Slow Kill

by Michael McGarrity

  “We’ve also got the last phone call Claudia Spalding made to Dean at the pharmacy just before he took off.”

  “Again, unless we can prove that Claudia actually warned Dean of the arrest warrant, it’s circumstantial. What’s Sergeant Lowrey up to?”

  “She’s on her way to Clifford Spalding’s corporate offices in LA. He stopped there before driving to Paso Robles. She’s hoping to find the prescription bottle from the Santa Fe pharmacy. She thinks Spalding may have transferred the contents into his pill case, knowing he’d have a refill waiting for him when he got home.”

  “As a pharmacist, Dean had to be fingerprinted, right?”

  “And photographed,” Ramona said. “I’ve sent both his prints and picture to Lowrey by computer.”

  “Hold up for now on reworking the Spalding arrest affidavit until you hear back from Lowrey. Go for another search warrant on Dean’s business instead. Focus on his finances. It’s possible that we may have multiple motives for murder. Not only does Claudia Spalding inherit a considerable estate, she frees herself to have an open relationship with Dean and bail him out of his financial woes. Use the statement you took from Nina Deacon about Claudia wanting out of the marriage to back it up.”

  “But what about the amendment to the prenuptial agreement that validated her right to extramarital affairs?” Ramona asked.

  “Her lies to Nina Deacon went way beyond what was necessary to adhere to that agreement,” Kerney said. “She told Deacon that she wasn’t happy in the marriage but didn’t want to get off her husband’s gravy train.”

  “Should I go after Claudia Spalding’s financial records also?” Ramona asked.

  Kerney stood up. “Not yet. Let’s see what kind of backdoor information we can get from Dean’s records. Has he increased his borrowing lately? Does he have large or overdue accounts payable? Are there frequent cash transactions? Has he been bouncing checks? If Dean is hurting for money, he has a ready supply of drugs he can peddle illegally. Make sure the warrant covers his pharmacy inventory and prescription records.”

  “Anything else?” Ramona asked.

  Kerney smiled. “Find Dean.”

  “He’s either still traveling or has already gone to ground.”

  Kerney nodded. “Probably some place that’s familiar enough where he can stay low and feel safe. Get people started talking to everyone who knows him. Contact the ex-wife again and get a list of the names and addresses of family members and old friends. Where does he like to vacation? Where does he go on business trips? Is there someone—a sibling, a parent, a college chum—he visits regularly?”

  “Dean and Spalding may have scouted out a hiding place for him on their trips together, in case things went sour,” Ramona said. “I’ll check his credit card charges. That may give us a lead.”

  “Keep me informed,” Kerney said as he stepped into the hallway.

  Century City, an incorporated municipality of 176 acres, had once been the backlot of a major motion picture studio. Now its office towers, high-rise condos, and luxury hotels filled the West Los Angeles skyline. It boasted a major outdoor shopping center with trendy, high-end stores and retail businesses that drew people from all over Southern California and beyond.

  In the stop-and-go traffic of the freeway, Ellie Lowrey had a view of Century City through her windshield for a good twenty minutes before she could ease onto an exit ramp and park in an underground garage. Until today, she’d been here only once, a long time ago, on a weekend shopping spree with her kid sister. She’d left suffering from sticker shock and sensory overload, wondering why all the beautiful clothing, expensive jewelry, fine art, and custom home furnishings had left her feeling so dejected. Did people really need all that stuff to be happy?

  She took an elevator to street level and made her way to one of the twin office towers that rose behind a large water fountain. Inside, a security guard directed her to the floor where Spalding’s offices were located.

  On the top floor, Ellie explained to a receptionist the reason for her visit and was asked to wait. While the woman whispered into a telephone, Ellie gazed out the plate glass windows at the barely visible Santa Monica Mountains, veiled by brown smog. Far below, she could see traffic flowing on the streets. Except for a package delivery man rolling a dolly into a store there was nobody else on the sidewalks.

