The Cyclops Conspiracy (17 page)

“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.”

“I wonder why Pettigrew didn’t check the claims and reversals himself. You’d think they’d be in this box,” said Peter.

“Did the insurance carrier pay the Colonial for the prescriptions?” asked Waterhouse.

“Another good question,” Jason replied. “I’ll find the remittance statements from Winstead’s insurance company. They’re probably in a file somewhere in the pharmacy. They send a statement along with a check to reimburse the pharmacy for payment of the prescriptions for all filed claims each month. I’ll dig up each statement corresponding to each one of these prescriptions.”

“Again, why didn’t Pettigrew do that?” asked Peter.

“Maybe he didn’t have access to those documents. Lily Zanns wouldn’t let him have free run of the place once she bought the pharmacy. Or maybe he died before he could get to it.” He pulled out two more items from the pile of paper. “There’s more,” said Jason. One was a wax-paper prescription bag with a Colonial receipt fastened to it. The bag and receipt were crumpled, and specks of claylike dirt granules were inside. The second was a white piece of paper with a drawing and a word scribbled on it. “This”—he held up the crumpled bag—“is the prescription bag from the last prescription fill. Why would Thomas keep it?”

Waterhouse and Peter shot each other confused looks.

“Then there’s this drawing. There’s a word under it. It says, ‘Simoon.’”

Peter grabbed the sketch from his brother. Blood drained from the ex-marine’s face.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jason. “Have you seen this before?”

“Nothing. Never mind,” Peter muttered tersely. “Let’s just take it to the cops.”

“No, not yet,” Jason answered, eyeing his brother. The drawing had evoked a reaction in his brother, but he knew better than to press the matter.

“Why not?” asked Peter.

“Because if we do that, we may never find out what happened to Thomas.”

“What are you saying? That he was murdered?” Peter seemed irritated.

“I’m saying we need to look into that possibility.”

“Sheesh, bro. You’ve been watching too much late night TV. How are we going to look into something like that?”

Waterhouse held up a finger. “If he died in a car accident, it’s considered an unattended death. Since there was alcohol involved, they probably did an autopsy. I might be able to get a copy of it.”

“Do that,” Jason commanded. “There’s also this.” He pulled the now-dead cell phone from his jacket pocket. It was in a ziplock bag. “I found this in the Colonial. Can we find out who it belonged to?” Small droplets of brown water clung to the inside of the plastic bag.

“Where’d you find it? In the shitter?” asked Peter.

“It was in a bucket of dirty water in the Colonial. Why would someone drop a cell phone in a bucket and leave it there?”

“I can find out who it belongs to. Leave it with me,” said Waterhouse. “Thomas had a phone just like that.”

“Where do we go from here?” asked Peter.

“I’ll follow up on the cell phone and the autopsy,” Waterhouse said.

“We know three people who’re involved,” said Jason. “We can start with them.”

“Three?” asked Peter.

“The patient, the doctor, and the pharmacist,” Jason replied.

“The patient is Winstead, the doctor is Kader. Who’s the pharmacist?” Waterhouse asked.

Jason smiled tightly at the private investigator. “Sam Fairing.”

Walter Waterhouse stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray sitting on his crowded nightstand. It sat in a valley between prescription containers. The large vial of generic Vicodin was as wide and round as a mortar shell and was half filled with the horse pills. A muscle relaxant, cyclobenzaprine, stood next to two containers of high-blood-pressure pills, a vial of antidepressants, and those damned capsules to keep him from having to take a piss every hour during the night.

A box of tissues hung precariously over the edge of the nightstand. Discarded tissues lay piled on the floor beside the bed, crumpled and stained with a brown substance that had come from deep inside the private investigator’s respiratory tract.

Waterhouse sensed that the brothers Rodgers did not trust him. He could see it in their exchanged glances when they were asking about his investigation of Thomas’s wife’s death. He couldn’t give two shits. It was his time to cash in. He’d spent the better part of his life taking down scumbags and murderers while in Boston. And all he had to show for it was a painful leg wound that flared up when clouds rolled in.

Waterhouse had seen enough violence and death in the last twenty-odd years. It’d begun in the army during his two tours in Vietnam. As a lowly grunt, he’d volunteered for every patrol he could, walking point under the hot sun by day and in the stiflingly humid nights. Remarkably, he received not even a scratch in country over twenty-four months. Two acts of bravery had earned him a Bronze Star with oak leaf clusters and a promotion to lieutenant.

There’d been one close call. In the jungles of Ia Drang valley, a mortar round landed nearby, leaving him unharmed but totally disoriented. Had it not been for Clint Jones dragging his ass to safety, the next round, which hit ten seconds later, would have ripped him apart.

Though physically intact, the experiences had left him emotionally shattered. Withdrawal and panic attacks never affected his police work. They only haunted him after the sun went down as he lay in bed. The recurring nightmare of a black-clad, yellow-skinned warrior about to plunge a bayonet into his chest visited him nightly for the next ten years. Sometimes, he wished he
had
been wounded in battle. He heard that those guys actually had an easier time making the transition back to normalcy.

The war had cost him his marriage and any meaningful relationship with his three daughters. They’d had enough of the long, unpredictable hours followed by the silence and the booze at home. They took a permanent tour of duty to California. His daughters, whom he hadn’t seen in almost seven years, had made their own lives. And he was not a part of them.

Vietnam left him with other, invisible scars. He was a first-rate racist when it came to anybody whose eyes weren’t round. Having grown up in the lily-white neighborhoods of eastern Massachusetts, he’d have hated blacks also, if it hadn’t been for his army buddy, Clint Jones. Jones had saved an entire race from Waterhouse’s internal wrath. A massive former defensive lineman who’d flunked out of Purdue, Jones had been as dark as midnight with pearly whites that could light a small city. Waterhouse had often ordered Jones not to smile on patrol
at night, so the enemy wouldn’t get a make on their position. They’d become good friends in the four weeks after Jones had saved his skinny white ass. When an NVA ambush occurred in broad daylight and Jones was bayoneted by a gook regular, Waterhouse’s hatred toward Asians multiplied. The attack on 9/11 had immediately and effectively transferred that hatred to Arabs and Middle Easterners as well.

The physical injuries that he’d avoided in Southeast Asia managed to catch up with him back home. After being discharged and spat upon, Waterhouse became a cop walking a beat in the small town of Medford a few miles north of Boston. Muscle strains and sprains were common. Five years later, he was promoted to detective, investigating small-time break-ins and minor drug trafficking. A buddy got him an interview with the Boston Police Department in narcotics. He took the job, and his life intensified. Two years later, Cathy left him, taking their girls with her. Fifteen years after that, a whacked-out drug dealer accused of murder put a round in his right leg. Three months and two surgeries followed. Waterhouse walked out of Mass General, sold everything he owned, which wasn’t much, and moved to southeastern Virginia. He’d given more than his share for his country, and he’d paid dearly for it. No two-bit, legal pill pusher would shame him into a guilt trip.

As he sat on his bed and hawked into a tissue, Waterhouse heard a high-pitched, short squeak from the rear of the house. Waterhouse knew instantly someone had opened the screen door. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t gotten around to lubricating it. His senses on high alert, he rolled silently out of bed and crept to the kitchen entryway.

Waterhouse peered around the hallway doorjamb into the kitchen. The doorknob jingled softly as the intruder manipulated it. The kitchen was dark. The figure, dressed in black, was silhouetted against the soft glow of a neighbor’s porch light.