“Why did you arrest Joey Silva?”
“We wanted to pressure him and offer him a deal; all he had to do was tell us what was going to happen, and how we could stop it. We told him what would happen to him if he didn’t go along.”
“What happened?”
“We made him the offer, one so good that he couldn’t possibly turn it down. Essentially he’d have immunity for every awful thing he’s done in his life, and that covers a lot of ground. Just tell us about the explosives. And he turned it down.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because, and this is just my opinion, so I could be wrong … he didn’t know what the hell we were talking about.”
The SIMMONS INSURANCE AGENCY sign seems a strange homage to a forgotten murder victim.
It makes it seem as if William Simmons, totally forgotten in life, lives on through this business. I doubt he would be impressed or touched.
The agency occupies a small office on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, and currently has a SORRY, WE’RE OUT sign on the front door. I peer in, though, and I see a man sitting behind the desk. He sees me as well, then waves and gets up to open the door.
“Mr. Wilkinson?”
He nods. “Yes. Come on in.”
“I’m Lieutenant Brock, I…”
He nods. “I know. I recognized you from television. Have a seat.”
I sit down and accept his offer of a Diet Coke. “So you purchased this agency from William Simmons?”
He shakes his head. “No. A group of insurance companies had ownership after Mr. Simmons left. I have two other agencies down near Matawan, and wanted to expand into this area.” He smiles. “Bergen County is where the money is.”
“So you bought it from them?”
“I did. Two of those companies retain part ownership … fifteen percent each.”
“Did you ever meet Mr. Simmons?”
Another shake of the head. “No. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know what happened to him until about an hour ago. When you said you wanted to talk about him, I Googled his name. Terrible situation.”
“But you didn’t change the name of the business. Why?”
“Just for continuity’s sake. His customers knew that name. Very often, when you sell someone a policy, especially life insurance, you don’t hear from them for a very long time. I mean, until someone dies, there’s no reason, right? So people knew that name, and if they ever needed to contact us, that would make it easier for them to find us.”
“Would most of his clients have had a personal relationship with him?”
He shrugs. “Some, probably not most. But keep in mind, when I got the place, he had been out of it for a long while. The insurance companies were running it.”
“So what I want to know is whether you have ever noticed any unusual activity on accounts that carried over from his day.”
“Unusual activity?”
“Yes. Significant payouts, more of them than you’d expect, something like that. Anything ever happen that caused you to take notice, something out of the ordinary?”
He thinks for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I could run the numbers now, but if anything I think there’s been less than my other offices. Insurance is a numbers business; if there was anything unusual it would stand out. But definitely nothing that has caused me to take notice.”
I ask more questions, but I’m basically floundering in the dark and not getting anywhere. Wilkinson is far removed from William Simmons, and though he inherited many of his clients, he’s not noticed anything unusual about any of them.
I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing except filling up my day.
I check my voice mails, and there’s a message from Nate telling me to come back to the office, that we “have something to talk about.”
I would rather he said we have someone to shoot.
So I do as I’m told and head back to the office. Nate wastes no time, and starts by saying, “There were one thousand, one hundred and fourteen murders in New Jersey in the last three years.”
“Have we solved any of them?”
“I have,” he says. “You, not so much. But overall, forty-eight percent went unsolved. A total of five hundred thirty-four.”
“Okay.”
“Of the unsolved ones, eighty-one were in Bergen County.”
“Seems high,” I say, since Bergen is one of the more upscale counties in the state. There is very little gang violence, which can normally account for a high murder rate.
He nods. “It is. Bergen County has about ten percent of the population of the state, but fifteen percent of the unsolved murders.”
The numbers he’s quoting are surprising but not shocking. Hopefully, this is not just a statistics class, and he’s going to get somewhere. “You approaching a point?” I ask.
“Stay with me. Bergen Hospital is one of six in the county, but half the victims in the unsolved murders were brought there. It’s the largest hospital, but not by that much.”
“I’m not following,” I say, because I’m not.
“What if they were using these victims’ presence at the hospital to fake drug orders? We get their records, and maybe we find out that they were using their identities as part of the fraud.”
I shake my head. “We saw Simmons’ records, and that didn’t happen with him.”
“But maybe he was the exception. Maybe something stood out about him, which made using him impossible. Maybe someone noticed something, which is why Lewinsky and Silva remembered him.”
He pauses, and says, “Maybe Rita Carlisle noticed something.”
Maybe she did.
In order to test Nate’s theory, we’ll need the hospital records of the victims.
That presents some problems. We could get a subpoena, but that would take a while, and would impact our ability to do it quietly. I can’t go to Galvis, who has moved into Lewinsky’s job at least on an interim basis, because he is very much under suspicion since Travis Mauer turned out to be real.