  She turned back to the receptionist, who gave Ellie a nervous smile as she quickly dialed another extension. On the wall behind the woman’s desk were three rows of framed, enlarged color photographs, eighteen in all, displaying Spalding’s hotel properties. One of them showed the high-rise hotel Ellie had just been looking at out the window.

  After a few minutes, a man in a suit came down a hallway, introduced himself as the corporate counsel, and took Ellie to his office, where he questioned her closely about the investigation.

  She told him what she was looking for and why. Satisfied that her visit was tied to a murder investigation and had nothing to do with corporate matters, he accompanied her to Spalding’s corner office, and watched while she searched.

  Light flooded the big room through two window walls. It was sparsely furnished with two angular leather couches separated by a low coffee table, and a large, highly polished writing table with steel legs and a matching desk chair.

  Ellie looked through the drawers of a built-in cabinet behind the desk and glanced at the framed photographs on the shelves above. There were several of Claudia Spalding, but most were of Clifford Spalding posing with movie stars and politicians.

  There were no drawers in the desk and the wastebasket was empty. In Spalding’s private bathroom, Ellie found some personal toiletries in a travel kit and another empty wastebasket, but no prescription bottle.

  “Was anyone here when Mr. Spalding returned to his office from his business trip?” she asked the lawyer.

  “I doubt it,” the lawyer said. “We were closed for the weekend.”

  “Where does he park his car?”

  “In the underground garage,” the lawyer said. “But when he travels on business, he leaves his car at our hotel here and takes the VIP limo to the airport.”

  Ellie thanked the lawyer for his cooperation, went back to the garage, found Spalding’s reserved parking space, and searched the area. There was the usual accumulation of trash under and around the nearby cars, but no prescription bottle.

  She drove to the hotel and spoke to a bell captain, who called inside for the limo driver. An older, skinny man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and black tie hurried out the lobby doors.

  “Did you pick up Mr. Spalding at the airport last weekend?” Ellie asked.

  The man nodded. “Yes.”

  “Did he leave anything behind in the limo?”

  “Yes, he left an empty prescription bottle on the backseat. It had refill information on the label, so I kept it in case he needed it.”

  Ellie broke into a big smile. “Where’s the bottle?”

  Ramona Pino wanted her next case to be a cake-walk. Maybe a gang member who popped a round into somebody’s ear in front of ten witnesses, or a body dump case with enough physical evidence at the crime scene to lead her right to the perp, drinking a beer and watching the tube at home, just waiting to be arrested. Even a good old-fashioned domestic disturbance that had escalated into a murder of passion would be a welcome change of pace.

  Santa Fe averaged only two homicides annually, but last year had been a real bitch, in terms of numbers and complexity. A lone, smart killer with a bad attitude had chalked up seven victims. One of them, the perp’s mother, had been killed years ago and buried under some backyard shrubbery. The rest were all fresh kills done within a matter of days. The perp had been stopped just short of adding Chief Kerney, his wife, and their newborn son to his tally.

  Since Spalding had died in California, Ramona wondered if the case even technically qualified as a local homicide. Maybe an argument could be made that murder was committed the instant Spalding’s medication ha
d been switched. That made it a slow kill, Ramona thought.

  With a new search warrant in hand and three detectives to assist her, Ramona walked into Dean’s pharmacy to find Tilly Gilmore, the clerk, and a pharmacist talking in low voices behind the counter. The pharmacist wore a name tag on his white smock that read GRADY BALDRIDGE.

  She showed them the warrant and explained what the detectives were about to do.

  “Where is Kim?” Baldridge asked. “He should be here for this.”

  “I wish he was here,” Ramona said as she motioned to the officers to get started. Matt Chacon steered Tilly to a back office, while the other two men began looking through the filing cabinet and desk behind the pharmacy counter.

  “Do you work for him full-time?” she asked Baldridge.

  He shook his head and the folds below his chin jiggled. Ramona put him in his late sixties. The smock he wore bulged at his hefty waistline. His pasty skin almost perfectly matched his gray hair.

