Land of the Brave

by Tom Fowler

  "Yeah."

  "When are you gonna marry that girl?"

  I snorted. "Rich, come on. I like Gloria, but I'm not sure either of us are the marrying types."

  "You two are fooling yourselves," he said with a grin.

  "I hope you didn't come over here to give me relationship tips," I said.

  "No," he said. "Just wondering if you did any work while you weren't busy talking to your girlfriend."

  I was about to point out Gloria wasn't my girlfriend. Rich's smirk changed my mind. Let him have his satisfaction. "I have, in fact. Something Rodgers said troubled me."

  "What was it?"

  "When he said Jim was seeing a psychologist and had tried some medication." Rich shrugged. "Psychologists can't prescribe. They're not medical doctors."

  "Interesting," said Rich. "Do you know where the prescription came from?"

  "I haven't looked yet. His comment got me thinking the organization wasn't so pure. I've been nosing around."

  "And?"

  "I'm not an accountant," I said. "Thank goodness. But I don't know how they afford their building and all the employees. They show six full-time and eight part-timers. Their current office is more than double the rent at the old one."

  "Donations?" Rich said.

  "They get some, sure. Not as much as I would expect. And they make money selling honey and other things. It doesn't add up."

  "What about Rodgers himself? He could have money and run the whole thing at a loss."

  "Maybe," I said. "I'm going to look into him next. In the meantime, I printed some things out for you."

  Rich grabbed the small stack of papers. "Let me know what you find about Rodgers," he said.

  "I'm on it. I'll know all the things worth knowing about him soon." I fired up the VPN and anonymizer again. It was time to see what Pete Rodgers had crammed in the corners of his closet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pete Rodgers came from a large family. He was the fourth of eight children. Six of his seven siblings were still alive. Unless any of them hit the lottery, their ages indicated they would still be working. And they were. A few minutes of searching found them scattered throughout the east coast and Midwest. All of them had boring jobs that didn't interest me for this case.

  Except one.

  George Rodgers was an administrator at the Fairmont Regional Medical Center, named for the city in which it's located in West Virginia. I could not count Fairmont among the two cities in West Virginia I had ever heard of—Morgantown and Harpers Ferry—so I looked it up. Driving there from Oakland would take about ninety minutes. A regional hospital would have access to all manners of drugs. George could hook up Pete and his shrink with some. I hypothesized this was how Jim Shelton got his medication.

  A quick job search told me the salary I could expect to earn as a candidate for hospital administrator jobs. I then poked around until I found where George Rodgers did his banking and investing. My degree is in computer science, so I'm pretty good at math. Even if I weren't, though, I could have deduced something fishy in George's books. Unless he'd been working for about fifty years—almost quadruple the length of his current career—he couldn't have saved and stashed all the money he did.

  I looked deeper. George's paycheck hit his savings account every two weeks. He also made small cash deposits once a month, as well as large investments in his brokerage account around the same time. Another savings account showed irregular cash deposits and ATM withdrawals. If I didn't know better, I'd think George was a drug dealer.

  Hospitals received medications all the time. Some were boring, like aspirin and Tylenol, and even though you could buy a bottle of them for three dollars, the hospital would still charge you four bills per pill. Nice racket if you can create it. Other drugs they get are more interesting and far more regulated. Opioid medicines, for instance, required someone to account for them at each step of their journey. Despite this, they ended up stolen and distributed illegally with alarming frequency.

  I wondered if the withdrawals from the savings account were payments to delivery people or suppliers. Here's some cash to look the other way while I grab this box. Then the contents of that box could be sold, generating funds for the deposits I saw. The amount of money meant it would need to be more than an occasional box. I knew some rich people who could have lived nicely on George's money.

  Rich needed to know this. It was another path to the investigation. We could drive to West Virginia and nose around. Rich would complain about jurisdiction, but he was already out of his. I, at least, was licensed to investigate all over the state of Maryland. I wouldn't want to involve anyone on the other side of the border. We needed to confine the investigative task force to the two of us. I shut everything down and walked next door to Rich's room.

  I wished I had more information.

  ***

  "I want to bring in the FBI," Rich said when I brain-dumped everything to him.

  I hadn't expected him to want to run to the feds. There were jurisdiction concerns and there was punting to the goddamn FBI. On top of that, I didn't want to tell them how I got my information, or even what information I had on George Rodgers. "Well, you've certainly proposed a solution," I said.

  "You don't agree?"

  "Of course not."

  "Let me guess," he said, "you don't want to share your info with the feds."

  "I don't even want them to know that I have info," I said. "If it's all the same, I'd prefer to keep my intelligence-gathering methods out of this. They're going to have too many questions."

  "I think this is getting bigger than you and me."

  "How? So far, we know Land of the Brave looks shady. We know the boss has a brother who might be making money buying and selling drugs out of his hospital. This isn't a drug cartel in action here."

  Rich crossed his arms under his chest. "You want to risk the investigation because of your shady methods," he said, shaking his head. "Incredible."

