by Lisa Black
“You need to see his check?” Ralph reiterated.
“Sure,” Riley said, ignoring his earlier inquiry about the wire transfer deposits. One step at a time.
“What has all this got to do with Evan getting killed?” Ralph demanded.
“We’re hoping this information will help us with that.”
“It won’t.”
“Really? How do you know?” Riley asked, and a guilty look crossed the man’s face.
Then Ralph noticed Maggie watching from the desk, straightened, and said: “Well, if it will help you catch who killed that poor boy, then okay.” He even put his hand over his heart, and seemed a little disappointed when the two detectives didn’t respond with murmurs of great empathy and human feeling. They only waited.
He went over to an unlabeled cardboard box, fished around, pulled out a simple blue-colored check and handed it to Riley, who asked if the cardboard box represented the extent of Ralph’s filing system.
“Checks gotta be sent back to the issuing institution. I let them pile up and then take care of that at the end of the day. There may be more than one going to the same place.”
Maggie got up and joined their huddle. Indeed, a simple check, issued by the United States Social Security department of Medicare, made out to Marlon Toner in the amount of thirty-five thousand and some odd dollars, dated the previous week. About the only interesting item on the piece of paper was a long number written on the memo line.
“See?” Ralph said, his tone a bit petulant. “I told you. A check. Perfectly good. Why would I cash bad checks? I’d be the one who loses.”
“I never said it was bad,” Riley said. “Do you know what this reimbursement was for?”
“No! Of course not.”
Jack thought aloud, “Toner’s only about thirty-five. How is he getting Medicare?”
Maggie said, “He could be on disability.”
Riley said, “Nah. Unless he was diabetic, he’d have to be on disability for two years before being eligible for Medicare, and his sister said his plunge down the rabbit hole only began four months ago or so. What? So I look ahead . . . I’m not going to be a bug on the windshield of my future.”
“Quite admirable,” Jack said. “Did he mention diabetes during his interview?”
“Not a word. I think we have to assume these hefty checks are all a scheme cooked up between him and Dr. Castleman.”
Maggie heard a tiny but sharp intake of breath, and Ralph’s fingers tapped a staccato beat on one meaty thigh. “You know Dr. Castleman?” she demanded.
“What? No. Uh-uh.” His face had smoothed. Sweat glistened over his upper lip and nose, but then he did keep the office heated to near-saunalike temps.
Riley had Maggie take a picture of the check and then handed it back to Ralph with sweet thank-yous before he moved on. “Now, the transfers Mr. Toner sent—”
“You can’t get it back. That money’s gone.”
“We don’t want it back. We want to know where it went.”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s a security thing,” Ralph added, as unconvincing as a toddler found in possession of his sister’s toy.
“Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense,” Riley said. “But that’s okay, we don’t need you to tell us, because we’ve got these.” He pulled out the receipts for the money orders. “Toner came in here with thirty-five thousand dollars and left with thirty-five hundred. Mr. Bank Deposit got twenty-seven thousand. Forty-five hundred never left this place—I’m guessing that was your cut.”
Jack said, “You know what that’s called? That’s called money laundering.”
“No,” Ralph said firmly. “That’s transaction fee. Is standard.”
Riley went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “No, we don’t need access to Mr. Bank Deposit’s account or account numbers or anything. We only need to know his name.”
“You sent this money order.”
“Is not money order!” Ralph exploded, exasperated with this inaccuracy. “It’s a wire transfer. It’s different.”
“Right, no pesky cap. So where did this transfer go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s start with something easier, then. Where is this bank? Is it local? If it is, we can go bother them.”
“I don’t know—there’s only the account—”
“Panama,” Maggie said.
All three men stared at her.
“The bank’s in Panama. See?” She pointed to the eight characters written on the line next to the words Swift Code. “The first four letters are the bank, the second two are the country. ‘PA.’ Remember, that’s where our mortgage broker hid all her money a few months ago.”
“No,” Riley said, “but I’ll take your word for it. So, not local. Then let’s at least have the name. It will be in the record of your transaction.”
“I don’t think I—”
“We’ve got a murdered cop in this city,” Riley pointed out, leaning harder than Maggie had ever seen him lean, and without even raising his voice. “I think you can.”
“Cop? What cop? Evan no cop.” Panic suffused his face. “Was he?”
“Account name.”
Ralph twisted his lips, darted his gaze around the shop in a futile search for rescue, and sweated. Finally he said, “Let me check.”
“Great idea!”
Riley’s bonhomie seemed to frighten the shop owner more than Jack’s glowering bulk. For the rest of the visit he ignored Jack, but kept Riley in sight as if he were an unexploded bomb. Ralph returned to his desk, took the laptop from its surface, placed it on his lap, and pointedly pivoted so that they could not see the screen. He tapped keys. He tapped more keys.
“Not that it will matter much,” Jack muttered to Riley. “It will be some shell company that one guy traveled to Panama to create with invented names and structure. As soon as the cash transfers to it, it will be shifted right out again to other shell companies with other invented names and no one in Panama or Cyprus or Lichtenstein or wherever will ‘violate client confidentiality’ to tell us who’s behind it.”
