“It looks like he will,” Molly said. “He will need many months of rehab first. He won’t be coming back to B. Healthy, at any rate.”
“Look, Tobi, you have, like, one of the highest times in the whole company,” Ismar pointed at his computer screen, trying to bring them back to his own agenda. “Maybe this isn’t a fulfilling life for you.”
Screw it, Tobi thought, and dove in. “So, are you telling me I should be looking for a different job?”
“Oh, no, Dr. Lister!” Molly said. “But it is very important that we keep the numbers up and one of the ways we assure that happens is when patients are satisfied with our services. So, we just want to make sure you’re happy working here. Happy doctors means happy patients. And, of course, we don’t want any more severely depressed providers.” She smiled from ear to ear, lips curled wide, but her eyes were like ice. She suddenly reminded Tobi of the character Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series.
Of course, Tobi thought, Meloncamp is very poor publicity. “Thanks for worrying about me, Molly. I will definitely make a point of checking in with myself frequently to make sure I’m doing okay.” She laughed it off to make it a joke, and Molly laughed too, but Tobi had no illusions. She skipped lunch and went back up front to see her patients. Molly left, but Ismar continued to hover around.
As Tobi got back to her work station, Ismar sat down next to her.
“Tobiii, are you having any trouble with the EMR lately? Any questions?”
Tobi peered at him. “No, Ismar, I’ve been using this program longer than you. I seem to remember tutoring you on it when you started.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but, like, I wondered if you were trying to do too much, like, maybe that is slowing you down and frustrating you.”
“Ismar, I try to do the bare minimum on computers of any sort. There is a lot of documentation that needs to be done for liability reasons and for billing, and I do my best to be compliant with both.”
“So … you haven’t had any, like, problems?”
“No, Ismar. Have you?” Tobi tried to be the barest level of polite, but she just wanted him to go away.
He laughed. “No, no, of course not. And you are putting in all the pertinent medical history and diagnoses, right? You know, we have to include all of the patients’ other problems, not just what they come in for this day.”
More than you do, Tobi thought. “Of course, Ismar, I chart very thoroughly. That’s one of things that ‘slows me down.’”
“Good. We need to be very complete.” Ismar was sweating; he really needed to lose at least a hundred pounds. “Tobi, do you have any siblings?”
“Excuse me?”
“I just wondered, like, we never talk. I know you are not married, maybe you are lonely. Are you an only child?”
Tobi glared at him. “Why do you care about my personal life?”
“Really, I would like to know. Just friendly. And to make sure you are okay. Are you close to your brothers and sisters?”
Tobi’s first impulse was to say “we’re not friendly,” but that would be rude, so she said nothing. Ismar continued to stare at her, waiting for an answer. The sweat was beading on his brow.
“I had a brother,” she said finally. “He’s dead.”
Tobi stood and picked up her tablet, closing the conversation. She walked stoically into the next room, completely baffled. In the last two years, Ismar had not asked her a single personal question, why the sudden interest in her private life? Was she happy, was she lonely, did she have siblings … it made no sense. She had a deep sense of foreboding about the last half hour with both of them. She definitely felt like Ismar was trying to get her to leave B. Healthy.
Tobi had been through far worse than Ismar Rufini and Molly Baker, though. She was nothing if not a survivor, which was exactly what had gotten her into urgent care—or what she now called “Fast Food Medicine.” Ben’s father had gotten involved with another woman a few months before Ben was born and then had told her when Ben was only a week old, that they ought to split up before their son was one. They fought a nasty custody battle that lasted four-and-a-half-years and rivaled The War of the Roses in its ferocity.
In those days, family practice doctors had taken call at the hospital and visited their patients who had been admitted before or after their usual office hours, since “hospitalists” did not exist yet, so the hours were long and variable. Ben’s father had told the court that he deserved full custody because Tobi’s work required excessively long absences from their baby boy, and she could not provide proper care as a result. It later became clear he’d really just wanted her to pay him the child support, but she had been so frightened of losing Ben, she had started doing urgent care when it barely existed. It was a good way to make money and do strictly shift work and it was less stressful than the emergency room, which, in those days, was often staffed by moonlighting psychiatrists.
Those early years had been nightmarish, and she’d had no family support, not emotional or financial. Tobi’s father had been manic depressive, occasionally violent, and always unpredictable. She’d remained terrified of him most of her life, and her mother was, well, her mother.
One of the only five or six times her father had ever called her was when she was seven months pregnant. He’d asked Tobi to take out a loan for him for $40,000. In 1991, that was a huge amount of money, at least to Tobi. It was completely unmanageable with baby on the way in, husband on the way out, and a mountain of student loans to repay. She’d said no, and that got her disowned for the second time, or was it the third? There had been about four or five in all, she’d stopped keeping track after a while. Thankfully, a person can only die once. Tobi only felt that vice crushing her heart once. She could only be banished from the home that was supposed to be filled with unconditional love and acceptance once. After that first time, rejection lost its power. How could she be cast out if she no longer belonged? Tobi had learned to make her own way in the world.