  "What's the risk to the investigation?" I said. "You and I can do this."

  "I think there are more people involved than a charity director and a hospital boss."

  "Sure. They have to have a driver or two somewhere. And they have the four assholes we sent to the hospital. If those are the best goons they can muster up, I'm not worried."

  "This is about Jim!" Rich's face grew red. "I want justice for Jim, justice for his family, justice for—"

  "Yourself?"

  Rich sighed and glared at me. "I was going to say his kids. But I'm his friend. So yes, for myself, too."

  "I don't think we should bring in the feds," I said. "We can do this."

  "We have people in Maryland and West Virginia involved," said Rich. "That's interstate crime."

  "Great. You bring in the feds. And when they take over everything, lock you out, and bungle it, don't say I didn't warn you. And even if they don't fuck it up, you're looking at months to get your justice. Hope you have a lot of vacation days." I turned toward the door.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Back to Baltimore," I said. "You bring in the FBI, I'm out."

  "How are you going to get there?" Rich said.

  "I'll take an Uber." I grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.

  "Wait."

  I stopped.

  "I still think this is bigger than the two of us."

  "Have fun getting stonewalled by the FBI, then," I said.

  "If I don't call them, what would your next steps be?"

  "I want to look into the brother and his hospital."

  "And if we build a case against him?"

  "Then we close it," I said, turning back to face Rich. "You came out here to get justice for your friend. If you want to farm that out to someone else, whatever. Up to you. But you're not getting justice then. Someone else is."

  "I don't see it the same way," said Rich.

  "You and I often see these things differently."

  Rich uncrossed and crossed his arms again. He pursed his li
ps, rolled his eyes, shook his head. If steam poured out his ears, I would consider my triumph complete. "Thanks to you," he said, "I'm not convinced we can trust the locals."

  "Agreed."

  "Fine. We'll keep it small for now. If this gets too big for us, though, I'm going to call in some help."

  "Not the feds?" I said.

  "State Police," Rich said. "I know a guy. He's trustworthy. We can work with him."

  "Who decides if the case overwhelms us?"

  "I do. My judgment. If you don't like it, go call your fucking Uber."

  I grinned. "Really, Rich?"

  "What?"

  "You don't call an Uber. You use the app."

  Rich chuckled and uncrossed his arms. "Go back to your room," he said.

  So I did.

  ***

  My father's deep exhalation over the phone made a sibilant hiss in my ear. "I'm not sure this is what we envisioned when we set this up, son," he said.

  When I left Hong Kong after thirty-nine months, it was with the strong encouragement of the Chinese government. They arrested my hacker friends and me. They threw a bunch of charges at us, but the ones they cared about the most were helping Americans and dissidents hide from the government or leave the country. Most of those things fell on me. My compatriots were into embarrassing the communists, going after their banks, and similar things. I did some of that, too, but even then, my conscience reared its ugly head and compelled me to help people.

  After returning to the States, my parents threatened to cut me off from the family money unless I got a job helping people. Seeing as I had burned through most of my money in China, I was forced to consider their position. Before long, I settled on being a private investigator, and got my license thanks to some embellishment of the legitimacy of my work in China. The kicker was, I wouldn't charge my clients. My parents hired me into their foundation and would pay me for solving cases. So far, this arrangement chafed me but worked reasonably well. Until this case, apparently.

  "What do you mean, Dad?"

  "Rich wasn't who we had in mind for your clients."

  "I told you the details of the case," I said. "You don't think the family sounds like they need help?"

  "I guess so," he said. "It's just . . . irregular, is all. Clients usually come to you."

  "Rich did."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Do you think it was easy for him, Dad? You know how Rich and I have gotten along—or not—over the years. Since I started this job, he's taken every chance he could to run down the way I do things."

  "You never thought he had a point?" said my father.

  "I'm sure he does," I said, "but Rich and I are very different people. He has trouble with anyone who doesn't do things by the book."

  "What are you getting at, son?"

  "My point is, it took a lot for Rich to approach me for help. He had to swallow his pride and choke down a bunch of objections about my methods. I could have given him shit for coming to me, but I recognized what it took for him to do it. Maybe you should, too."

  Silence was my only reply for a few seconds. Then my father said, "All right. I think you've got a point. We'll be interested to hear how this one turns out."

  "So will I," I said.

  "Should your mother start looking for western Maryland newspapers?"

  "Dad, I'm not sure the two of you could be seen reading a paper called the Republican. What would your rich liberal friends think?"

  "I'll let your mother worry about it," he said. We both knew she would. It was probably the thing she did best in the world. Well, maybe tied with sniffing and tsking after I offended her sensibilities. "What are you going to do next?"

  "I think we're going to poke around the organization," I said. "They're our best lead right now. Maybe our only lead."

  "Good luck, son. You're a long way from Baltimore."