So it’s back to the well that is Dr. Steven Cassel. He will resist and complain, but he’ll do what I want, because he knows that I know about his affair with Rita Carlisle. I would feel guilty about taking advantage of him this way, if I were the “feel guilty” type. I’m not, and I doubt that I ever was.
He just about moans when I show up at his office, even though I had called and said I was on my way. “You’re taking advantage of me, Lieutenant.”
I nod. “I wasn’t sure you noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed. What is it now?”
I hand him the list of murder victims that were first brought to Bergen Hospital, more than forty people. Some were DOA, but many were not, although if Nate’s theory is right, that shouldn’t matter. It’s their names and identities that were utilized.
He looks at the list briefly and asks, “What is this?”
I tell him what it is, and ask if the names are familiar to him.
“No, but that’s not surprising. Most of this is handled in the emergency room; I’m only called in if specific surgery is called for. I may well have operated on a few of them, but I also may not ever have known their names, other than to see them on a chart.”
“I need their hospital records.”
He laughs at the ridiculousness of the request. “You do? All of them?”
“Yes. Humorous as it may seem to you.”
“Come on, Lieutenant, this is crazy. I’m not in charge of records. Why don’t you just ask Mitchell Galvis, and he’ll tell the relevant departments to get them for you.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
He reacts with surprise. “Are you telling me you don’t trust Mitchell Galvis?”
“I’m not telling you anything. I’m asking you to do this. You’ve been here a long time; you must have friends in the records department, or whatever it’s called. You can do it, and you can do it quietly.”
“This will not be nearly as easy as you describe.
”
“Which is why they pay you the big bucks,” I say.
“I never imagined that when I committed my indiscretion that someday I would be blackmailed by a state police officer.”
“Yet here we are. Life works in mysterious ways.”
He sighs. “I’ll do what I can.”
“And as quickly as you can,” I say, starting to get up.
“When you came in I was hoping you were just going to ask me about Travis Mauer. I did not expect a new assignment.”
I had forgotten that I had given him Mauer’s records and asked him to find out if in fact Mauer was fictitious, and did not exist. Now that we have learned through Jessie that Mauer was real, I didn’t think to follow up.
“What did you find out about Mauer?” I ask.
“I checked with the doctors and nurses that were listed on his records,” he says. “And you were right.”
“What does that mean?”
He shakes his head. “The guy was never here. No such patient.”
Holy shit.
Dr. Steven Cassel lied to me.
There can’t be any question about that. It is inconceivable that he went to the doctors and nurses that treated Travis Mauer for an extended period of time, only to have them tell him that Mauer was never there. He was there, and they would know it.
Like everything else in this case, though, there are a number of possible meanings to Cassel’s lie. The most innocent version is that he never checked with those people at all; that he got busy and just went with what I had told him I believed in the first place.
The more likely interpretation is that Cassel is dirty, that he was Lewinsky’s coconspirator in the drug operation, that he was the person Lewinsky told about his questioning by us, that he was the person who alerted Joey Silva to it, and that he was involved with getting Lewinsky killed.
All this time we thought it was Galvis, and it could be him as well, though I would think it is unlikely that a conspiracy would have that many pieces. There are law firms with less partners than that. My guess is that Cassel told Galvis that Mauer was fake, and Galvis just fed it back to me.
The other damning fact is that Rita Carlisle was having an affair with Cassel, so it makes sense that she learned what was going on from him, perhaps by accident. Either way, she paid for it with her life.
At this point I can’t trust either one of them, but if only one of them is guilty, I think it’s Cassel.
I call Nate and Jessie and tell them what I’ve learned, and I direct them to get a warrant so that we can electronically surveil Cassel. At this point we have surveillance on half the citizens of New Jersey, but we don’t really have a choice.
I also tell them to get an urgent subpoena for the records of the murder victims on the list I gave to Cassel. I didn’t let on to him that I no longer trust him to get it for me, because I obviously didn’t want him to think he’s under suspicion.
But there is no longer an option to get the records quietly. If Nate is right, then a murder victim is an opening for drug records to be faked, and drugs to be stolen. And an explosion in a crowded place would be an ideal way to accumulate a lot of victims at once.
There is no time to waste. Today is the fourteenth.
We’re two days away.
The warrant for the surveillance of Cassel is gotten quickly.
More importantly, Bradley gets a judge’s order to expedite the retrieval of the hospital records on an emergency basis, and hospital administrative employees are served first thing in the morning and ordered to immediately get those records.
I’m sure that Galvis, and probably Cassel, are aware, or about to be aware, of what we’ve done. That’s unfortunate, but at this point there’s nothing we can do about it. There is simply no way to get the information without attracting attention.
Much to my surprise, I get a call from Mitchell Galvis shortly after the subpoena is served. “What the hell is going on?” he asks.
“You want to rephrase the question?”
“A bunch of storm troopers came in here this morning, demanding my people drop everything and get records of hospital patients, some of them two and three years old.”
