Tommy Lee took a few seconds to digest my words. “Tag anything else that seems suspicious. Bring one example of each bank account that you find. Have Wakefield take charge of the rest, but under no circumstances is he to say anything other than he discovered a suicide.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t want Crystal Hodges or Doug Larson to have died in vain. Doug might have given us a way to flush out our enemies, but we’ll only get one shot and we’ve got to be careful.”
I felt a twinge of excitement cut through my despair. Maybe something good could come out of this tragedy. “I’ve got your back.”
Tommy Lee chuckled in spite of the situation. “Fine. But I got shot in the front.”
Reece arrived within fifteen minutes and took charge of securing the scene. He only nodded at me and told his deputies that I was following up a possible lead on the street dance shooting and as far as they were concerned, I wasn’t there. Reece got a couple of curious stares from his colleagues because his face looked like a patchwork quilt of scratches. No one said anything, not even a meow.
I identified ten bank accounts from three different banks. I pulled a range of statements from the previous six months and noted the number of cancelled checks was small in comparison to wire deposits and withdrawals. None of the transactions were over $8,000.
I asked Wakefield to search Doug’s body in case he’d hidden something on himself when he heard me pounding on the door. Wakefield pulled two wads of cash out of the pockets of Doug’s pants.
“Explains why there was nothing but change in the register,” Wakefield said.
“And no money in the safe. Doug was making a break for it, and somehow these bank statements were an insurance policy. Tag all the statements as evidence and I’ll take them with me to show Tommy Lee.”
“And the rest of the safe’s contents?” Wakefield had found a few boxes of OxyContin in the rear I hadn’t noticed at first.
“Take everything,” I said. “Note the lot number on the pills. Maybe we can match them to an invoice or purchase order.”
Wakefield pulled a pad and pen from his shirt pocket. “You know, it’s really sad.” He glanced down at Doug lying in a pool of blood. “The Larson family has been part of this community as long as I can remember, as long as my daddy can remember. To end up this way. Dead in your own store and by your own hand. Who could have seen this coming?”
I knew who should have seen it coming, but I kept that thought to myself.
Tommy Lee was chasing rubbery chicken around his plate with a fork.
“Your egg from this morning must have hatched.” I walked across the room and set the pile of bank envelopes by the computer.
“This hospital must have an inexhaustible supply,” Tommy Lee said.
Patsy raised her head from a magazine and gave me a sympathetic smile. “Tough morning, huh?”
“I’ve had better.”
An unspoken cue ran between Tommy Lee and his wife. Patsy stood up and curled the magazine in her hand. “I’ll leave you two to talk business. How’s your Dad?”
“About the same. The doctor hopes the antibiotics will start making more headway today. I stopped in before coming here. Mom’s sitting with him.”
Mom had just sat down and begun knitting when I’d arrived. She’d given me the report that Mildred Cosgrove’s funeral had gone without a hitch.
“I’ll say hello to her if that’s okay,” Patsy said.
“She’d love the company.”
Patsy closed the door, leaving Tommy Lee and me to talk in private.
I sat in a chair next to his bed. “I really screwed up big time.”
Tommy Lee gave up on his chicken and pushed the plate aside. “What else could you have done?”
“A thousand things. For starters, I could have taken Wakefield in with me to watch Doug. I could have paid more attention to what Doug was doing. But no, I had to go in there like the cock of the walk, expecting Doug to fall at my feet and confess everything because I’m such a wonderful detective.”
“And I should have invested in Microsoft when Bill Gates was just another geek. Hindsight’s perfect, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing to whatever’s over and done. Especially in police work.”
Tommy Lee’s one eye fixed me with a hard stare. “You have to make too many split-second decisions based on too little information to try and predict human behavior. Yes, if you’d arrested Doug the second you walked in the store, he’d be alive. If I’d arrested him yesterday here at the hospital, he’d be alive. We both made decisions based on information we had and did what we thought was best at the time. That’s what a policeman does. Sometimes the decisions turn out to be wrong.”