  “No,” Baldridge said. “I’m basically retired. Kim uses me as his relief pharmacist. This is the last day I can be here for three weeks. The wife and I are leaving tomorrow on vacation.”

  “Were you supposed to work yesterday?” Ramona asked.

  “No, Kim called me at home early in the morning and asked me to come in.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Just that he needed coverage,” Baldridge replied.

  “Was that unusual?”

  “I’d say so,” Baldridge said. “In fact, Tilly and I were just talking about it. He’s only called me to come in on short notice before when he’s been sick. We don’t know what to do if he doesn’t come back tomorrow, except refer his customers to other pharmacies. I only came in today because people were waiting to have their prescriptions filled.”

  “What a nice thing to do before your vacation,” Ramona said. Baldridge smiled at the compliment.

  “Do you know Dean’s customers well?” she asked.

  “Most of them. I’ve filled in here for the past five years.”

  “How about Claudia Spalding?” Ramona asked.

  “Oh yes, she has several current prescriptions on file.”

  “For what?”

  “Unless your warrant specifically permits you to gather prescription information about our customers, I can’t tell you that.”

  “It does,” Ramona said, showing Baldridge the appropriate paragraph in the search warrant.

  “I’d have to look it up,” Baldridge said.

  “Please do,” Ramona replied.

  Baldridge spent a few minutes at a computer, then returned and rattled off Claudia Spalding’s current prescription information. Ramona had him translate it into language she could understand. Baldridge told her one script was for a mild muscle relaxant and the other was for a narcotic painkiller. She asked Baldridge to pull the hard copies, and while he went off to do so, she called the doctor who’d prescribed the medications and asked him to verify the information.

  “The muscle relaxant, yes,” the doctor said. “But I never gave her any painkillers.”

  “What did she need the muscle relaxant for?” Ramona asked.

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Sergeant.”

  “If you talk around the subject a little bit, Doctor,” Ramona said, “I might not have to pay you a visit.”

  “Do you ride horses, Sergeant?”

  “Not since I was a little kid,” Ramona replied.

  “Let’s say you did, and you took a bad fall from a horse and strained the muscles in your back. Not severely, but enough to cause discomfort. The muscle relaxant, in a very low dosage, provides relief.”

  “That helps,” Ramona said. “What about the narcotic painkiller?”

  “It had to be forged,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Spalding has no medical condition I’m aware of that requires it.”

  “Your records confirm that?”

  “Absolutely,” the doctor said before hanging up.

  Baldridge hovered next to her with the hard copy scripts in hand. Both looked real, but who better to forge a doctor ’s prescription than a pharmacist?

  “Tell me about this painkiller,” Ramona asked.

  “It’s hydrocodone acetaminophen, a Class III controlled substance,” Baldridge said, “which means it doesn’t have to be as strictly inventoried and accounted for as Class II drugs under federal regulations.”

  “How is it accounted for?” Ramona asked.

  “We do an annual report and give an estimate of how much was dispensed and what’s on hand. It doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate.”

  “Would the painkiller give the user a high? Make them nod out?”

  “It’s a downer, so I’d imagine so,” Baldridge said. “In normal dosages, other than relieving pain, it tends to cause drowsiness, dull the senses, and flatten the affect.”

  “Can you find out how many other people have had this medicine dispensed to them at this pharmacy?”

  “Easily,” Baldridge said, returning to the computer. He came back with the names of twelve individuals, all with scripts written by Claudia Spalding’s doctor.

  “Did you fill any of these?” Ramona asked.

  Baldridge shook his head and pointed to a line on one of the scripts. “Each prescription must be numbered and initialed by the pharmacist who filled it. All of these were filled by Kim.”

  “What about phone-in prescriptions?”

  “That’s in a different computer file,” he said, stepping back to the monitor. He printed out another ten names of persons receiving the medication, all supposedly phoned in from the same doctor who’d treated Claudia Spalding.

