“This was our second,” she said. “About two years ago, we had several bottles of cyclophosphamide stolen.”
Hal started to write phonetically. “Cyclo—”
She spelled it out for him. “It’s an alkylating agent.”
Hal stared.
“Another drug used in fighting cancer,” she explained.
“Did you discover who stole the cyclo . . . ?” He didn’t bother trying to say it again.
“No. But there was also some cash in the pharmacy—about four hundred dollars. That was gone, as well. We think maybe the theft of the cyclophosphamide was a diversion, and they were after the cash. We let two employees go about two months after the theft. We had reason to believe they were involved, but without any evidence to prove it, they were let go for nonperformance issues. So no charges were filed.”
“I understand there are no security cameras in the center. Is that right?”
“There hasn’t been one. The laws about patient privacy are quite rigid,” she said. “It’s not like a bank. A recording might pick up a patient’s name—on a chart or a screen.” Her tone suggested the business was cumbersome. “We’ve always had a camera in the pharmacy’s mixing lab so that someone sitting in the main area of the pharmacy can see the process. It’s more a safeguard for the pharmacist who is prepping the treatment than a way to make sure nothing is taken. These chemicals are dangerous, and if something went wrong in there . . .”
“But the cameras in that room weren’t recording that night?”
“No. The video is stopped and started from inside the main pharmacy. They’re not like security cameras.”
“Even with all the drugs in there, you didn’t see a reason for a security camera?”
“We never did,” she said. “These are medications for chemotherapy. They’re toxic. It’s not like we have narcotics on hand. There is literally nothing in there that someone should want to steal.”
She interlaced her fingers and rested her hands on the table as she shifted forward in her chair. “That said, the doctors met with an outside consultant in response to the latest break-in. They’ve decided to install a single camera inside the pharmacy, above the main door. The camera will record 24-7, capturing the full view of the room, including all the drug storage areas. But from above the door, it won’t capture the computer screens on the desks or pick up enough detail from files, so there should be no violations of patient privacy.”
Hal considered that. “Why would someone steal a chemotherapy drug?”
She exhaled. “I don’t know. I’ve thought a lot about that since the news on Dr. Posner. Honestly, the only people who know how to prepare those drugs are the pharmacists. No one else comes into contact with them. They’re very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Any of the pharmacists had an issue with Posner?”
“No. I don’t think any of them ever interacted with Posner at all. He’d have no reason to be at or near the pharmacy, and that group is not really his type—too quiet, too smart.”
“Who in the office knew Posner best?”
She thought a moment before answering. “He probably spent the most time with Tamara Long. She’s part of our leadership group, but she’s also extremely involved in the organization that Posner worked with.”
Hal wrote that down. It was the first thing he’d heard about Posner that didn’t sound like a criticism. “Posner did fund-raising?”
“Actually, it was the one area of his life where he really gave back. He worked hard for that charity.”
Hal made a note. “What charity?”
“It’s called the Finlay Foundation, but Tamara can explain it better than I can. She handles marketing and PR for the center.”
“A cancer center has a PR person?”
“Community relations,” she said, wearing a smile that looked as if it was supposed to denote patience. It didn’t. She glanced at her watch. “And I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting that started a few minutes ago.”
Hal was in luck—Tamara Long was on his list. “I’ll be in touch if I have other questions. Will you ask Ms. Long to come in?”
“Of course.”
By the time Hal had chugged the remains of the water, he was joined by Tamara Long. In her mid to late forties, Tamara was red-haired with ruddy cheeks and almost six feet tall. She crossed from the door to the table in about three steps, stuck out her hand, and shook his firmly.
When she sat, she spread four folders in an arc on the table in front of her. To the right of those, she propped up an accordion folder that was three or four inches thick.
Without prompting, Tamara Long expressed much of the same sentiment about Posner that Norman Fraser had.
Hal didn’t write down a thing she said. It was already like a loop playing in his head. Posner was an asshole. Posner was selfish, arrogant, impossible.
“I took the liberty of pulling together some records for you.” She slid the first manila folder toward Hal. “This is all the information I was able to pull on the pending lawsuits he was involved with at the time of his death.” Her hand lay flat on the folder as she added, “And these are only the ones we know about.”
“Do you have reason to believe there were other lawsuits?” Hal asked. “Ones you don’t know about?”
“A month has passed since I updated that file, so there’s a good chance it doesn’t include everything. Todd had a penchant for getting sued.”
Todd. She was the first person to call him by his first name. That, he noted.
She watched until he was done writing and gave him the next folder. “These are the full medical records and incident reports on the two patients who have filed malpractice suits against him.” She leaned in. “The insurance company would settle on these. They always do, but in my opinion, his process was exactly right. There are no grounds for malpractice in these cases.”
“Todd’s process, you mean?”
“Yes.” She didn’t bat an eye at his use of Posner’s first name.
“If he did everything right, why would the insurance company settle?”