“The banks won’t even know themselves,” Riley agreed.
Maggie shifted her weight on tired feet, torn between anticipation that this money trail might finally unlock this inexplicable group of deaths, and doubt that some international kingpin’s laundered money would have anything to do with Rick’s murder. She itched to get back to the lab and identify those animal hairs. She was sure she’d seen the distinctive roots before, in one of her texts....
Ralph’s shoulders loosened, and some of the wrinkles flattened out. Before he even opened his mouth, she predicted that he honestly couldn’t find what they needed, or he could and for some reason didn’t mind telling them.
“Wayne Hawk Therapeutics.”
Apparently, the latter.
Jack and Riley both stirred at this. They turned to each other and then back to the little man in the desk chair.
“Hawk?” Riley said.
“Wayne?” Jack said.
Ralph appeared considerably less happy at having told them something actually useful, and Maggie felt a quick thrill. This meant something.
“There’s the connection,” Riley muttered.
“We need to revisit that office.”
“Both of them. You think it’s—”
“Possibly any one of them. Maggie,” Jack said suddenly. “Those animal hairs. On Rick’s coat?”
“Um . . . yeah?”
“Could they be from a sugar glider?”
She turned to Ralph but he couldn’t help, as confused by this change in topics as she. “What the hell is a sugar glider?”
“I think it’s a kind of flying squirrel.”
“Squirrel . . . oh yes, that could . . . the scale pattern . . . I’ll need to find the reference sample in my cabinet. . . .”
“Let’s go,” Jack said to Riley.
Chapter 31
Monday, 5:00 p.m.
Her cop babysit
ter had fitted Shanaya with a wire—as in, an actual wire that ran from a two-inch square digital recorder and battery clipped to her underwear up to a fake gold pin that looked like a sunflower weighing down the edge of her collar. The stupid thing only recorded, didn’t transmit, so no one at the police department would be listening in real time. They didn’t have the manpower for that, thanks a lot. They gave her a phone to use for emergencies, while the recording would be made for future prosecutions. No one was supposed to notice that the patterned center of the sunflower was actually the sieve covering a microphone. Or that a woman her age, with her style, would ever wear anything as old-lady as a tacky pin.
Not to mention if the pit boss felt her up again, something he’d been doing with increasing regularity, he’d rub on that wire and she’d be dead before she ever got the chance to call her cop babysitter. No matter where he stationed himself along East Ninth Street, she would be inside a locked building with one exit, surrounded by men ruthless enough to steal little old grannies’ life savings. They wouldn’t hesitate to choke the life out of one girl with a headset and dump her body in the same alley where Eric Hayes had attacked her. And since that idiot had been released on his own recognizance, he would make the perfect fall guy.
She stepped into the foyer and rang the buzzer.
But if the pit bull kept his hands to himself, she could still pull this out. She’d let the wire record what it could. She would write down every coworker’s name and their position in the hierarchy, as best she could. She’d keep a record of names, credit card numbers, phone numbers, how much money each lost. And she’d try to snap as many pictures with the new phone they’d given her—yeah, like that wouldn’t attract attention, and they hadn’t even given her a decent phone to do it with. But she’d do it.
Then, she might, just might, get to keep some or all the money she and Evani had worked so hard to accumulate if she made the cops too grateful to ask where it came from.
For that, she’d walk into the mouth of hell itself. The door lock buzzed and she pulled it open.
And this place was pretty close.
Monday, 5:15 p.m.
“Wayne Hawk,” Riley mused as he drove, dodging another car, all four tires sliding on the slush-covered pavement. “Wayne, our little receptionist, or Hawk as in Hawking Industries and Mark Hawking?”
Maggie tensed as they approached a red light. The vehicle slid to a stop by some margin not visible from the back seat.
“Good question,” Jack said. “We could have walked there faster than this.”
Indeed, the distance from A to Z to Dr. Sidney Jeffers’s office building might have been one and a half city blocks, tops. But—“You want to walk in this? Your shoes would be soaked through before they tapped 14th.”
“I guess not.”
“What makes you so sure this doctor’s office has something to do with it?” Maggie asked. They hadn’t wanted to take the time to drop her back at the station, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to hang out with Ralph until someone could send a ride.
“I don’t even have a guess,” Jack said. “Somehow they’ve got to be part of the same concern. We have the same killer in all three cases, but no connection between Evan Harding and Jennifer Toner except for Marlon. Castleman is providing Marlon with pills, maybe through Jeffers, or Wayne, because Wayne’s pet’s fur winds up on Rick.”
“Maybe,” Maggie corrected, ever the scientist. She hadn’t even seen Jeffers’s office pet yet, much less examined its fur.
“Marlon is laundering money in exchange for the pills, through Ralph. Ralph nearly has a heart attack when he hears us discussing Castleman.”
Riley said, “Yet he gives up ‘Wayne Hawk’ without hesitation. . . or without much hesitation. Because he didn’t recognize the name? Assumed it was fake and couldn’t be traced back to anyone?”