  Ramona called the doctor again and asked about the names on both lists Baldridge had provided.

  “I’ve never treated any of those people,” the doctor said.

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “I don’t like your implication, Sergeant,” the doctor snapped. “I do not supply narcotics to drug users. You can come here any time you want and look at the master chart log and my patient appointment calender.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Ramona replied. “We may have to do that.” She disconnected and turned to speak to Baldridge, who was pulling hard copy files and printing information from the computer. He brought everything to her, and she scanned them quickly one by one. On the hard copies, she noticed that although the doctor’s signature and prescription information looked real, the patients’ names seemed to have been written with a slightly different slant. The printouts from the phone-in scripts showed Kim Dean’s initials as the dispensing pharmacist.

  “Do you have a sample of Dean’s handwriting?” she asked Baldridge.

  He nodded, stepped into the back office, and brought out a large, leather-bound address book.

  Ramona paged through it and noted the same slight backward slant. She wrote out a list of all the scripts, added Dean’s address book to it, gave a copy of the list to Baldridge, and told him that he needed to keep it as part of the inventory of seized evidence.

  “Show me the narcotic medication,” she said.

  Baldridge took her to rows of freestanding medication shelves and handed her a large, almost empty white plastic bottle.

  She looked at the pills, snapped the lid back on, and shook the bottle. “How frequently does Dean reorder this?”

  It took Baldridge a while to dig out the invoices. He finished with a distraught look on his face, and asked Ramona to give him back the hard copy prescriptions and printouts.

  One by one, Baldridge tallied up the total number of narcotic pills Dean had dispensed, including refills. He shook his head sharply, mouth tight with disapproval. “Kim’s been ordering three times the amount he needs,” he said.

  “Anything else?” Ramona asked.

  “There should be two unopened bottles of five hundred pills each in inventory,” Baldridge replied as he peeled off his pharmacist’s smock and stuffed it under his arm. “They’re not on the shelf.”
/>   “Where are you going?”

  “Home. I can’t work here anymore.”

  Ramona gave Baldridge a sympathetic smile and touched him on the arm. “You’ll need to stay for a while longer, Mr. Baldridge. Lock the front door, arrange for another pharmacy to handle any prescriptions that still need to be filled, and work with me. It might mean the difference between leaving tomorrow on that vacation with your wife or being delayed.”

  Baldridge sighed and looked glum. “Very well, if you insist.”

  Three hours into the record search at the pharmacy, the detectives had uncovered enough evidence with Baldridge’s help to prove that Kim Dean had been moving large quantities of drugs containing narcotic painkillers, barbiturates, morphine, and amphetamines onto the streets of Santa Fe. Forged and phony call-in prescriptions from a number of local physicians had been used to falsify the records. To hide inventory shortfalls, Dean had altered invoices from suppliers and lied on required reports to the state pharmacy board.

  Although they were only halfway through the prescription and inventory records, Ramona decided to call a halt and bring in the Drug Enforcement Administration, which by law had jurisdiction. She told her team to switch their attention to Dean’s financial records, and gave Grady Baldridge the news that he would have to delay his vacation trip with his wife. Clearly disgusted by what had been unearthed, Baldridge made no complaint.

  Sitting in her unit outside the pharmacy, Ramona reported in to Chief Kerney. “When we stopped tallying, the street value of the drugs was at least a hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “Who knows how high it will go once the final count is in. I need DEA here, Chief.”

  “I’ll get them on it,” Kerney said. “Do you know if Dean was selling the drugs directly or supplying a dealer?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Ramona replied.

  “What about the forged prescriptions? Are the patients’ names real?”

  “Except for Claudia Spalding, we don’t know.”

  “I doubt that they are,” Kerney said. “But I know a man who might be able to tell us quickly if any of those people on the list are part of Spalding’s or Dean’s social circle. He knows just about everyone with money in Santa Fe. He’s been helpful to me in the past.”