“Money,” she said flatly. “It’s too expensive to try the cases, and juries love their victims. Plus putting Todd on the stand would guarantee the plaintiffs would win. Jurors would hate him. Putting him in the courtroom might even guarantee a loss.”
Hal wondered if there wasn’t a video of Posner somewhere. He seemed too pompous to be real. There had to be more to the guy than being an excellent surgeon, a bit philanthropic, and otherwise a total douchebag. “These are helpful.” He nodded to the other files. “What else have you got?”
She slid another one forward. “This file includes the work Todd did for the Finlay Foundation. He was extremely involved in their annual benefit, and he gave very generously to the charity. So much that it was a point of contention in his first marriage.” She raised her hands as if to surrender. “That information is unsubstantiated, of course.”
“The Finlay Foundation does cancer research?”
“More than that. They fund research, they fund treatments for people who can’t otherwise afford care, and they advocate in cases in which a patient is fighting with an insurance company about coverage. It’s really a remarkable organization.”
“Is it based here in the city?”
“Yes. It’s small. There’s a board of eight or ten people, including Todd. It’s really just one woman who started it—Ruth Finlay. Her husband died of leukemia—rare in a man his age. He had done quite well. The Finlays had a couple of children, but by then her children were mostly grown, so Ruth started the charity in her husband’s honor. That was maybe fifteen years ago.”
“But Todd Posner was involved?”
“Yes. He got involved just after medical school, I think.”
“Who runs the organization now?”
“Ruth Finlay was involved until recently. There’s a new executive director there, but I can’t remember his name. He’s not trained in
medicine, which was something different, but Ruth picked him herself. The board members are mostly doctors. The board’s chair is a woman named Ellen Cho, a researcher at UCSF.”
“Is Mrs. Finlay deceased?”
“No. She’s alive but not in great health. She’s got to be in her eighties by now.”
Hal slid the folder open and glanced at a newspaper clipping from the city’s society page. An elegant older woman in a full-length royal-blue gown. Standing beside her, arm in arm, was Michelle Obama. “The head of office admin”—he skimmed over his list for the name—“Ms. Duarte, said you were very involved in the foundation, as well.”
“I was.”
“But you’re not anymore.”
“No. It’s changed quite a bit since Mrs. Finlay was ill late last year.”
“Changed how?”
“It was her energy that I loved most. The new director is good. Charming, efficient, very smart.”
“But,” Hal prompted.
“But he’s not Ruth.”
Hal tried to read Tamara’s expression. The thinned lips, the slight puckering at her brow suggested her relationship with the organization had changed. Had the new director cut the ties or had she? “But Posner continued his work.”
“He did. Ruth reached out to a lot of us to continue on. Todd did. I didn’t. It’s just the way it worked out.”
He believed her. And it made sense to him. Working under the founder would have been a unique experience. “Do you know how Pos—Todd—got involved originally?”
“I believe he and Ruth Finlay met when he was at Stanford. She was a visiting speaker. Ruth could be very maternal and also very stern, matronly. I think that appealed to Todd.”
Something he’d missed growing up. Hal could read between the lines.
Without additional commentary, Tamara slid forward yet another folder.
“And this one?” Hal asked.
“This file is some information on the women Posner has dated since he and Kendra separated.”
Hal noticed the shift. Now that they were talking about Todd Posner dating, he was Posner, not Todd.
“Some are just names,” she went on, her gaze remaining on the folder as though undecided about whether or not to share it. “Others include some estimated dates for their . . . relationships. Some of them predate the separation from Kendra.”
“You keep this kind of file on all your doctors?”
“We don’t keep this at all, but I didn’t sleep last night, and I thought it would be helpful.”
Hal was about to ask how she had gathered the information when she interjected. “There are a lot of bright women in this office, Inspector. We pay attention.”
Hal flipped open the manila folder and scanned the names. Twelve or fourteen of them. Tamara’s wasn’t among them. “Did Dr. Posner date anyone in the office?”
“Not in a long time.”
“And this was because the ladies in the office realized Dr. Posner wasn’t a good prospect for a long-term relationship?”
“That might have been part of it,” she said. “But also because involvement with Todd Posner was grounds for immediate termination.”
“As of when?”
“About four months ago. We lost a really good employee because of an entanglement with Posner. Her name is on the list—Wendy Shapiro.”
Hal put a star next to the name.
She leaned over and pointed to the mark he’d made. “Don’t bother. She lives in Washington, DC, now.”
He made a note next to Shapiro’s name. “You and Dr. Posner never dated?”
“I’m married, Inspector Harris.”
“That doesn’t exactly answer the question, Ms. Long.”
“I was not involved with Todd outside the foundation, and what little interaction we had was here in the office.”
He made a mental note to think more about that answer. For now he let it go. “Fraser mentioned they were working to remove Posner from the practice. Was the incident with Wendy Shapiro part of that decision?”
“That I don’t know.” Tamara pushed her chair back and set her hands in her lap. She looked ready to leave.
