The Society (6 page)
“Yes, sir.”
“Margo, isn’t it?”
Patty knew her father might have only met Brasco’s wife once, possibly years ago. She wasn’t the least surprised that he remembered her—he remembered everyone.
“Yes, sir, Margo. She’s doing great.”
“So?”
Although the question was directed more or less to the group, Brasco was not about to pass up the opportunity to impress the colonel.
“So, it’s another managed-care executive,” he said. “The other two looked like professional hits. So does this one. Probably Semtex, we’re guessing. I just told Corbin and Brown here about the alphabet letters we found with the other two victims. It’s my guess there must be letters in the garage.”
Patty stifled a groan.
“Roosevelt,” Moriarity said, “do you think you could check with the crime-scene people and get us permission to take a look in there?”
“No problem.”
Moments later, the detective returned and indicated that so long as they were careful, they could enter the garage through the kitchen of the house. Just leave the garage door alone until someone could determine how it might have been opened and closed by the killer without the electronic code and without anyone knowing. Stepping around and between grisly remnants of Cyrill Davenport, they entered the house through the front door.
Using a handkerchief, Patty gently opened the door from the rear hallway to the garage. Then she extracted a slim, powerful flashlight from her purse, located the light switch, and flicked it on with a pen.
It took just three minutes of searching before Tommy Moriarity said, “Well, Lieutenant, it looks as if you are absolutely right.”
He indicated a heavy metal rake, tines propped up against the back wall. Impaled on the tine at each end of the row was a three-inch white square that looked as if it was cut from a file card. Meticulously, artistically printed on one card was the block letter
B
, and on the other, an
E
. Careful to touch nothing, the four of them peered at the finding as Patty further illuminated it with her light.
“E, R, R, T, B, E,”
she said softly.
“Heartbeat?” Corbin offered.
“Possible,” Patty replied. “Maybe it’s parts of several words in a quote.”
They searched the garage for another five minutes, but found nothing unusual or out of place. Back outside on the driveway, Moriarity encouraged Corbin and Brasco to keep him informed and to contact him if there was anything he could help them with, including passage around any bureaucratic roadblocks to their investigation. Then he motioned Patty to a spot on the lawn where the two of them could talk unheard.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Good enough. You?”
With friends, Patty often referred to herself as
the son my father wishes he had had
. Her wonderful older brother, Tom, a wilderness guide and expert fly-fisherman, was often unemployed but always busy advocating for various environmental causes. He was also openly gay and exceedingly happy—except for those infrequent times he spent with their father.
“Soon,” Patty’s brother would say every time he ventured east from Oregon. “Soon the guy’s going to figure it all out. What a force he’ll be then.”
Moriarity scuffed at the ground with the toe of his spit-polished shoe.
“I’m doing all right. I miss your mother, that’s for sure.”
It had been two years since Ruth Moriarity lost a heroic battle with ovarian cancer—two years during which Tommy seemed to have aged a dozen.
“Yeah,” Patty said, risking a squeeze of her colonel’s hand. “I miss her, too.”
Moriarity seemed to sag for a moment, then just as quickly pulled himself up ramrod straight.
“So, how are you doing on these cases?” he asked.
Patty shook her head.
“We’re working like hell on them, but nothing so far. My bet is it’s either a disillusioned, disgruntled physician or the relative of someone who died because of managed-care negligence. Our hope is that sometime soon the killer will feel the need to get his message across to the public more stridently, and move closer and closer to being out in the open. Then maybe we can get a hook into him.”
“You still upset about Brasco taking your place in charge of this case?”
“Nope. I’m fine, Dad.”
“Good. I’m glad you understand why the change was made. Brasco’s been around a good while. I imagine you’ll learn a lot from him.”
“I’ve learned a lot already.”
“I heard he’s got a cryptographer and a psychologist on the case.”
“That he does.”
