by David Perry
CHAPTER 24
Jason and Peter trailed Waterhouse single file toward the rear of his small Poquoson one-story bungalow. A large-breasted woman, wrapped in a frayed towel, emerged from the bathroom. Her hair, still dry, looked as if it repelled water better than Kevlar, and appeared to have been dipped in undiluted Clorox. Waterhouse filed past, foregoing introductions. The same strong scent of cheap perfume Jason had smelled on Waterhouse during their first encounter permeated the house. Jason averted his eyes and ran a hand over his throbbing head, but the woman showed not a scintilla of embarrassment at her state of undress.
Jason’s brain felt like an overinflated balloon pressing against his cranium. He’d woken this afternoon to Peter pounding on his front door. He had no recollection of leaving the Southern Belle, or of how he’d even managed to get home. But his car was in the driveway, and the keys were on the counter. What bothered him even more than the headache was that he didn’t remember anything that happened between leaving the restaurant and waking up. Had he done something with Jasmine he was going to regret?
“Have a seat,” Waterhouse instructed.
The cramped dining room had been converted into a command center, stuffed with a myriad of electronic assets. On a long table in front of a drawn curtain sat a large-screen computer surrounded by a digital video recorder and several cameras. Three telephoto lenses stood inverted, like oversized chess pieces. On the opposite wall, a desk with another computer was flanked by two large filing cabinets.
Three chairs huddled in the center of the room, surrounding a tattered, bulging, white banker’s box. The sides were dotted with gouges and lengths of duct tape.
“Here it is. Thomas’s pride and joy.” Waterhouse pulled a chunk of files from the box. He squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette.
“You mind if I light up?” Peter asked, rubbing the scar over his eye. It was an unconscious habit, Jason noticed, his brother fell into when he was about to stress that gung-ho, “ooh-rah” brain of his.
“Be my guest,” the private investigator replied. Peter shook a cigarette loose, and with the two of them puffing away, a velvety cloud soon hung below the ceiling.
Waterhouse continued, “It’s his collection of material on any kind of conspiracy he could get his hands on. The moon landings, the Kennedy assassination, crop circles, September 11, UFO sightings of all kinds, Freemasons, the Illuminati, Operation Valkyrie, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and anything else he could think of.” He paused. “Did you know he actually spent four days, on two separate trips, at Dealey Plaza investigating Kennedy’s murder? He stood behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll with his camera and tape measure. He also visited Ground Zero a year ago. Claims there’s evidence that the Twin Towers and the smaller buildings were intentionally brought down by preset explosives, not the planes crashing into them. He also went to Shanksville to see the crash site of Flight 93. Said no bodies were ever recovered from the site.”
“He was a conspiracy theorist?” asked Peter, giving Jason a look. “Is that what this is all about?”
The next twenty minutes were spent leafing through the dog-eared collection of papers. “I have to admit, Walter. This doesn’t look good,” said Jason. “The man was paranoid.” He tossed a stack of papers about a UFO crashing somewhere in Pennsylvania in the fifties on the floor beside the box. A sliver of doubt entered Jason’s mind about Thomas’s activities.
“I show you this so you know what kind of man Pettigrew was.”
Peter fanned through paper, pamphlets, and brochures. “It looks like he was a quack. How did you know him, anyway?”
Waterhouse leaned back and clasped his hands behind his graying head. “Thomas and I became friends about six years ago. He hired me to investigate the death of his wife—”
“His wife died of cancer. She wasn’t killed,” Jason declared.
“I know that,” Waterhouse replied. “But Thomas was convinced her chemotherapy was diluted. Asked me to investigate her outpatient intravenous pharmacy.”
Peter leaned forward. “And what did you find?”
The naked woman had emerged from the bathroom, clothed now, and was rummaging around the kitchen. “You’re leaving, Becky Sue,” Waterhouse called to her.
She grunted in the negative.
