T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril

by T. Lynn Ocean

  “Tell me, Jersey Barnes …” He poured syrup on the stack for a full ten seconds, until the little glass syrup pitcher was half-empty. “Are you this abrasive with everyone you encounter, or just me?”

  I finished a bite of sandwich before answering and took my time to do so. “Nope, not everyone. Only con men.”

  “I’m a con man?”

  “If I recall, you are the one who suggested that we work together on this Argo’s thing. Said we could share information, help each other out. Yet all you’ve been doing is keeping tabs on me. You’re certainly not sharing.” I drank my coffee. Ate a bite of egg sandwich. “You want to get something for nothing. Which makes you a con man.”

  Brad burst out laughing. “My grade-school teachers always noted on report cards that I didn’t play well with others.”

  At least he didn’t take himself too seriously. I gave in to a smile. “I don’t really have a good reason to stay mad, do I. You’re just doing your job.”

  He stuffed a forkful of soppy pancake in his mouth and nodded. “Right. And I don’t really have a good reason to stay mad at you, either, do I.”

  “Nope,” I said. “But there is something about us that rubs each other the wrong way.”

  He wiped syrup from his lips, stared at mine. “Definitely something.”

  We finished our food and coffee, and Brad agreed to remove the tracker he’d put on the corpse caddy. He put money on the table, telling me he’d expense the meal. “Next time you want to expense a meal with me,” I said, “how about a lobster dinner?”

  He asked what I’d learned at CC’s Hair Boutique.

  “Well, crap.” I threw up my hands. “I start to like you a teensy bit, and you go back to being a jerk.”

  The waitress returned with change, and we walked out to a brightly lit parking lot. Brad retrieved a Swiss Army knife from his Murano, got on his back, scooted beneath the front end of my hearse. “Go easy on me, Jersey,” he said through a grunt. “We both want the same thing.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He rolled from beneath the hearse, straightened up, brushed himself off. Held out the tracking device to prove he’d removed it. “We both want to figure out who’s the entrepreneur behind this prescription drug ring and put him out of business.”

  I showed him my cocky smile. “Nice pep talk, Brad. Translation: Your girl didn’t get a thing from CC’s hair place, did she.”

  He did the lopsided grin. “Nope. Except she got her roots done, whatever that means. Went back two days later for a haircut. Expense-reported both.”

  I found my keys and climbed into the wagon. “Let’s meet tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything I learned at CC’s—where, by the way, Alex took care of my split ends. Forty-two dollars for a wash, cut, and blow-dry.” I held out a hand, palm up. “Plus tip.”

  Mumbling like Spud often does, Brad found his wallet and passed me fifty bucks. Hey, I have to take perks where I can get them. Especially when I’m working for free.

  He stuffed the wallet back in a pocket. “I’d also like copies of whatever you carried out of Soup’s place.”

  “No can do,” I said. “Besides, it’s a memoir he’s working on. Nothing you’d care to look at.”

  Brad leaned through the open car door and kissed me on the mouth. “Right,” he said, and vanished before I could protest. Or decide to kiss him back.

  I shut my door. “He really should stop kissing me,” I said to nobody.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The next morning as I fixed breakfast, Cracker acted clingy, following me around and propping his big, wide body against my legs the second I stopped moving. With Ox being out of town and Spud spending so much time with Fran, the dog probably felt neglected.

  I squatted on the floor at dog level. “Whazzup, stinky breath?” He went for my face, tongue lapping and tail wagging, and didn’t stop until I’d fallen over laughing and rolled around on the floor with him. I pushed the animal off me and gave him a final pat on his backside. Appeased after some quality one-on-one time with a human, Cracker stretched out in a streak of sunlight that filtered through the kitchen balcony doors and promptly started to snore. If only my days were so easy.

  I folded my limbs into a chair at the kitchen table and spread out the report Soup had just e-mailed to me. It would have taken me weeks—lots of legwork and time-consuming research—to amass the same intelligence. Thankfully, Soup is an expert at finding the right databases to hack. His way is much quicker.