Belatedly, Tobi recognized that her mother, Hannah’s controlling, narcissistic personality had been, at least in part, compensation for double survivor guilt. As a toddler, Hannah had watched her baby brother die of “consumption,” and two years later, the family had fled Poland. That was in 1938, less than a year before the Nazis had occupied, and Hannah had been spared yet again, so anxiety was practically her middle name.
The family had settled in a small town in Connecticut, where all their neighbors spoke Yiddish, so Tobi’s grandmother never did learn English. Hannah, of course, had learned in school, and since Tobi’s grandfather went to work every day, Hannah was left to translate the world for her mother, a tremendous task to give a six-year-old child. It was no surprise Hannah had grown up feeling she needed to be in control of everything, all the time—while desperate to be taken care of herself. Unfortunately, that extended to Tobi and Reuben. Growing up, Tobi had been told what she should feel, what she should think, and who she should be, and whenever she had strayed from that script, the threat of rejection loomed. It was almost a relief when she’d finally been sent packing.
When he was a teenager, Reuben had run away frequently, but was greeted by a beating from their father each time he was dragged back home. Once he’d even made it as far as Newark airport, but the police had been suspicious of a lone fourteen-year-old with the family dog on a leash, trying to catch a flight to Virginia. Over the years, Reuben had succumbed to pressure and become the dutiful son. Perhaps he had feared being ostracized like Tobi was, and being all alone in the world too. Tobi knew he had given up a big part of himself in the process.
As a child and teenager growing up, Tobi had not understood any of her father’s bipolar disease or her mother’s neuroses—not that it would have made it any easier if she had. She had watched Reuben’s beatings and kept her head low, and focused on learning how to survive. By now, she was a pro. Ismar and Molly were child’
s play by comparison.
A half hour after Ismar left, Suleman walked in. “Hey, Dr. Lister. They found coverage, so they sent me back over to scribe for you.”
“Great!” she said. Privately, she thought management was trying to pretend there was no staffing problem in her office. Whatever the reason, having Suleman around always improved the patient flow, and she enjoyed his company. They often compared their religious practices on various topics, and she learned a lot from him. Judaism and Islam were actually quite similar in language, customs and principles, and they tended to focus on the things they had in common. Once, they had even stepped lightly into the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, and Tobi was pretty sure that, given their good will toward each other, and their both being reasonable human beings, they could have ended the conflict if it were up to them.
Chapter 25
Sipping on his coffee, Troy told Bent everything. He began with the morning in New York Bagels and Reuben’s terrified state. How Reuben had discovered the EHR software he had been writing was being used to identify public figures with medical secrets, things that could ruin them if they were known. There was even an FBI director who had been diagnosed with early Parkinson’s dementia that he had not yet disclosed, even though it rendered him unable to do his job. He probably didn’t want to retire yet. Reuben had traced the findings to a new Russian oligarch named Bereznikov, who was collecting large sums of money from each of them.
“Bereznikov didn’t stop with blackmail. Reuben kept digging through the program, and he discovered their front, an expensive insurance carrier whose main niche was high-risk health problems. A significant number of those insured had been meeting with ‘accidents’ before requiring the costly treatments, mostly organ transplants. Reuben even found the marker indicating who and when was the next target. So this company was taking in high premiums for hospital insurance while guaranteeing they would never have to pay out on claims.”
Troy looked up at Bent, whose face was impassive. A little fan in the room created a loud white noise that started grating on Troy’s nerves.
“He asked me to get him out of the States,” Troy said, “to make him disappear, and I set it up. But the night before he was supposed to leave, he insisted on meeting with a man who had a severe cardiac disease called cardiomyopathy and was a match with a kid who was on full life support and brain dead from a motorcycle accident. The family was expected to pull the plug any day, and this guy, James Arlan, would be getting the kid’s heart. Or he should have been.
“Reuben saw his marker. Arlan was scheduled for ‘redirection’ the next day—that’s what they called it. Reuben was sure Arlan was going to be killed. Reuben had wanted to meet the guy at a coffee house in Austin, but Arlan came to Reuben’s apartment instead, because he felt too sick to be out in public.” Troy paused. The fan bobbed back and forth, its buzz suddenly loud in the silence.
“The guy was severely debilitated, he wasn’t breathing well, and he had trouble walking from his car to the front door. His legs were swollen … he really should’ve been in the hospital himself, but he didn’t want to lie in a bed, waiting to die, and he knew his time was almost up. When Reuben told him about the scam … he said Arlan didn’t believe him at first. But Reuben wouldn’t give up. He showed Arlan what he’d found and told him he had to hire protection or at least check into the hospital immediately. When the guy finally did believe him, he couldn’t take it. He clutched his chest and fell over. He died in Reuben’s apartment that night.”
Troy stopped to drink the coffee. His hands were shaking from it, after so many years without caffeine, and he wondered why he was drinking the vile stuff; it was going straight to his head. He struggled to keep his voice even.
