He was a busy man, with a pager and cellphone always sounding. Parishioners at the church where he worshipped didn't look twice when he came to services in his scrubs.

Nor did his wife, who'd slide over in the pew and smile when he joined her. Dr. Eric Perteet was saving lives, and adding a new dimension to hers, too.

Fulton County Jail (ENLARGE)

Eric and Tammi Perteet married a month after they started dating.

Mark Davis / AJC (ENLARGE)

Eric Perteet wore scrubs issued by Piedmont Hospital; the hospital says he did not work there.

Fulton County Jail (ENLARGE)

Mug shot of Eric Perteet.

That's changed with the snap of handcuffs and the clang of a steel jail door.

Perteet is in the Fulton County Jail, charged with impersonating a physician. Officials at Piedmont Hospital, where police arrested him, deny that he ever worked in their emergency room or dealt with patients.

And his wife, Tammi Perteet?

She has a stack of documents that lay out a life built on lies. She has a scrub shirt from the hospital where she dropped her husband off for two months.

She has questions.

"Who is he?" she asked Friday. Perteet gestured at letters, grade transcripts and death notices — all, apparently, fake. "How could he have done this?"

The details following his May 19 arrest at Piedmont are sketchy. They have come in phone calls and discoveries in the closet of the six-bedroom, 41/2-bath home the Perteets share with two children from Tammi Perteet's earlier marriage. They are recollections of moments when a carefully crafted facade may have slipped.

He was good-looking, younger than she thought; he had told her he was 30, but police say he's 27. He once ended an argument by spelling, "I'm sorry," with rose petals. He talked big, dreamed bigger: She has sketches of a proposed $2.1 billion Conyers-area medical center that her husband drew up.

He also tried to borrow $4,000 for their wedding; promised her a wedding ring that cost about as much as a new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and didn't have a valid driver's license or insurance on his car.

And yet, he gave his 38-year-old wife cash, sometimes as much as $1,000 at a time. He was, Perteet told his wife, about to begin drawing a full-time, annual salary of $250,000 at Piedmont.

So she drove him there every day, kissing him goodbye near the ER door.

Leaving ghosts

The story was so awful it had to be true. He was working the emergency room at the University of Chicago Medical Center when he got a call from doctors in Arizona.

His parents and children, he learned, had been critically injured in a crash. They'd been airlifted to a special facility in Colorado, and he'd better get there quick.

He didn't make it in time. They were dead, he was devastated, and it hurt to talk about it, more than two years after the August 2005 crash.

The story came out after Tammi met him at an Atlanta club in November. Unemployed and bored — she'd lost her job at a mortgage brokerage when the bottom fell out of the housing market — she felt like weeping as the man told his tale.

"My heart just opened up," she said. "I felt so sorry for him."

The physician was healing himself. He'd left Chicago, left medicine. He got a job in Atlanta at Georgia Power, which hired him, he said, because he had an advanced degree in electrical engineering. He wasn't ready to resume the practice of medicine — not yet, not while the memories lingered.

But the memories began fading as he and Tammi made new ones. Once, she asked him his middle name. "He said, 'I don't tell anyone my middle name unless I plan to marry them,' " she recalled.

In December, about a month after they started dating, he told Tammi his middle name: Lee. He also asked her to marry him. She said yes ... provided they get pre-marital counseling.

"I thought that was the safe thing to do," she said. "I wanted to do everything right."

On March 14, a Friday, friends gathered to toast the couple at Vino Libro, a wine bar near East Atlanta. The next day, they stood in the living room of their home and promised each other forever.

It was time to lay aside old ghosts, too. When they returned from their Bahamas honeymoon, she said, she drove him to his new job at Piedmont. "He started that following Monday."

'Great asset'

Officials at Piedmont Hospital say they have no evidence Perteet was at the hospital for two months, as Tammi Perteet says.

"We cannot support the wife's statement," said hospital spokeswoman Nina Montanaro. "Our internal investigation does not support her statement."

The hospital, Montanaro said, has not altered any security measures because of Perteet's arrest. They say hospital security staff has interviewed an array of employees, but none has been able to say much about the faux physician.

The hospital on Thursday said Perteet could not have entered areas of the hospital closed to the public because he lacked the proper credentials. When police arrested him, Perteet had a stolen physician's pass. The hospital said it had been deactivated. Investigation closed? Not yet, said Montanaro. If anyone recalls dealing with Perteet, the hospital wants to know.

Tammi Perteet wants to know about his fake transcripts, which she discovered in their bedroom. They lay out a three-year course of study in which the would-be doctor excelled: Human Morphology I: A; Cell and Organ Physiology: A; Medical Ethics: A.

"You see? "she asked. "He placed himself at the top of his class."

Then there's the letter purportedly written by a physician at the University of Chicago, urging Piedmont to hire the promising young physician. It is rife with misspellings and malapropisms, from the greeting to the final line: "I insure you that he will be a great asset to you."

She has death notices she now thinks are fake. They list the deaths of 4- and 5-year-olds — Perteet's children, her husband said.

"I know people scam people, but death certificates?" she asked. "People don't lie about that, do they?"

Do they lie about telephone calls? Tammi Perteet can recall calls her husband fielded in which he spoke as if he were talking to other doctors. "He can communicate, medically, with other physicians," she said. "You would never think he did not go to med school."

He is in jail on $12,000 bond on multiple charges, including one felony count of stealing a financial transaction card and identity fraud. Perteet is scheduled for a first appearance in court Monday.

His wife plans to schedule an appointment with a lawyer. She wants a divorce — perhaps an annulment, because their marriage was based on a fraud.

She also may need to do some healing, said Tammi Perteet — the sort a physician cannot offer.