“He paid me to become a certified pharmacy technician and infiltrate the pharmacy. It took me three months to get my qualification, then I applied. They denied me at first, but eventually I got the job. Meanwhile, he was paying me eighty dollars an hour to do this undercover work.”
“Again, Walter, what did you find?” Jason was growing irritated.
Walter rubbed his beard stubble. “I couldn’t find anything wrong.”
“What made Pettigrew think that the pharmacy medications weren’t correct?”
“He’d read about some pharmacist in the Midwest who was mixing IV bags with subpotent medications to save money. Thomas thought this pharmacy was doing the same thing. In fact, he started accusing the doctors who owned the pharmacy before we had any hard evidence. It turned out to be very embarrassing. Luckily, I—and his attorney—convinced him to apologize and zip his mouth.”
“This is ridiculous,” Peter mumbled. “This guy was a fruitcake.”
Jason held up a hand, quieting Peter. “So you took his money to investigate this pharmacy, and it turned out to be nothing?”
“Mind you, I didn’t know it was nothing until I got in there. Once I realized they were legit, I stopped taking payment. By that point, I felt sorry for him. I began to stop by the pharmacy once a week to talk to him. We became friends, started meeting for chess and dinner.”
“How much did he pay you before you stopped accepting his money?”
“About thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
“Sweet Mother of God,” Jason whispered. The guy’s stock dropped several points in his eyes; was he trustworthy?
He looked hard at Waterhouse. “I thought you wanted to keep this quiet,” he whispered, jerking his head toward the kitchen, and the girlfriend.
Waterhouse waved the comment off. “She doesn’t care about this stuff. She’ll be outta here in a few minutes.”
Jason squinted then said, “You were saying?”
“His money paid for a lot of the equipment you see here. I’m a retired police officer, moved down here from Massachusetts after my divorce. Worked homicide in Boston. I was just starting out in the racket when I met Thomas. At the time, I needed a break. Thomas gave it to me.”
“And once you found out the scam was bogus?” Jason’s tone left no doubt about how he felt about Waterhouse’s actions.
“I told you, I stopped taking his money! I didn’t call Thomas. He called me!” Waterhouse, now agitated, sat up. “Listen to me, you good-for-nothing pill pusher. Who the hell do you think you are?”
Waterhouse and Jason locked eyes. The tense, testosterone-laced moment passed. Waterhouse blinked, and Jason continued. “How do you know his daughter, Christine?”
“I don’t know her very well,” the private investigator replied, relaxing a bit. “I went to the house because I overheard her inviting other people. I told her the truth. I was a friend of her father’s. Since I was curious about his death, I wanted to check out folks at the Colonial, see if anyone might be a person of interest.” Waterhouse handed Peter the drug report with the handwriting on the back he’d already shown Jason.
Peter read the report and looked quizzically at the two men.
“There’s more,” Waterhouse said. “Turn the page over.”
Peter turned the page over and saw the note. He handed it back to Jason. “What is it?” Peter asked.
“That’s what I was hoping your brother could tell me,” Waterhouse replied, looking at Jason. “Here’s the rest of what was in that particular file.” He handed over a thin sheaf of documents and six paper prescriptions. “Then there’s this.” He handed Jason a DVD in a thin, clear plastic case. “It’s a video o
f a day at the Colonial taken from a security camera. I’ve looked at the thing four times. I didn’t see any unusual activity on it. But I’m not a pharmacist.”
“What day was it recorded?” Jason flipped the case over, remembering the video equipment in the pharmacy.
“September 15.”
“That was the night Pettigrew died.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s this?” Peter asked, holding a palm-sized device.
“It’s a GPS. Evidently, Thomas tracked one of the pharmacists the night he died. Sam Fairing. I believe you’ve met him. There’s only one file on the hard drive. The trail ends at the Lions Bridge.”
“Pettigrew left this box and these reports the night he died?”
Waterhouse nodded once more.
“What time did he leave them?”
