records from another doctor, showing that his wife wasn't taking one of the prescriptions that they want to insist that she was. This begs the question of why it was added to the chart if it wasn't the case, and Annabeth agrees to look into it further. What she finds makes them decide to take on the case, even though it still isn't strong.
Apparently the deceased woman was a member at a country club, and the anesthesiologist had just been denied membership in the said club recently, and at least one person at the club was on record as hearing her say that she was not going to be humiliated by her again. That "again" struck in their minds, but they had a heck of a time tracking down what it meant.
It seems that the two had a history going back a very long way indeed. A number of years ago, they spent a year in high school together, and the dead woman had belonged to something of an elite group of popular girls in the school, where she had done the unthinkable - she had stolen the other girl's boyfriend, just before prom. It humiliated her. Apparently this was something that she had never quite been able to get over.
Using all of her considerable persuasion, the woman purchased a gift certificate at a spa that was only good for one day, then had the spa call to tell the normal anesthesiologist that she was the winner of a contest, but she had to use it on that day. It seems that day just happened to be the day when the hated ex-rival was coming in for a small procedure, so what could she do but switch shifts, and you-know-who would be waiting to help out.
In the meantime, she used the time while she was waiting for the approaching date to collect a small amount of the anesthesia from several patients to be able to administer a lethal dose when the time came. This was her undoing, however - she left a number of patients with post-operative pain, and this was what her coworkers were able to testify about that eventually led to her conviction. Oh, so close.
Incidentally, this case was (loosely) based on events that transpired in a real-life case that took place in Charlotte, NC. Spooky.