“In this case, dead wrong.”
“That’s right. And no amount of wishing or second-guessing is going to change that. We’ll both have to live with it. But in the final analysis, Doug is dead because he got into a situation he couldn’t see any way out of. We can sit here and feel sorry for him and ourselves till the cows come home, or we can concentrate on catching the scumbags who really killed him. Now let me see those checks.”
I handed him the statements from May postmarked only a few days earlier.
Tommy Lee flipped through the pages slowly, and then examined the five checks that had been enclosed with the statement. “The checks are made out to pharmaceutical companies and signed by Doug.”
“That’s the story with all the envelopes. And deposits are either recorded as cash or wired in.”
“Some transactions are wired out. Some of the numbers repeat.”
I opened one of the envelopes and ran my finger down the lines. “I spotted funds going back and forth between the accounts.”
“Always different banks I bet.” Tommy Lee folded the sheets and replaced them.
“Why?”
“I think your first guess was accurate. Doug was buying drugs that could be laundered on the street. Cash is coming in and out in small enough amounts that those transactions stay beneath the radar.”
“And the funds wired out?”
“They probably wind up in the accounts of individuals who don’t want their names on a check. Then the bigger profits from the street sales go straight to the muscle behind the operation.”
Tommy Lee’s theory sounded right on the money. “And you’ve got a plan to uncover the muscle?” I asked.
“I already know who the muscle is, and you do too if you think about it. Organized crime.”
“Here in Gainesboro?”
Tommy Lee sailed the bank envelope back to me like a Frisbee. “I told you we were in over our heads.”
Hydraulic pools were one thing. Being thrown in a hydraulic while wearing concrete shoes was another. “Maybe we should give this case to the feds.”
“We will. But Doug Larson was one of us. And Crystal Hodges lost her life trying to find justice for her brother. They were our people. Mountain people. And I want someone to learn a hard lesson. You don’t come into these hills and screw us over without paying a price.”
The old warrior may have been shot and hooked to an IV, but if it was Tommy Lee versus the Mob, I knew where to place my bet.
His mention of Doug reminded me. “Doug said something else right before he shot himself. ‘They already knew you suspected me.’ Nobody but us knew about Doug except for Susan and she wouldn’t have told anyone.”
Tommy Lee took a deep breath. “Nobody but us and the state of Florida.”
“What?”
“We added Doug’s name to the email you sent Roy Spring. We wanted to know if his name had come up in their investigation.” Tommy Lee chewed on his lower lip. “Damn. Even if Spring’s clean, he has to share his information with everybody from his supervisors to the DEA.”
An idea flashed through my head. “If you ask me, two can play at this game.” I moved to the computer. “If somebody in Florida is so interested in what we’re doing up here, I say we tell them.”
Tommy Lee laughed. “I’m reading your mind.”
Together we composed an update of our case. I wrote that Doug Larson had been uncovered as the source for the pills that Artie Lincoln had been selling. He’d been forging prescriptions through the hospital, his own drugstore, and possibly area nursing homes. Also, Doug had probably killed Lincoln and Crystal Hodges. We expected a lab report to confirm the girl’s murder. Doug may have been acting out of fear for the safety of his son who is incarcerated in Central Prison. When confronted with the charges this morning, Doug had committed suicide. As an officer had attempted to serve the arrest warrant, Doug had refused to open the door and was seen running to the rear of his store where he locked the safe and then grabbed a pistol from his cash register. He suffered a single self-inflicted shot to the head. We suspect more incriminating evidence might be in his safe and are bringing in an expert to open it tomorrow.
“The safe’s the bait,” I said.
“Yeah. We’ll have the store staked out.”
“I don’t think Roy Spring’s dirty.”