“I was on an assignment that night. I left the house about eight thirty. I didn’t return home until about half past midnight. That’s when I found the box inside the door. He had a key to this place.” Waterhouse snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah, there’s one more thing. He left a message that night on the landline at a quarter to twelve. He called my cell, but I leave it off when I’m on assignment. I saved it.” Waterhouse moved to his equipment and pulled a CD from a stack on the table. Placing it in a tray, he pressed a button, and the message played.
“I found one, Walt. I found one. I know I’ve been wrong in the past. But this time it’s real. It’s urgent, very urgent!”
CHAPTER 25
Pettigrew’s deep, scratchy voice competed with the harsh background noise. It sounded as if he was in a hurricane. He might have been driving fast with the windows down. The recording stopped and left the three men in smoky silence. These were some of the man’s final words, now spoken from the grave.
“What did he find?” asked Jason.
“That’s what I was hoping you could help me with. It’s in these papers somewhere and on the DVD.”
“You haven’t gone to the authorities?”
“With what? There’s no evidence of foul play. All we have are some reports and a message left by a man notorious for jumping to conclusions about wild conspiracies. They’d boot me out on my ass.”
“If he was killed, what would be the motive?” Peter leaned back and stroked his eyebrow.
“I don’t know. But these reports and invoices are the only documents in his file box that aren’t of national or international scope. They involve the Colonial. The last entry on that report was for the day before he died. It’s the only connection I have right now.”
Jason shuffled the reports again. “I’m going to need a few minutes to review these. Don’t you two have some death sticks you need to smoke?”
“That’s our cue,” said Peter, slapping his hands on his thighs. “Walter, my man, let’s go take a few minutes off our lives thanks to the United States tobacco industry.”
Jason sat at Waterhouse’s desk and inspected each document, placing it neatly in a pile before moving on to the next. After he had reviewed each, he rummaged in the desk and found a writing pad and a pencil. He began again at the beginning of the stack and hastily scribbled notes.
An hour after he’d begun, Jason walked outside. Waterhouse was on the tail end of telling Peter about a firefight outside of Khe Sanh.
“What did you find?” asked Peter.
“There’s a pattern to the paperwork. But I’m not sure I’ve found anything yet. I’ll walk you all through it.”
Back in the makeshift command center, Jason explained. “These are six prescriptions for the same medication written over the course of more than a year. They are all for the same patient, some guy named Douglas Winstead. And they’re all for the same medication, a chemo drug called Prucept. It’s used for liver cancer. And they were all written by the same doctor, Dr. Jasmine Kader.”
CHAPTER 26
Jason held the report in his hand uneasily. If Jasmine Kader was somehow involved in Thomas’ death, the implications were enormous. But Jason needed more. If Thomas was following a trail of prescriptions written by Jasmine, the old pharmacist must have suspected something was amiss. And, according to this sleazy private eye, he had literally followed Sam Fairing the night he died. The anxiety Jason felt was growing as he dealt the prescriptions, laying them out as if he were playing solitaire.
“What’s it mean?” Waterhouse asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing yet. Then there are these invoices.” Jason referred back to the hastily scribbled notes on the yellow pad. “Each prescription corresponds with one of the listings on the report except one.” Jason showed them his notes. The dates of the prescriptions and invoices were laid out in two columns. “There are seven invoices, but only six prescriptions.”
“There’s a prescription missing from the collection?” asked Waterhouse.
“Definitely, the one dated June 18,” Jason replied. “This other report is a drug audit. A pharmacist can run one to find all the prescriptions written for a certain medication during a specific time frame. We use them all the time. This one”—Jason shook the report—“is a printout for all the Prucept prescriptions. Pettigrew must have run it. Each hard copy of a prescription is listed on this report, including the one dated June 18. But the actual hardcopy from that date is missing. Is it still in the box?”
“Let’s take a look,” said Waterhouse. The front door clicked closed. Waterhouse’s lady friend had left.