But Hal wasn’t done. “What’s in that other folder?”
“Oh. Dr. Fraser said you wanted to see the complaints and letters sent to Todd.” Todd again. He was only Posner in regard to the women. She handed him the folder. It was heavier than he had expected.
“These are all complaints?”
“There are some threats in there, as well.”
Hal pulled out an unopened envelope. “This one is still sealed.”
“Oh, a bunch of them are,” she said. “Todd didn’t care. He thought they were hilarious. He really couldn’t see how angry he made people, had no idea why everyone didn’t love him the way he loved himself. He’d have thrown them all away if I hadn’t kept them. Last I counted, there were almost four hundred in there. I’ll bet it’s closer to five by now.”
She had called him Todd again—in disdain now.
He thanked Tamara Long and watched her leave the conference room, mentally adding her to his list. Five hundred potential suspects in those letters—not to mention the women he’d slept with, the people in the pending lawsuits, the ex-wives.
The question was no longer about who wanted Todd Posner dead.
The question was who didn’t want him dead.
8
With the autopsy completed and her notes dictated, Schwartzman contacted the morgue to request the attendants transport Todd Posner’s remains back there. While she waited, Schwartzman did her best to sort the equipment. Everything that had come into contact with Posner’s body was either discarded or double-bagged for disinfection. She sacrificed the surgical scissors used to take a sample of his stomach and liver, as well as her favorite red-handled pruning shears because the rubber handles could have absorbed the toxin. Both went into the hazmat receptacle to be destroyed.
She was a little sad to see the pruning shears go, but there was no effective way to sterilize them since the plastic would melt in the temperatures required for sterilization, and the chemicals that could be substituted for heat would destroy them.
It wasn’t normal to get attached to autopsy equipment, but the red-handled pruning shears were the first thing she’d bought for herself when she’d arrived in San Francisco. They’d sat in her bedroom, ready for her first day of work, before even her bed arrived. She’d slept those first few nights on a folded blanket on the hard floor.
With the tools packed up, she used the small scrub room to change into street clothes. She pulled on her jeans first and removed the scrubs top, standing in a white tank undershirt. She pulled her button-down over her shoulders and caught motion from the corner of her eye.
The morgue attendant stared through the small window into the room.
Watching her change.
The new attendant.
She spun away from him, shoving her arms quickly into the shirtsleeves. Buttoned the shirt and tucked it in, moving efficiently. When she turned back, he was still there, smiling. One hand in the air, he wiggled his fingers at her, the way one waved at a child.
She opened the door and stepped into the hall.
“Roy,” Wally, one of the attendants who regularly helped her in the morgue, called from down the hall. “Let’s get going.”
“You got it,” Roy said, tipping an invisible hat at Schwartzman as he went to join his colleague.
Schwartzman watched him go, anger hot in her chest. His arms swung loosely as he walked as though they were too long for his body. Slightly built with blond hair cut close to his scalp, he looked like a teenager from the back. A new addition to the morgue while she’d been away—first in Charlotte and then out for her mastectomy—Roy had moved from somewhere in Idaho.
There was something off about him.
Not to mention that it was strange that he wore long-sleeved jersey shirts beneath his scrubs. Even in the heat. And he had a habit of tugging
on the sleeves, pulling them down over his wrists as though there was something there he didn’t want anyone to see. At first she’d thought there might be some kind of scar—on his wrist, perhaps. But he did it on both arms, not just one.
Last week, one sleeve had gotten caught up while they were moving a corpse. Faded blue ink covered the entire front of his forearm, symbols and words in a Gothic-style print that made the tattoo impossible to read quickly.
What had bothered her most was his tendency to lurk around the morgue after his shift was done. She’d had to remind herself that he was new to town, that she, too, spent more time at work than most. But she couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t as young and innocent as he seemed at first glance.
The two men came through the door with a gurney carrying Posner’s remains. “We’ll be back for the rest of the equipment,” Wally said. “You can leave it if you need to get going.”
“Thanks,” she said, feeling Roy’s gaze follow her.
She carried her kit to her car and loaded it into the back. Across the lot, the morgue van sat outside a service entrance. As a rule, hospitals didn’t like to send corpses through the front door.
Her phone rang as she was heading back inside for the rest of her things. Ken.
“Hey.”
The deep notes of Ken Macy’s voice made her smile. “Hi.”
“Sounds like you had a long day.”
“Interminable.”
His low laugh. “I made you soup.”
A man who could cook. She was elated. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“I want to bring it by, but I don’t need to come up if you’re too tired,” he said. “I can leave it with the front desk.”
“No, I want to see you,” she said. The words stumbled over one another, as if they were a crowd pressed up against a door that had just opened. “I’m still at the hospital,” she added more slowly. “Just loading up my equipment.”
“Do you need help?”
“No.” She thought of the cafeteria food, the stuffy autopsy room, the creepy morgue assistant. “I’m leaving in a few minutes.”
“You tell me what works for you,” he said.
Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2) Page 7