Tommy Lee shook his head. “I don’t know. Somebody’s been staying a step ahead of us. Send the message and then don’t contact him by any other computer. We know this one’s been heavily fire-walled, but we don’t know who has access to the one in Delray Beach. If you need to talk to him again, use this phone so I can hear the conversation.”
“In case something happens to me?”
“I’ve got your back, remember?”
I hit send and then phoned the Delray Beach Police Department. Roy Spring was out on a case, but the dispatcher radioed him that the email message would be waiting.
“Now what?” I asked.
Tommy Lee got up and rolled his IV back to the bed. “Log out.” He sat on the edge of the mattress and glanced at the wall clock. “Nearly one. No need to stake out the drugstore till closer to dark. Nobody’s going to break into a store in town until the other stores have closed. I’ll have Reece board up the front door and release the deputy. You take these bank statements to Special Agent Lindsay Boyce at the FBI in Asheville. She’s expecting both you and the statements.”
I was surprised at the speed of the appointment, but part of me was glad for the extra help, especially the resources of the FBI. “When did you make that appointment?”
“I didn’t. I told Patsy to call from her car while you and I were talking.” He ignored my confused expression and stared at the empty bedside table. “Damn. She took my last doughnut.”
Chapter Twenty
Lindsay Boyce opened the door of a small conference room and motioned me inside. The round oak table and four matching chairs could have been found in any bank branch in Asheville. In fact, the entire décor of the FBI office wasn’t much different from the Wachovia offices a few blocks away. We could have been closing a loan.
Special agent Boyce reminded me of Elaine Vincent, who had shown me the video of Crystal Hodges only a few days earlier. Both walked with a confidence born of training and achievement—Elaine from her years in the military and Lindsay from surviving the rigors of Quantico. Lindsay had the body of a runner and I estimated her age to be around thirty, a few years younger than me. I had no doubt she could break me in two.
She took the near chair, where she could be between me and the door. “I understand Sheriff Wadkins has some bank accounts he’d like us to run.”
I slid the envelopes across the table. “What did he tell you? I’m surprised you set this meeting up so quickly.”
Lindsay laid the bank statements to one side. “Aunt Patsy told me what you found in the safe.”
“Aunt Patsy?”
Lindsay smiled. “She’s my mom’s sister. I try not to refer to Sheriff Wadkins as Uncle Tummy—that’s the way I pronounced his name as a kid.”
“Tommy Lee didn’t tell me he had a relative in the Bureau.”
“I’m out in San Francisco. Mother died five years ago. We’d lost touch, but I heard about the shooting.”
I remembered Patsy’s family had lived in California, and five years ago I’d still been with the Charlotte Police Department.
Lindsay leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “Two days ago Tommy Lee called asking for any information I had on a DEA operation in Florida. When he told me why, I got permission to travel on the government’s nickel.”
Now I understood why I was sitting in an FBI office. If Tommy Lee and I were in over our heads, he’d want to deal with someone he could trust. Lindsay Boyce wouldn’t betray Uncle Tummy.
She patted the stack of envelopes. “You think Mr. Larson was financing drug purchases through these accounts?”
I shrugged. “If we’re talking about organized crime, Doug might have been using the accounts to balance his books while moving extra pills through his store. But you probably know more about organized crime’s financing schemes.”
“That’s what got me my ticket here.” Lindsay pushed back from the table and relaxed. “I find it interesting that Larson was a small-town pharmacist.”
“Why?”
“Are you familiar with the term blowback?”
As a policeman, the first thing that popped in my mind was the small blood spatters often found on the hand and gun of a suicide victim with a head wound. I’d seen blowback only hours earlier on the hand of Doug Larson as he lay dead in his own store.
When I hesitated to answer, Lindsay continued. “Blowback is when some action has bad consequences that no one anticipated. In this case, I’m going back over forty years to when the President and Congress did something nice for senior citizens.”
“Are you talking about Medicare? My father’s medical bills would have bankrupted us without it. As a matter of fact, I enrolled both him and my mother in Part D last year. What’s the blowback?”
