The Cyclops Conspiracy (20 page)

Peter and Walter followed Jason through the storage area and into the alley.

“What’s up there?” Jason asked, gesturing toward the roof.

“A wireless transmitter and a dish. Whoever installed it can look at the video images from a remote location. I’m familiar with the company. Digitronics. It’s top of the line.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yep,” said Waterhouse.

“Why? What’s going through that mind of yours?” asked Peter.

Jason scratched his cheek with a forefinger. “That’s how Thomas made the surveillance video. The receiver is at his house.”

“How do you know?” asked Peter.

“I saw the receiver in his office. It’s a model made by Digitronics and wired to a satellite dish outside his home office.”

Jason went straight for the middle drawer of Lily’s desk, and found it secured by a flimsy lock. He could force it, but he didn’t want Lily knowing anyone had been in it. Fishing his keys out, he tried each of them. The blades were too wide and long.

He cursed because he’d sent Peter and Waterhouse home, thought about calling them back to the pharmacy, but decided against it. Instead, he returned to the pharmacy and found a thin-bladed spatula and a paper clip. Returning to the desk, Jason inserted the spatula blade and the clip into the keyhole, manipulating them in unison. After several unsuccessful attempts and some whispered curses, the cam turned, and Jason slid the drawer open.

At that moment, Christine sighed. “I can’t figure out the password. I could call a friend who works in our IS department at the firm. He could break it, but we’d have to come back.”

“No can do. We need to keep this to ourselves for now. What about these filing cabinets? Are there paper copies of the transactions?” Jason asked, as he slid Lily’s checkbook from the drawer.

* * *

Two hours later, the floor around them was littered with stacks of bank reports, financial statements, invoices, insurance remittance summaries, and payroll and billing statements. Jason stretched his aching back. They’d located every document pertinent to their investigation going back fourteen months since the first fake prescription had been billed. Christine had sorted them into piles and clipped them together with binder clips from Lily’s desk. She’d labeled them with sticky notes to indicate the file and drawer they had been stored in.

Jason had scrutinized Lily’s checkbook register. That task alone had taken him an hour. He’d found a yellow legal pad and jotted down every entry for the last two years, including the two checks Zanns had made out to him. Most appeared to be ordinary expenses.

Each insurance remittance statement listed the prescription claims billed by the Colonial to ShieldCare, Winstead’s carrier, the previous month. Jason also pulled the same documents for the months following each of the seven phony prescriptions. Jason highlighted each claim. ShieldCare had paid for each bogus prescription. He’d found no evidence that any of the claims had been reversed. Another damning piece of evidence.

He glanced at his watch as Christine returned unneeded documents to the filing cabinets. It was one fifteen in the morning. He was about to suggest they take the documents to an all-night copy place, when a loud rattling came from beyond the pharmacy department.

“What the hell was that?” Christine whispered.

They scampered into the pharmacy, staying out of sight. Jason rose up, peeking above the frosted glass of the pharmacy counter. A uniformed man stood inside the double doors, scanning a flashlight in a wide arc.

Jason cursed and sank down beside Christine. He had not locked the door after entering the pharmacy. He motioned with his hands and mouthed the words “Someone is inside.”

Christine’s eyes went wide. She mouthed a question. “What do we do now?”

Jason held up a finger. He rose again, slowly elevating his eyes above the glass. The figure had moved deeper inside the store, swiveling the flashlight 360 degrees. The beam sliced through the darkened building as the man moved to their left. The guard had yet to notice the open grate that separated the pharmacy department from the front store.

Jason sank to Chrissie’s side again and placed his lips to her ear. “Go back to the office and gather up the papers. Take them to the back door and wait there for me. When I get there, be ready to run. Make sure you close up Lily’s office. And be quiet!”

He carefully pulled his car keys from his pocket and slid them into her hand. Jason reached above him, groping along the pharmacy counter. He touched something heavy, grabbed it, and lowered it to his lap. It was a box of staples. Jason turned and crouched, ready.