Patty narrowly avoided choking on the words. Even before the murder of Marcia Rising, she was concerned that the letters found beside Ben Morales’s body might be the start of something and had both the code-breaker and profiler at work. In one of his first acts after taking over as head of the investigations, Brasco had sent out a memo to all the higher-ups summing up the department’s efforts to date on the two managed-care killings. In it, he unabashedly took full credit for bringing both specialists on board.
If Tommy Moriarity picked up on the venom in his daughter’s voice, he hid it well.
“So,” he said, “you’re still happy you became a cop?”
Tommy’s dream for his daughter centered around at least law school, and at most the Presidency. He didn’t speak to her for two months after learning she had taken the state police exam without consulting him.
He’s the perfect father
, she often said to friends,
so long as you do what he wants
. “I’m very happy being a cop,” she said now.
“I hear good things about you from Lieutenant Court.”
He can’t stand me, Dad, or any other woman detective, for that matter. He and his pal Brasco are absolute Neanderthals. If a male version of me had handled this case exactly the same way I had, believe me, he’d still be running it.
“I’m pleased to hear that,” she said.
Tommy shifted uncomfortably. This wasn’t going to be the moment he suddenly blurted out how proud he was of her and what she had become, or how sorry he was for not insisting she be left in charge of the managed-care murders. If anything, Patty suspected he was embarrassed at how much pressure had been brought to bear on him to not protest her demotion to Brasco’s second fiddle. At some level, she thought, he had to be proud that she had chosen to follow in his footsteps. But then again, maybe not.
“So,” he said, “we’re still on for our dinner a week from Friday?”
Without ever really discussing it, they had gone from eating together twice a week following the death of Ruth Moriarity to every other.
“My place, same time,” Patty said with forced cheer.
“Well . . . good luck with this case. Call me if I can be of any help.”
He gave her a wooden hug, turned, and headed off across the lawn, stepping to his left to avoid what looked like a piece of Cyrill Davenport.
The Boston chapter of the Hippocrates Society had been meeting on the third Thursday of each month since its inception fourteen years ago. Initially, the three founders of the chapter met at the home of one or another of them. Soon, driven by a steady increase in membership, they moved to a conference room at Harvard Medical School. Now, for nearly four years, meetings had been held in the amphitheater of the Massachusetts Medical Society—a spectacular modern structure located in a Waltham office park, featuring a massive four-story glass atrium at the main entrance, which opened onto terraced gardens and a bamboo forest.
The avowed goal of the Hippocrates Society was to recapture the practice of medicine from the capricious and viselike grip of the managed-care industry. Begun originally in San Francisco, the Society now had chapters in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Houston, as well as its most rapidly expanding member, Boston. It was named for the fourth-century BC Greek physician, who was now widely recognized as the father of medicine. Hippocrates held the then-heretical belief that illness had a physical and rational explanation and did not represent possession of the body by evil spirits. He also preached the natural healing properties of rest, a good diet, fresh air, and cleanliness, and wrote the Oath of Medical Ethics taken today at most medical-school graduations.
Will arrived at the medical society with fifteen minutes to spare before the seven
P.M
. start. He had spent the last hour with John Doe, who had, over the past forty-eight hours, made the transition from near-hopeless physical disaster to medical miracle. Following his remarkable surgery there had been a rocky period during which his coma remained dense, his temperature once reached 106 degrees, and his systolic blood pressure persisted below 80 despite the most vigorous treatment.
To make matters worse, the shock and hypothermia had caused his kidneys to shut down, producing no urine output at all. Will brought in specialists from cardiology, neurology, and nephrology—the kidney experts. He and his residents delicately monitored dozens of body chemicals, working under the dangling sword of nonfunctioning kidneys, which meant that toxins couldn’t be cleared from John Doe’s body. In addition, without kidneys, the blood level of administered medications was a challenge to control and could, in fact, have easily become a source of lethal complications.