“In a word—fraud. Fraud to the tune of thirty billion dollars a year.”
The enormity of the number staggered me. “Thirty billion?”
Lindsay smiled at my obvious shock. “And rising. We estimate ten percent of all claims are now fraudulent. Last year the government spent over three hundred billion on Medicare. You do the math.”
“That’s incredible,” I said.
“Not really. Fraud used to be by individuals, but in the past decade organized groups have become more sophisticated and vicious. We’ve seen rings take over the healthcare system for an entire area. They usually start with fraudulent drug claims because that’s the easiest and quickest money to make. When Tommy Lee told me a man who’d been an honest pharmacist all his life started forging prescriptions, I got interested.”
“You’ve seen this before?”
Lindsay nodded. “You mentioned Medicare Part D. That’s triggered its own blowback by squeezing down drug prices, which might be fine for the big chains like Wal-Mart and CVS, but puts the small, locally owned pharmacy in a terrible bind. Prescriptions for which Medicare might have paid four dollars to dispense have been cut to a dollar and a half. And Medicare Part D is administered by private insurance companies, some of whom delay the reimbursement checks to the pharmacists for months. So we’re now seeing fraud occurring to a disproportionate degree in small towns and rural areas.”
“I know Doug was having a tough time.”
“But when Tommy Lee said Doug began forging prescriptions at the same time his son was assaulted in prison—well, that’s quite a coincidence.”
I laughed. “Don’t tell me. You don’t like coincidences.”
“Runs in the family.”
“If drugs aren’t the point, then what are these rings after?”
Lindsay held up her empty palms. “It’s simple. They want the whole damn thing. Once they get their foot in the door through the drugs, they expand to other healthcare providers who get reimbursed by Medicare. False claims are like printing money. They gain control of area nursing homes, home healthcare services, medical laboratories, and equipment companies, anybody who can feed from the Medicare trough. Violence li
ke Larson’s case is rare. There are plenty of people either hurting for money or greedy for a fast buck. But once they cross the line and these rings get their hooks in them, they can’t get out.”
Laurel County Memorial’s efforts to combat fraud and theft took on new significance. I thought of Artie Lincoln and Crystal Hodges. Maybe he’d been recruiting her to do more than skim a few OxyContin pills. A smart girl like Crystal could work her way up into the facility’s administrative staff and open up lucrative doors. Multiply Crystal across the many nursing homes, hospitals, and clinics in our area and the scale of the operation became huge. Millions of dollars of fraudulent claims pouring into Medicare—everything from lab tests that were never run to wheelchairs that were never delivered.
And I saw another possibility. “A ring like that could be run from anywhere. From Detroit to Delray Beach.”
Lindsay smiled at my not-so-subtle locations. “Anything’s possible. That’s why I’m hoping these bank accounts will get us one level higher up the food chain.”
“So Tommy Lee did ask you to check out Lieutenant Spring and Fletcher Shaw.”
“He mentioned several names.” Lindsay got up from the table. “Perhaps it would be better if you asked him yourself.”
When I returned to Laurel County Memorial, I found Dr. Madison and Susan in my father’s room.
“Where’s my mother?”
“She went to the cafeteria for coffee.” Susan spoke in an emotionless monotone. “We wanted to do a more thorough examination and she preferred to be out of the way.”
“You don’t like the way things are going, do you?”
Susan turned to Madison. He set my father’s chart in the holder at the foot of the bed. “The antibiotics are having an effect. But they’re extremely powerful and place an added strain on the body.”
“You mean his heart,” I said.
“The cardiologist was in earlier. He’s determined your father’s left side’s pumping at only fifty percent efficiency. That creates pulmonary fluid. The furosemide helps, but increased urine formation has put a strain on his kidneys.”
Final Undertaking: A Buryin' Barry Mystery (Buryin' Barry Series) Page 21