  Eating a cup of yogurt with fresh pineapple chunks, I learned that the Divine Image Group doctors—Leon William Haines, Jonathan O. Rosch, and Michael J. Pratt—had attended medical school together at Duke University in Durham. Not only were they in the same fraternity, they were also roomies. After completing internships at different hospitals and clinics, they had reconnected to open the Divine Image Group in Wilmington. Quite an impressive undertaking for thirty-year-olds. Since then, they’d moved locations twice, ultimately buying a patch of undeveloped dirt and erecting their own building. Collectively, the three looked like saints on paper. Successful. Altruistic. Positions on several boards of directors. An anthology of awards. Articles published in medical journals. Guest speakers at conventions. The group appeared too perfect. Until I reached the part about their personal lives. Leo was the only one still married to his original wife. The other two had three divorces and several kids between them. And Jonathan had a public intoxication arrest on his record.

  Their financials piqued my interest, too. Soup found no evidence of scholarships or wealthy families. They started as three ordinary kids from middle-class America who wanted to be doctors when they grew up. All three paid off their student loans in full, immediately after graduation. They also opened a joint savings account that was later used to start their medical practice.

  I leafed through the final pages of the printout: spreadsheets of prescriptions they’d written over the previous four years, broken down by the drug’s prescribing physician and category, or schedule. There were no schedule 1 drugs, but there were plenty of schedule 2’s such as amphetamines, morphine, and oxycodone.

  I dialed Soup’s home number, figuring that he’d be at one of his keyboards, venturing through cyberspace. He was.

  “Can you get me any patient information?” I said when he answered. “A master list of Divine Image Group patient names would be great.”

  “Your outpouring of gratitude overwhelms me.”

  “Thank you for the info,” I said. “Can you get me any patient names?”

  The keyboard sounds stopped. “Here’s the thing. Since cosmetic procedures are rarely covered by insurance, there’s not a data dump to follow. And even though health insurance will cover psychiatric treatment, rich people don’t want it noted in their medical files that they’re seeing a shrink. All of a sudden, a bad mood turns into a preexisting condition. You follow? Medical privacy is bullshit. A diagnosis of mental problems, for example, could be used against a person in the future for all sorts of things. Child custody hearings. A new job position. A weapons permit. You name it.”

  “So…”

  “So the only way you’re going to get a patient list is to burgle the Divine Image Group offices. They’re probably computerized, but they’re using a self-contained PC with no Internet access.”

  I asked Soup if he could go through all the local pharmacy databases and pull patient names by the three prescribing doctors.

  “And you’re paying me how much?”

  “Never mind,” I said, but I think he’d already hung up.

  I don’t mind a little breaking and entering now and then. I could always ask Trish to help. Or take the direct approach and boldly confront the three medicos. I had enough to make them squirm. At the least, I’d stir the pot and possibly dredge up a few morsels from the bottom.

  Spud and Fran clomped up the stairs from the Block and beeped their way into my kitchen. They wore matching T-shirts. In block letters, hers said, HOK
EY. His said, POKEY.

  “We need to get an elevator in this building, for crying out loud,” Spud said.

  Fran pinched his butt. “Walking the stairs will keep you in shape for more strenuous things,” she said, winking at me.

  He didn’t catch the innuendo. “I get any more strenuous, my heart’s gonna blow a valve.”

  I cringed and waited for another Fran comment. Spud had teed it up—a big fat white ball—and she would be compelled to swing at it.

  “It’s a different valve I’m thinking about, baby.”

  If only a person could shut their ears like they shut their eyes. It was way too early in the morning to visualize Spud and Fran having sex.

  Still not clueing in, Spud told her that he didn’t want any of his valves to blow and, thankfully, changed the topic.

  “Thanks for leaving these papers out for us,” he said, pointing at the stack of Green Table transcripts with the tip of his walking cane. “Frannie and I read them last night.”

  I hadn’t left them out on purpose. “You read them all?”