“So?”
“So why is this happening?”
“Because I want records of hospital patients, some of them two and three years old. And I want your people to drop everything and get them for me. Which part didn’t you understand?”
“I thought we had a working relationship, Lieutenant. Rather than causing this kind of chaos here, you could have come to me.”
“Yes, I could have, but I didn’t.”
“Well, I don’t like it or appreciate it,” he says.
If Galvis is one of the drug conspirators, then he is giving an Academy Award performance on this call. And I have to respect it; instead of curling up in a panic, he’s taking the offensive.
“Let me ask you a question. You told me that Travis Mauer was never really a patient at your hospital, that he never really existed. Where did you get that information? Did you track it down yourself?”
He hesitates. “No. Someone told it to me.”
“Who might that be?” I ask.
“I’m not sure I should share that with you.” His tone has gone from aggressive to worried and unsure.
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Galvis. If you don’t share it with me, the next thing you’re going to share is a jail cell.” It’s an empty threat, at least at this point, but I’m hoping it will intimidate him.
“Is the information not accurate?” he asks, possibly stalling for time.
“Who told it to you, Mr. Galvis?”
“It was told in confidence.”
“This is the last time I’m going to ask. Who told it to you?”
“Our head of surgery. Dr. Steven Cassel.”
All we can do now is wait for the records.
If they confirm Nate’s theory, then we’ll arrest a bunch of people, Cassel and Philly DeSimone at the top of the list. Many of the arrests won’t stick, but we’ll at least be able to keep them in jail tomorrow. And for what it’s worth, tomorrow is the sixteenth.
We’ve sent a couple of officers over to the hospital to make sure proper attention is being paid to the collection of the records, and they confirm that it is. The age of some of them, and the sheer volume of hospital records in general, makes it a difficult and time-consuming task, even though they’re electronic.
The subpoena provided for a 6:00 P.M. deadline, and the word comes in that they’ll be able to meet it. Bradley orders a bunch of officers to stay around to help Jessie, Nate, and me go through it. He’s pulling out all the stops, not all of them conventional. For example, he has a brother-in-law who’s a doctor, and he brings him in as well, to help with the technical stuff.
They beat the six o’clock deadline by fifteen minutes, and it takes another half hour to print out copies for those of us who don’t want to view them on the computer. Then we all dive into it, and about ninety minutes later we have the answer.
We were wrong.
There is absolutely no evidence that the victim’s names were in any way used to serve as recipients for drugs that were never dispensed. On the contrary; they received very few.
There is a palpable feeling of depression in the room; we had high hopes for this one, and they were completely unjustified. It’s possible that all the records were faked to conceal a fraud, at some point in the past, but I don’t think any of us really believe it. In any event, we couldn’t come close to proving it even if it were true.
Nate’s response sums it up best. “Shit,” he says.
The group breaks up and Jessie and I head to her house. I’m driving, but I have to admit that I’m pretty much lost in thought, and not paying the attention that I should be.
The flashing red lights on the car behind us make me somewhat more attentive. I pull over so that the cop can come and tell me exactly what it is I did wrong. Just what I’m in the mood for now.
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The local cop comes up to the window and says, “Do you realize you went through a stop sign a couple of blocks back?”
“No, officer, I didn’t see it,” I say.
He looks carefully at me, trying to make out my face in the dim light. Finally, he says, “You’re Doug Brock.”
I nod. “I’m aware of that.”
“I really admire what you did,” he says, and I don’t think he’s talking about my missing the stop sign. “My name is Ted Rizzo.”
“Nice to meet you, Ted. This is Jessie Allen.”
Jessie and Ted exchange hellos. This is going on a bit longer than I am in the mood for.
Ted smiles. “I guess I’ll let you off with a warning. Try and see the stop signs next time.”
“Thanks, Ted, I will. Have a good night.”
I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and can’t seem to get back to sleep. Instead I play the entire day over again in my mind, including the fiasco with the hospital records, right up to my getting stopped for not seeing the stop sign.
And then I sit up in bed and yell, out loud even though Jessie is sleeping, “Holy shit!”
When you’re a cop, your office is always open.
We have to keep the same hours as the world at large, which is twenty-four/seven.
For some reason, my yelling “Holy shit!” in the middle of the night has woken Jessie, and by the time she can ask me what is wrong, I’m already up and getting dressed.
“I think I know what’s going on,” I say.
“Going on where?”
“With the case. At the hospital. I can’t wait until morning to find out.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to say; not until I know for sure. I’m going down to the station.”
“I’m going with you.”
I’m dressed before Jessie, only because I have a head start. Bobo seems not to be impressed by the activity; I saw him open one enormous eye and then go back to sleep.
Before we leave I call Nate, who answers on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”
I can tell that his mouth is full. “Middle of the night snack?” I ask.
Fade to Black Page 19