The men paused briefly before taking sections of the documents and papers and leafing through them, looking for the missing prescription. They sat on the floor beside the battered box, legs crossed Indian-style, perusing the papers and files. Thirty-five minutes later, Jason looked up. “There’s nothing in my pile.”
“Nothing here,” Peter agreed.
“Same,” said Waterhouse. “So, where’s the seventh prescription?”
“Wait a minute,” Peter interjected, rubbing his eye. “What do the invoices have to do with the prescriptions?”
Jason turned to his brother. “The Colonial, being an independent pharmacy, doesn’t have a warehouse. They buy their drugs directly from a wholesaler. We did the same thing at Keller’s.”
“So?” Waterhouse asked.
“These prescriptions were put into the computers at the Colonial and ordered from the wholesaler. But the shipment wouldn’t have arrived until the next day. The invoice would be dated for the day the shipment arrived.”
It was Peter’s turn. “Wait one minute. Some of the dates you have for these invoices aren’t for the next day. Two of the invoices are dated two days after the drug was put into the computer. Explain that one, boss man.”
Jason puckered his lips, thinking. “Walter, you have a calendar on your computer, don’t you?”
They spent the next twenty minutes reviewing dates on the calendar and matching them with the prescriptions and invoices. They had an explanation for each instance. If an invoice was dated two days after the prescription was entered into the computer, it was because a holiday or a weekend intervened.
Peter put a hand on Jason’s shoulder. “Why would these prescriptions have to be ordered? How come they weren’t on the shelf?”
“Good question. But I have an answer, O Dimwitted One. Prucept’s very expensive. I believe it costs upward of a thousand dollars for one bottle of a hundred pills. Thomas was very cost conscious. He would never allow such an expensive drug to sit on the shelf tying up his money.”
“But didn’t he sell the Colonial? So it wasn’t his money anymore.”
“Old habits die hard,” Jason replied.
“Why is any of this important?” Waterhouse swiveled in his chair to look at Jason and Peter, who were standing. “So they have a patient on a chemo drug. They filled his prescriptions. Big deal.”
Jason touched his forehead. “You know what? I didn’t realize what it meant until just this second.” He picked up the invoices, then another sheet of paper from the stack. “I should have looked at
this before! Look here, this report is a printout of the signature log for these prescriptions. When a patient picks up a prescription, he signs the electronic record to indicate he received the medication. The log is kept so that when an insurance company audits, a pharmacy can prove that the medication was picked up by the patient.” His confidence in Thomas’s sanity was returning.
“What if the patient forgets to sign it?” Peter asked, playing devil’s advocate now, his second-favorite sport after guns and shooting.
“It happens. But look at this second report. Douglas Winstead never signed for any of his Prucept prescriptions.”
“So you’re saying he never received the medication?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jason intoned. He snapped his fingers and rifled through the invoices. Then he said, “On each of these invoices, there’s no listing for Prucept. The drug was entered into the computer, the insurance company was billed, but the drug was never delivered to the pharmacy. So how could they dispense it to the patient?”
Peter asked, “Why wouldn’t they just have this patient Winstead sign for the drug or fake his signature to cover up the fact he never received the medication?”
“Good question, Pete,” Jason replied. “It’s one I can’t answer at the moment.”
“You know what you’re saying, don’t you?” Waterhouse furrowed his brow.
“You’re damn right I do. The Colonial is guilty of insurance fraud.”
“Son of a bitch,” Peter swore under his breath. Then he said more loudly, “The old man was on to something. But how do you know those prescriptions were billed to the insurance company.”
Jason thought for a minute. “That’s easy. I can check the activity on each prescription. Anytime anyone does something to a prescription file, there’s an electronic tag of everything that happened. I’ll check each prescription and see if they were billed to Winstead’s insurance. If they were, I’ll also check to make sure no one reversed those claims. If the claims were reversed, there’s no fraud. They billed the drug and ordered it. When it didn’t come in from the wholesaler, they should have reversed it. If that’s the case, everything’s peachy. If they didn’t, we’re talking fraud.”