“Or because he’s willing to sacrifice them?”
Maggie said, “And this Dr. Castleman is in hiding?”
“Apparently,” Jack said. “Because he’s sure impossible to find.”
“But he’s a legitimate doctor?”
“Sure. But in the pill mill craze most pushers were actual doctors, too, though not always in the specialties they were supposed to be.”
“So why is Castleman in hiding?”
“Because he’s a pill pusher,” Jack said. “Why are you turning?”
Riley said, “You can’t get there from here. Not with that weird fork at 18th.”
“But a legitimate one,” Maggie persisted. She knew something about the pill mills that had swept the country only a few short years before. One of the most frustrating things about them proved to be their brazen operations, with billboards and large parking lots, lobbies that didn’t try to hide the quick in-and-out of patient visits where physical exams were reduced to a few questions on a form. Granted, new laws had been put in place specifically to combat such mills, so perhaps that had forced such doctors underground. “If you can’t find him, how do his patients?”
“Same way they find the drug dealers, I guess. Word of mouth.”
Maggie said, “Maybe Castleman started taking his own product and lost his license. Fell on hard times, started selling pills. I can’t see any other reason for him to stay out of sight if he’s legit. Do you know if his license is still in good standing?”
Jack said he had no idea. Riley didn’t answer, waiting for a break in the next lane. A large pile of snow outside a parking lot had collapsed into the street and then frozen again, hard as a glacier. It blocked the far right lane.
“Did you call the A.M.A.?”
Silence. Which meant they had not, and neither of them wanted to admit it.
“I have a friend who’s the national secretary. I could—”
Yes, the detectives said in unison. Call her.
While Riley negotiated their way through three lanes of traffic where snow obscured the lines on the asphalt, Maggie Googled the number for the A.M.A. She listened through two sets of phone menu instructions, then connected with the main office and asked for Tanya Schroeder. They had met at college, played in the band together, and still exchanged birthday cards.
“Tanya! I got your Christmas card. First one of the season, as always.”
“Gotta send ’em out the day after Thanksgiving. My mom’s training.”
“Isn’t that kind of cheating? You should at least have to wait until December.”
“It is not,” Tanya assured her firmly. “Check Emily Post.”
Maggie explained why she called, that they needed to ask the mysterious Dr. Phillip Castleman some questions regarding a murder. Actually, several murders.
Mentioning murder did not open any floodgates when it came to Tanya Schroeder. Any woman who would not violate Emily Post would also not violate even an unimportant regulation of the American Medical Association. “I can’t tell you anything about his record, or any personal information—”
“No, no. All I want is the most impersonal information possible. His office address. That’s it.”
“That’s all you want?”
“Yep.”
A pause. “Have you tried the phone book? Or, today’s version of the phone book, Google?”
“Yep.”
Another pause. “Okay, let me see what we’ve got. Hey, how’s your brother doing?”
In their dorm days Tanya had invariably shown up to “help” Maggie move in or out when Alex was there as well. “Today? Playing a gig in Hilton Head, the lucky stiff, then they’re off to a ski resort. And yes,” Maggie told Tanya before she could ask, because she always asked, “he’s still married.”
“Damn.”
“Tanya, so are you.”
“Don’t bother me with trifles.” Keys clacked in the background.
“Would a woman who sends out her Christmas cards on a strict schedule really be happy living and raising kids in constant motion from town to town, gig to gig?”
“Maybe I yearn to leave schedules
behind.”
Maggie doubted it but didn’t argue.
“Okay. Dr. Phillip Castleman, licensed in Ohio. What a name. Sounds like something out of a romance novel.”
“It does.”
“His license is in good standing.”
Maybe not for much longer, Maggie thought.
“But currently on hold for renewal.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s a number of reasons . . . I probably can’t tell you, you know, but . . . it’s not . . . oh. That’s cool.”
“Cool? What’s cool?”
Riley had maneuvered the car into the lot and plunged into a spot at the edge. If there were any lines to indicate separate parking spaces, they had been lost under six inches of snow, but that hardly mattered since only a few vehicles dotted the lot. He and Jack made no move to get out, waiting for her to finish her call but, mercifully, left the engine running along with what heating element it had.
“I see why you’re having trouble finding the dashing Dr. Phillip Castleman. In light of this info, I might throw Alex over for him on the spot.”
“Tanya—”
“He’s in North Kivu.”
Maggie waited.
“In the DRC. Democratic Republic of Congo.”
“Congo?” Jack and Riley had both turned in the front seat, watching her with a uniform, unsettling intensity. “As in African Congo?”
“You know another? Your very good doctor is currently attached to Doctors Without Borders, working in a war zone with the worst Ebola outbreak—Ebola. I may still throw Alex over for him but not until Phillip is out of quarantine. That stuff is nasty.”
“How long has he been there?”
“Aboouuuttt . . . a year and a half.”
“Huh. Could someone be here still prescribing meds under his license number?”