  The cane went back to the floor and Spud used it to settle himself into a kitchen chair. “Yeah, and we’ve got some theories for you about the doctors.”

  Fran nodded. “We figure somebody is blackmailing them.”

  I did, too.

  Spud’s mustache twitched from side to side. “Question is, why would three successful doctors start doling out drugs like a Shriners clown tossing candy at a parade?”

  I didn’t know.

  “According to Soup, they have plenty of money,” Fran said. “Their finances look good.”

  “You talked to Soup?”

  Carrying a basket of mini blueberry muffins, she dropped down next to my father. “Sure did, sweetie. He called last night around ten-thirty to let you know that he e-mailed a detailed background report on the Divine Group.” She pointed at my report. “Looks like you’ve already printed it. Anyhow, Soup and I chatted awhile.”

  “You chatted?” Soup doesn’t normally “chat.” Not with me.

  Eyebrows arched high, Fran nodded. “Such a nice man, and so smart, too. I’m going to cook him a pot of homemade red curried lentil soup. It’s a shame that Jennifer isn’t around anymore to do for him. He really misses that girl.”

  I think my jaw fell open. “Who’s Jennifer?”

  “She was his girlfriend.”

  “Soup had a girlfriend?”

  “Why, they’ve been dating on and off for months. He took her to Amsterdam.” Fran breathed out a falsetto sigh. “Unfortunately, that’s where Jennifer met the famous photographer and dumped Soup.”

  I really needed to work on my friendship skills, I decided.

  “I didn’t climb those stairs to listen to girl-talk, for crying out loud,” Spud said. “We’re investigating a peccadillo.”

  It had to be a calendar word.

  “A peccadillo is actually a petty misdoing,” Fran said. “This thing is much more serious than a peccadillo.”

  Spud muttered something about spending ten minutes learning how to pronounce the word, and what good is the stupid calendar anyhow if the words of the day don’t work into his sentences?

  The two of them just might be helpful, I figured, if I could keep them focused on the topic at hand. Especially since I couldn’t conjecture with Ox. “You guys said you had several theories. Blackmail—we all agree on that. What else?”

  “They ain’t only writing bogus prescriptions,” Spud said. “They’re paying out money to somebody. Probably the same person, the one they keep talking about when they’re eating at Argo’s. They never say his name. They might not know his name.”

  “Right.” Fran fed my father a bit of muffin. “Which makes your daddy think the doctors had a set dollar amount to pay.”

  Spud washed down the muffin with a swallow of Yoo-hoo. “The way I figure, they couldn’t come up with all the money at once without causing questions from their wives. So they gave what they could from personal accounts. They set up a schedule to pay each month out of their office account. But that still didn’t satisfy the debt, ’least not soon enough for the blackmailer. So he got them to agree to start supplying the drugs, too. Sounds like he’s got ’em by the cojones.”

  My father stated the obvious, which I hadn’t quite put together yet. And it made perfect sense. “At which point,” I said, “Morgan’s mother and father somehow got involved in the drug side of things and were basically dealing at Argo’s.”

  “Not necessarily, kid.” Spud’s mustache did a miniature version of the electric slide. “The mother, Rosemary, for sure. Maybe she did it to help out the shrink, since they were supposedly tight. Chat chums. He was her sexless squeeze.”

  Sexless squeeze? That wasn’t a calendar word.

  “Or maybe she was hooked on dope,” he continued. “The mother could have got caught up in the mess for any number of reasons. Not so sure about Garland, though. Put it all together, especially the fact that he’s the one who bugged that table, it makes me think he wasn’t in on it. I don’t think he knew what the doctors and his wife were up to.”

  I wasn’t used to my father making sense. He caught me appraising him.

  “What, for crying out loud?”

  I snatched a muffin. “Nothing, just thinking. Maybe Garland was doing exactly what I’m doing: trying to figure out what his wife had gotten involved in and how the doctors fit into the picture.”

  Fran fluffed her hair. “Your daddy used to be an acclaimed detective, don’t you know.”