  I looked at my motel room. It didn't offer a view of Route 219, but the images had been seared into my head the last couple days. "Don't I know it," I said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Fairmont Regional Medical Center had a slick-looking website. No doubt it had been designed by a well-coiffed chap (or chapette) who sat in the dark and sipped lattes while writing the code. It wasn't built on WordPress or Wix or any other do-it-yourself platform. Whoever designed it made a professional, functional, and mostly clean website. They even required secure connections over the web.

  None of this stopped me from hitting it with a scanner. Services run on ports, many of which are assigned specific numbers, and the scanning program tells me which ones are running. It didn't take long to find the weak link. An older service, File Transfer Protocol, was still used for exactly what its name suggests. The problem: it was designed in the infancy of the Internet. No one thought about security then. Thus, FTP had no security built into it. Everything it transmitted, including login credentials and the contents of files, got sent over the wire in the clear. Unencrypted.

  Because FTP is an older protocol, the versions of it installed on web servers are frequently outdated. In other cases, the service will accept default login credentials because whoever configured the server never bothered to remove them. The FTP version was current, so I looked up this particular implementation's default credentials. I tried them.

  They worked.

  Sometimes, it really is that easy. While I like to think I'm good at the advanced hacking stuff, there are occasions that the simple tactics are the home run hitters. The login I used had full access to the file system. FTP uses simple commands to list directories and upload and download files. I spent a few minutes nosing around and seeing what directories could house juicy information. My searching turned up a scad of interesting documents, including a listing of privileged accounts. I downloaded them all to my laptop and disconnected all my sessions.

  Combing through the files was not exciting. I contemplated walking outside and watching some grass grow for a change of pace. I had some time to kill while Rich went to Jim's funeral. When he mentioned it, I didn't offer to go. He wouldn't want me there. Rich needed his space in a time like this; I understood and respected it. Besides, it gave me the chance to conduct a riveting review of hospital files.

  About ninety minutes later, I finished reading all the pilfered files. Nothing jumped out at me as irregular. I even logged back in with an admin account I found on the list, downloaded some more documents, and read those. The hospital maintained impeccable logs of all drugs that came in and went out, and they had all their I's dotted and T's crossed in triplicate when it came to controlled substances. Boxes of Vicodin weren't getting up and walking out the door.

  How else could George bring drugs in? I looked for shipments of opioids that got delivered to the wrong locations, stolen from another facility, or hijacked in transit. The number of results probably shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. A package arriving at the wrong destination could happen. There is no malice in human error. The others, though, involved both malice and muscle. I thought of the four goons who darkened our doorsteps. Give them ski masks and guns, and they could probably abscond with a bunch of stolen drugs.

  A box of fentanyl going missing from LA didn't mean much, however. I narrowed my focus. If George Rodgers had people stealing drugs, those thefts had to happen within driving distance of his hospital. You couldn't sneak a bunch of controlled medication on a commercial flight, and using a chartered plane would add both expense and another person who could talk. No, George's crew had to stay fairly local. Being a professional detective, I employed the advanced sleuthing tactic of making up a number, setting a search radius of two hundred fifty miles.

  Sure enough, I found some. A report of an irregular delivery to Fairmont Regional. A delivery of opioids knocked over outside Pittsburgh three years ago. Another near Charleston, West Virginia six months after. Yet another near Winchester, Virginia five months later. I expanded the search radius and found them going back a couple more years, always every five to si
x months, never more than three in a calendar year. Local cops and the feds were investigating, of course. I read up on the robberies. Different vehicles used every time. Never the same physical descriptions of the crew. Different clothes, masks, and guns each time. No one had been killed, though a few guards had taken beatings here and there.

  While I read over everything, Rich returned from the funeral. I heard the rumble of the Camaro's V8 in the parking lot, like the low growl of a wild animal. A minute later, he knocked on the door. "It's Rich." I knew already, both from the Camaro and his knock. Rich, despite being a little shorter than me, has larger hands, and the way he bangs on a door is distinct. Kind of like clubbing a tree with a hammer.

  I opened the door and let him in. We chatted about the funeral for a minute before getting down to new business. I told him what I'd discovered about George Rodgers, his hospital, and the pattern of stolen opioids. "Fuck," Rich said. I found this an adequate summary. "What do you think they're doing with the drugs?"

  "Selling them," I said. "My guess is George's random deposits equate to his share of the proceeds."

  "Of course they're selling them. But what's the method? How do you move a pile of stolen pills?"

  "And not just move them, but do it regularly. They restock a couple times a year."

  Rich shook his head. He tried to run a hand through his hair, but his crew cut made the gesture look ridiculous. "I know the manufacturers have tons of pills," he said. "It's a shame . . . they probably didn't even notice the missing stock."

  I was about to point out our focus needed to be on distribution when Rich's phone buzzed. He looked it at, frowned, then put it away. "Connie just texted," he said. "Land of the Brave is picking up Jim's last batch of honey tomorrow morning."

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. Then the light bulb went on for me. It must have gone on for Rich, too, because his eyes went wide and his mouth fell open. "The pickups," I said. "They pick up whatever legit products the veterans have, add their drugs, and distribute them through middle men."