The First Patient

CHAPTER 32

Donald Greenfield.

With each passing hour, thanks largely to the Internet and courses on its use that she had taken during her training, Alison grew to know more and more about the man.

Donald Greenfield, owner of a one-year-old Porsche 911, Virginia registration number DG911, garaged on Lido Court in Fredericksburg. Apparently paid for.

Donald Greenfield, owner of the forty-one-hundred-square-foot Victorian house at 317 Beechtree Road, Richmond. Purchased ten years ago for $321,000 and recently assessed at $591,000. Refinanced five years ago. Shared with at least one beautiful Mexican woman, Constanza, and one stunning Mexican girl, Beatriz. Previous residence, 14 Collins Avenue, Salina, Kansas; home owner there for fourteen years.

Donald Greenfield, occupation: self-employed; Social Security number 013-32-0875; mortgage $2,139.00 a month; no other mortgages; no credit card debt; no dependent ex-wives, no children; no criminal record. Checking account-Bank of America, Richmond. Credit rating 650. (Why so low? she wrote beside the number.)

Alison flipped through her notes, both pleased and dismayed with the results of her first day of investigation. She wondered in passing who Donald Greenfield had been before Treat Griswold appropriated his name and identity. Of all the hundreds-probably thousands-of federal agencies, there was still none coordinating births and deaths. Griswold had probably searched the cemeteries for an infant or child who had been born around the same year as had he. For a person with his understanding of the workings of the federal government, obtaining a Social Security number in the dead child's name would have been easy, and from there fleshing out an identity would have been even easier still.

Questions remaining to be answered included where Griswold was getting the money to support his double life and whether there was any connection between what she had uncovered about him and his practice of toting around an inhaler used regularly by the president.

Another gnawing question needing resolution soon was when she was going to share the burden of what she was learning and with whom. That was the most perplexing question of all.

It was after one in the morning. Her jaws ached from hours of vigorous gum chewing. The tension of the day had left her more wired than tired, but a glass of Merlot was usually all that was needed to nudge her toward sleep. She uncorked a new bottle-medium priced with a label she liked, from a California vineyard she had never heard of. She poured one glass, drank it slowly, then decided on a second, which she dispatched quite a bit quicker.

St. Boniface's Winery. Good label, good stuff.

She wrote down the name and terse evaluation in the small spiral notebook she always carried in her purse. No need to specify Merlot. It was rare that she drank at all and, as she was a creature of habit, even rarer that she ventured to another grape.

"Griswold… Griswold… Griswold," she murmured, settling back in her desk chair. "What's with you, Griswold? Are you really into what I think you're into?"

Kidnapping? Illegal alien trafficking? Pedophilia? Statutory rape?

She reached across her notes to the corner of her desk and extracted a letter from its envelope. It was the second time she had read it that night but possibly the twentieth since she had received it about a year ago.

Dear Cro,

Do people still call you Cro? I used to think that was the coolest nickname in the world.

Surprise! It's me, Janie, this time coming to you from beautiful downtown Bakersfield, home of The Driller Diner, where I am currently employed waitressing tables. The only thing here less appetizing than the patrons is the food.

It's been a few years, so I hope this address in Texas is still a good one to get this to you. As for me, this is like the tenth city I've lived in since I got shoved out of my job in the ICU at Shitcan General Hospital, and onto the street for doing exactly nothing wrong. Needless to say, since the hammer fell I never have gotten my nurse's license back. I've had a lot of lousy jobs like this one, but that's okay because I've never been able to hang on to any of them for very long. You know, depression, meds, worse depression, more meds.

The reason I'm writing is that my sister sent me the obituary on Dr. Numbnuts Corcoran, the incompetent bastard who started it all. Two columns and a photo in the L.A. Times. No mention at all of the lives he took or the one-mine-that he and his cronies in the Cognac and Cuban Cigar Club ruined. Well, at least it was cancer. I hope it was a slow and painful kind. I hope it for all of us.

Thank you for trying to fight them, Cro. At least you tried. That's more than anyone else can say, and plenty besides you knew I didn't do anything wrong. Thank you for trying. I don't blame you for bailing in the end. I never did. I hope you know that. You tried.

Take care. I hope whatever you're doing, you're happy. Me? I get to go into L.A. every few months and see how much my kids have grown. I was always a good mom and I still love them no matter what.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Janie

Keep fighting the good fight.

By the time Alison had finished reading, the Merlot had kicked in. Good thing. Sleep wasn't going to come easily. Now, as she padded unevenly to bed, she was grateful that fade to black was only minutes away.

She was in over her head-maybe way over. In the end, if she kept pushing, she might well end up in Janieville, waiting tables or working at Wal-Mart and wondering what in the hell had happened to her life. Had Treat Griswold been an L.A. surgeon, he most certainly would have been a member of the Four Cs. In the Secret Service, he was The Man-respected, even revered. Now, she was contemplating trying to take him down.

There was still time to just drop the whole thing and take the low road out of town and back to the desk in San Antonio. There was still time…

"Baby, I want to spend some time upstairs with Beatriz."

"Donnie, honey, it is one o'clock in the morning. She's sleeping."

"So, she'll wake up. I'll be gone all day tomorrow. There'll be plenty of time for her to sleep then. I've been working really hard lately, and I need a back rub."

"I can give you one. I know just how you like them."

"I want her to know how I like them. I want her to know how I like everything. You know the rules. Your time with me is coming to an end. It's your job to help me get her ready. Then it is your job to manage things until Beatriz is ready to take over for you with whoever follows her."

"That is what I'm doing, yes?"

"Yes, baby. You're doing a good job as long as you understand the way things work here."

"I do. When the time comes I will be ready to leave."

"That time's still a ways off. Now go and wake Beatriz and bring her upstairs to the room. I'm going to shower. Then I'll be up. I want her showered, too."

"Her hair also?"

"If you think so."

"I understand."

"Excellent. I love it when you understand."

"I did good telling you about the woman in the nail place, yes?"

"You did good… maybe very good depending on what fingerprints we find on that bottle of nail polish I bought from Viang."

"Marooned on a Desert Isle. That is what she chose. Women notice things like that."

"Marooned on a Desert Isle," echoed Donald Greenfield, running his hand over Constanza's firm breasts and down her lean, cocoa body to the smoothly waxed mound between her thighs. "We shall see what tales our little bottle has to tell us."