  “A detective?” I knew he’d spent his career in Lexington, Kentucky—home of the University of Kentucky. Since suddenly coming back into my life a few years ago, my father hadn’t wanted to talk about the past. We never discussed my mother, my childhood, or why he’d walked out on us. And we never discussed his working days. I’d always assumed his shifts as a cop were relatively mundane, dealing with petty crimes and domestic disturbances.

  Fran fed him another half of a mini muffin. “Why, they did a big story about him solving the flip-flop killer case. Man raped girls all over the country. He’d always take their shoes and leave a pair of flip-flops at the scene. What magazine was that article in, sweetie?”

  “Police and Security News.” Spud’s smile returned. “Was no big deal, for crying out loud.”

  Fran gazed at my father as though he were royalty. “You tracked him and found him and arrested him.”

  I stared at Spud. “You did?” My father—the Spud I knew—leaned more toward troublemaking, poker-playing, alligator-shooting, often illogical, bumbling and grumbling, sometimes crotchety old man. Not only did I need to work on my friendship skills, apparently I needed to work on my family communication skills, too.

  Spud waved a hand. “Was no big deal, for crying out loud.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  Spud threw back his head to get to the bottom of the chocolate Yoo-hoo bottle. “Frannie, how’s about you make us a pot of coffee and maybe dish up some of that fruit salad with the little marshmallows?”

  She jumped up to do so.

  He looked at me. “Kid, get your notes straightened out and let’s go over everything. And we need a big board to draw on. Or a pad of paper will do.”

  I found a legal pad and returned to the smell of coffee brewing.

  Spud waved his cane like an orchestra conductor. “First off, how did each of this Morgan kid’s parents kick the bucket?”

  Rosemary died of a drug overdose, I said, but Garland had told everyone—including his two kids—that she’d died of a heart attack. The police report stated that Garland had come home late after closing the restaurant and found his wife dead in their outdoor hot tub. The real reason she’d drowned, though, was that she’d passed out and fallen facedown into the bubbling water. The autopsy turned up an obscene amount of drugs in her system, and after a brief investigation, the death was ruled accidental.

  Garland’s body, on the other hand, wasn’t autopsied. His de
ath circumstances were simple and straightforward: injuries sustained during a fall. He’d been on a ladder, adjusting a floodlight attached to the side of Argo’s, when the ladder slipped. A witness saw it happen and called an ambulance. Garland never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.

  “Who was the witness?” Spud said.

  I looked at my notes and gave him a name.

  “You follow up on that witness?”

  I shook my head no. I hadn’t. I should have. “I will.”

  “Where are they buried?” Fran wanted to know.

  Another good question. I tried Morgan’s number but got his voice mail. I hung up and tried the judge’s cell phone number. Out of court, she answered on the second ring. I learned that both Rosemary and Garland had been cremated. Their ashes rested at Wilmington’s Maplewood Memorial Cemetery, in a prayer bench.

  “Inside a bench?” I said.

  “It’s a marble bench that you engrave, like a headstone. The base of the bench is hollow, so the front panel can be removed. The urns with the ashes are inside.”

  “I didn’t know you could put ashes inside a bench,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised at all the options for grieving family members,” my judge friend said. “Mom always wanted to be cremated. Dad decided to do the prayer bench because you can put them anywhere. Some people put them in a backyard or private park. At the cemetery, it’s a way you can go visit the grave, so to speak. Even though there is no actual grave.”

  I thanked her for the information and tried to disconnect, but she wasn’t going to let me off that easy. She wanted information and didn’t quite believe me when I told her that I didn’t yet have anything solid to report. We hung up, me promising to have something for her soon and her threatening to get in her car and drive to Wilmington.

  Cracker circled the table, nose working. Spud fed him a muffin, which he chewed exactly once before swallowing. We went over the rest of my notes, from Morgan’s car being searched to the encounter with Earless at Argo’s to Brad and his ongoing DEA investigation of a drug ring, possibly called the network.