Hour after hour, the man’s life hung by the thinnest of threads. Suddenly, twenty hours after Will had stepped back from the operating table and stripped off his gloves signaling the end of the surgery, a single magnificent drop of urine appeared in John Doe’s catheter . . . then, a minute later, there was another. Kidney function was returning, and from a treatment standpoint, anything was now possible. Will, the nurses, the residents, and the nephrologist toasted the event in the nurses’ lounge with coffee and stale doughnuts.
Just three hours ago, nearly two days after he was left for dead in an alley, the man remarkably and progressively regained consciousness. All at once John Doe had a real name—Jack Langley—and a life. He was a salesman from Des Moines, lowa, and father of three, and had been incapacitated by sudden, severe abdominal pain. He was down on one knee when he was attacked by three men. Fortunately, it appeared that Langley wasn’t conscious for most of the ensuing beating. Now, hardly out of the woods but certainly improving, Langley was filling the nurses in on the details of his life even as they were bringing him up to speed on his close brush with mortality.
Will was pleased to find that most of the medical society amphitheater’s 140 state-of-the-art conference seats were occupied. As he stepped into the hall, he was immediately surrounded by colleagues wanting some sort of update on the latest in the managed-care killings. As head of publicity and public relations for the Boston chapter for the past two years, Will had expected to be contacted by the press if not the police, but so far nothing.
An eager OB named Runyon, clearly more interested in what he had to say than in any grisly headlines, captured the conversation.
“So, get this one, Will. Twenty-three-year-old woman develops severe abdominal cramping. It’s the holiday weekend, so she gets called by the HMO on-call doc, who phones in a scrip for indigestion. The office is closed for the weekend, so no arrangements are made for follow-up. She is worse by morning and calls again and gets another doc who calls in a different prescription, insinuating that last night’s doc doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing.”
“Tubal pregnancy,” Will said, anxious to speak with Tom Lemm, the Society president.
Runyon looked crestfallen at having the tag line of his tale preempted.
“Exactly,” he said, speaking to those nearby, as Will had headed off. “She bled out on the way to an ER—as in
died
. Can you believe it?”
Will spotted Lemm, a family practitioner in his fifties, on the far side of the hall. By the time he reached the man, he had been regaled by a surgeon, whose name he didn’t know, with the story of a woman whose HMO told her to wait awhile to have her thyroid biopsy repeated because the evidence of cancer from the first set of seven painful needle biopsies was inconclusive. Three months later, her husband was transferred to another state and assigned coverage with a different HMO. When the woman’s cancer suddenly began rapidly growing, the new HMO refused to pay for treatment, claiming it was a preexisting condition.
“Hey, Will,” Lemm called out as he approached, “this may be our largest gathering yet.”
He motioned to the crowd, and Will noticed as he followed the gesture that his partner, Susan Hollister, had just entered and was casting about for a seat.
Thanks for showing up, Suze. I owe you one.
“I’ve got a couple of cases, Tom. Do you think they’re appropriate given this latest murder?”
“Are they funny?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you mean funny, ha ha, or funny, all of a sudden I can’t see out of my right eye.”
“Which are these?”
“A little of both.”
“Well, you’re on the agenda. There’s more tension than usual from what’s going on, but I don’t see any reason to withhold an anecdote or two. Tonight it’ll be right after we finish discussing the status of the class-action suit. After your report, we’ll decide what we’re going to do about the big debate against Boyd Halliday next week.”
“What do you mean?”
“I spoke to him an hour ago. He says it would send the wrong message to the public and the killer if he called off the debate.”
The debate, billed as a forum, had been organized by the Wellness Project, a respected independent consumer health-care coalition, and was scheduled for venerable Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. Halliday, the powerful and dynamic CEO of Excelsius Health, was to be matched up against Jeremy Purcell, a world-renowned surgeon, Harvard professor, philosopher, and former president of the Hippocrates Society. Thanks in large measure to Will’s efforts, publicity for the forum, which was titled
Managed Care: Boon or Boondoggle,
had been extensive, and a sellout was anticipated. Of course, the managed-care murders had only heightened interest in the event.