“Reuben panicked and ran. He was sure the Russians would realize he had sold them out, with their next target lying in his apartment, so he took Arlan’s wallet, hoping no one would identify him and make the connection until he was long gone. He really hadn’t planned for anyone to think he was dead—if Arlan’s body had been found sooner, it would have been obvious it wasn’t Reuben. He just wanted time to escape before the Russians knew he’d been talking to one of their clients. He left his own wallet behind so he couldn’t be traced by his credit cards or license. And then the body wasn’t found for three days, and it was already starting to decompose …” Troy blanched. “Someone took Arlan for Reuben, and it was a closed case.”
“No DNA verification?”
Troy shrugged. “It was the year 2000, who did that back then? They had roughly the same build and coloring, and he was in Reuben’s apartment, with no other ID than Reuben’s wallet sitting on the table. Reuben had some heart issues too, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
Bent was writing in his little notebook. “So, where did Reuben go?”
“He spent a couple of years in Guam and did some searching from an internet café, hoping it might have all gone underground, and maybe he could send word to his sister, but instead, he found the operation had actually become more global. He got paranoid and thought the Russians might have detected him snooping online, so he left Guam and came here, and started a new life as Robain Sacks. He was too afraid to surface after that, he thought they’d go after his family too, if they realized he was alive, which is exactly what I’m afraid of now.”
Troy rubbed the sides of his face and head again. “There may be more he didn’t tell me. I think Reuben was gathering evidence and trying to send it to the States, but he didn’t want me involved with anything that could make me a target, so he didn’t share that. He said the Russians were ruthless and thought nothing of murdering innocent people to make money off them. He said some in the US government were also in on it as victims of the blackmail scheme and would likely never reveal anything. He was genuinely terrified. That’s all of it. That’s all I know.”
Bent was sitting back in his chair, his mouth slightly open in disbelief. “That’s the craziest damn story I ever heard,” he said.
“Was for me too, and my life was forever changed by it. I was … I was about to propose to Tobi, his sister, but he made me promise never to tell her where he was. I couldn’t lie to her, I just couldn’t ….” His voice trailed off. Could I have? He shook his head. “I left. I haven’t been back since. I’m sure she hates me now, if she even thinks about me at all.”
“And you mean to go back now?” Bent asked. “The sister is blissfully ignorant, why uproot all that pain for both of you?”
Troy straightened and came back to the present. “If Marco’s killer was Russian and suspicious about ‘Robain,’ then he could be connected to these guys, and if they’ve sniffed out that Reuben was alive all these years … I don’t know. Did he kill Marco because he made the connection? Marco said the guy seemed genuinely interested in locating Robain’s family for him, and he didn’t know why. If the killer did figure out that Robain was Reuben, then Tobi is in danger—hell, I could be in danger, if Marco told the gunman about me. I have to admit, I’ve been looking over my shoulder more than a little. No, I have to go home and make sure no one hurts Tobi. I still love her. And I owe her that much, even so.”
Troy’s muscles were slack, but he felt oddly at peace. He had not told the story to anyone, in all these years. He had not realized how heavy a weight he had been carrying; he had attributed all his misery to losing Tobi.
Bent raised and then lowered his eyebrows and his hand was over his chin. He sat up. “That is such a preposterous story, I’m thinking you couldn’t possibly have made it all up. But even if it’s true, how many years ago was all that?”
“Reuben went ghost end of October, 2000,” Troy answered. “He showed up in Port Douglas in 2002. He loved diving and the Great Barrier Reef. He was afraid to work as a systems analyst and software writer anymore, because he knew his digital signature could be discovered, so he opened the dive shop.”
“How’d he get certification to
do that?”
“Well,” Troy smirked, “he was a PADI Divemaster, so he just certified himself in his new name, using his old name to file the paperwork, and backdated it. I know what you’re thinking, but up until then, and forever after, he was straight up.”
Bent was scratching his chin. “All I ever heard ’bout the man was good things … but you think the bloke who killed Marcus was from the same people Robain—or, you said his name was Reuben? —was running from?”
“Don’t know. It’s possible, from how Marco said this guy got curious about Reuben and offered to help find his family. But why would he kill Freddie?”
“Well, that would make perfect sense, seeing as Freddie had access to the killer’s files when he retrieved his hard drive. Who knows what Freddie found out. Sergeant Larsen is handling the investigation in Cairns, but this may become a federal matter. If Freddie found something amiss, I’d have liked to think he would have turned it in. If he had a chance to, that is.”
“So … you believe me?”
Bent ran his hand through his curly brown hair. It was warm in the office, despite the fan, and there was a dark spot under his arm from sweat. “I don’t quite know what to believe, mate. I don’t know if I can legally hold you here in Australia, but I’d be obliged if you’d hang around a bit longer so I don’t have to get creative. Might could use something you know to catch this mother fucker. As a return favor, I’ll share what I can with you as it comes up, and I can see about defraying the cost of your hotel bill.”
“No need for that, I can stay at Reuben’s place, but I would be grateful for information. I’ll stay a few days, if you think it will help.”
Now that he had spilled his guts to this man, Troy realized he was reluctant to leave the one person in the world who knew the truth, and he was so exhausted, he thought he might collapse on the floor. He was in no shape to go anywhere right then, anyway.
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