Chrissie was terrified, her irises completely encircled by the whites of her eyes.

“Go, now!” Jason said.

As she crawled away, Jason turned and launched the staples through the darkness. They landed with a metallic crash in a corner, far from the flashlight-wielding man.

Christine crawled on all fours into the hallway. She stood and found an empty cardboard box in the storage room, tiptoed back to Lily’s office, and stuffed the documents into the box. Thirty seconds later after locking Zanns’s door, she carried it into the storage room, setting it beside the back door.

* * *

Uniform whipped around, shining the beam of light in the direction of the sound and away from Jason. Jason saw a pistol clutched in his hand, backlit by the light beam.

The figure moved toward the source of the sound. Jason watched for a full minute as he made his way, ducking through aisles. At times, only the faint wash of the flashlight’s beam jerking this way and that was visible. Finally, Uniform was as far away from Jason as he could be, in the front corner.

Jason rose and began a slow turn toward the hallway and escape. His elbow brushed something on the pharmacy counter. It was a plastic counting tray that had been hanging over the edge. It teetered briefly over the floor before dropping. Its journey lasted only a second, but it seemed like an eternity. It clattered on the floor, sounding like a thousand rapid-fire gunshots.

Jason ducked. The beam wheeled, filling the pharmacy department with dust-speckled light.

“Who’s there?” the voice hollered.

Bent at the waist, Jason raced to the hallway. Christine waited by the back door, her hand on the knob. He motioned frantically for her to open it. They shot into the alleyway just as the light beam and heavy footfalls reached the entrance of the hallway.

Taking her hand in his, he cradled the box in his left like a football. “Go, go, go!” he hollered. “Get the keys ready!”

Thirty seconds later, Christine jumped behind the wheel as Jason slid into the passenger seat. She fired the engine. Tires squealed, and they sped off.

They exchanged relief-filled smiles. They had gone two blocks when Jason turned to her. “I’ve got to go back, Chrissie. I’ve got to go back, or Lily’s going to know we were in there. Take me back now!”

A cup of coffee cradled in his hands, Jason sat on the edge of the sofa in his living room, watching the television screen, with the kind of anticipation he’d experienced when his Red Sox were one out away from winning their first World Series in eighty-six years. He was exhausted, but with help from his fourth strong cup of Folgers and the residual adrenaline of their early-morning adventure, he pushed himself to focus on the Colonial security camera video Waterhouse had given him.

Jason had realized as they sped away from the Colonial hours earlier that he’d deactivated the alarm system using his alarm code. It was unique to him, and would indicate to Lily or anyone with access that he’d been the one in the pharmacy. A call to the security company would be all it would take. He’d dropped Chrissie at a coffee shop with instructions to wait for him while he returned in the car to the Colonial.

Jason was fairly confident he’d mitigated the chances a report would be filed by the shopping center’s rent-a-cop. He had approached the man at a dead run, flashing his pharmacist’s license and door keys to
the Colonial. “I’m the VP of operations,” he explained, out of breath from the run and the near miss of being caught. He’d received a phone call from the security company, Jason said, and had rushed right over. It took fifteen minutes and a tour of the pharmacy under the pretense of looking for signs of theft to convince the rent-a-cop that the situation was under control, and that there was no need to call the police. The man relented, but did not look convinced. The promise of avoiding paperwork, however, appeared attractive to him.

“You must have scared the thieves off before they had a chance to take anything,” Jason said. He watched the security guard’s chest puff with self-importance. He would file a report in the morning with police and make a call to his supervisor explaining his exemplary action, Jason promised. Reluctantly, the man let the matter drop. Jason locked up and watched as the guard walked away to finish his rounds. Jason had no intention of calling the cops.

The anticipation he’d felt over finding more evidence on this video slowly waned. It had been recorded two weeks ago on the hidden security cameras. He fast-forwarded at four times normal speed. Sam Fairing and Kevin Mitchell, the technician, worked the counter, filling prescriptions and answering the phone, ringing up patients. They scurried around like actors in a choppy, but silent, color movie. After an hour of fast-forwarding, the recording ended. The entire twelve-hour day at the Colonial had been saved. And it seemed to be just as ordinary as a thousand other days Jason had experienced over the course of his career.

What was Thomas trying to document?

Jason lifted copies of Pettigrew’s reports, along with his handwritten notes. None of the prescriptions for Prucept were filled on the same day as the video. The last prescription on the list was filled one day before, the fourteenth. What happened on the fifteenth that was so important Pettigrew wanted a record of it? He’d been murdered that night. Was there a clue here that would point Jason in the right direction? He felt the answer was staring him in the face, but he was groping like a blind man in the dark.

With his anticipation turning to frustration, he went upstairs, hoping a hot shower could scrub it away.

He returned to the kitchen twenty minutes later in only a slightly improved mood. He toasted two English muffins and nuked them in the microwave, melting a slice of Swiss cheese on each. He washed them down quickly with orange juice. His impotent angst over the Colonial mess was rising like a storm surge. He opened and closed drawers, slamming them recklessly, hunting for his favorite four-inch knife, part of a set given to him by Keller’s on his fifth anniversary. Unable to locate it, he crashed a final drawer closed and grabbed another.

Ten minutes later, he was out the door to pick up Michael from his friend’s house after a sleepover and bring him back to his mother.

Two hours beyond that, Jason was knee-deep in computer printouts inside the Colonial.

His cell chirped. Christine didn’t wait for Jason to offer a greeting, sounding like an excited little girl. “I found it!”

“You’re sure it’s from your father’s cell phone the night he died?” asked Jason.

“The message still has the time and date stamp on it.”

Jason did not answer, frustrated with his lack of progress in finding more phony prescriptions.

“Are you there?” Christine’s voice punctured the trance.

“Sorry. Yeah, I’m here.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m at the Colonial to see if I can find any more fraud.”

“Let me know if you have any luck.”

“What would you consider luck? Finding some or not?”

“Good point.”

“I’m just about done. I’ve found nothing. I’ve checked fifty more prescriptions for other high-cost drugs. Every prescription is authentic and original. Plus, the invoices and the software show that the drugs were in stock on the shelf when the prescription was filled. Only the Prucept prescriptions are fakes. Plus I’ve printed all the electronic signature
files for the fifty prescriptions. A signature means the prescription was picked up by the patient. All but three John Hancocks were present. The signatures were all different, written by different hands. Some were perfect cursive, others just scribbles. The ones that had no signatures were the three Prucept prescriptions, which we already know are bogus.”

“I’d say that’s good news. Maybe the problem’s not that big.”

He grunted.

“I’ll let you finish up. Call me before you come by.”

“Will do. I’ll be in a better mood by then.”

“You better be,” said Christine.

“Chrissie? Did you make the copies?”

“Uh-huh. I spent two hours this morning at OfficeMax, copying every side of every document.”

“Good girl.”

“I’m glad I can help,” she said.

“I’ll see you in a little while.” Jason hung up.

He stretched the tight muscles in his back. The last time Jason had experienced this kind of fatigue, he was back in college cramming for pharmacology exams.

“Damn!” He seethed. He still didn’t have an answer to his question. Why would they only fill seven fake prescriptions?

* * *

It wasn’t like running a marathon or climbing the steps of a stadium, but the exertion of moving the heavy file boxes worked off some frustration. Jason had not bothered to call Brandon today. He wanted no witnesses to his sleuthing and needed the time alone. The lifting and carrying forced blood to his muscles, which demanded more oxygen. Blood flow was diverted from his brain. That was a good thing. It slowed his mental gymnastics.

Frustration, one of his college professors had once said, was the result of unmet expectations. To quell your frustration, he explained,
change your expectations. Presto! No more frustration. Jason had never agreed with that statement. All that changing your expectations did was make you settle for less. Sometimes, you had to bust your ass to get results. Break down walls. See what was on the other side! There would be no settling, he thought. The answers were here somewhere. He was going to find out what the hell was going on.