The Society

CHAPTER 10

Six minutes after Will ended his conversation with Patricia Moriarity, two uniformed state policemen, sirens blaring, arrived at the Fredrickston Medical Arts Building and began the process of sealing it off. There were at least a dozen different practices of varying specialties in the building, in addition to a pharmacy, an optician, and a bagel store. Will knew that for at least the rest of the morning, there would be massive inconvenience for all of them.

Susan was doing a case in the hospital, and Jim Katz had the day off. But Gordo had arrived in his office while Will was speaking with Grace Davis. Now he was stuck there, and not at all pleased about it. Arms folded, his bulk threatening to overwhelm his desk chair, he stroked his beard and gaped over at Will in disbelief.

“Willy, now tell me again,” he said, “just what are ye doin’ consorting with a murderer?”

“Hey, you’ve got it backward, Gordo. It’s him. . or her. . or them. . or it-I couldn’t even tell, for chrissakes-that’s consorting with me. Because of the things I said at the forum last night, the bastard has decided that I’m a kindred spirit of his-a brother in the war against managed care is how he put it. In fact, I had this feeling while I was listening to him that he might have actually been there last night.”

“That gives me the willies-or maybe out of deference to you I should say the creeps. How could they have gotten into this building and then into your office?”

“I was hoping you might be able to come up with a theory to explain that.”

“Well, given the crack security company that watches over this place, my guess is an entire terrorist cell could be operating here every night without being noticed.”

“You might be right. Think we ought to try and get in touch with Jim?”

“I can’t imagine something like this happening and him not wanting to know about it. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s a wee bit of a control freak.”

“I’ll have Mimi try and find him.”

At that instant the receptionist called in over the intercom. “Dr. Cameron, would you tell Dr. Grant that Detective Moriarity is out here looking for him?”

“Consider it done, lass. Do us a favor and see if ye can locate Dr. Katz.”

Her expression businesslike, Patricia Moriarity shook Will’s hand, then motioned him over to the corner of the waiting room farthest from the receptionist. She was wearing a black hip-length leather jacket over dark slacks and a light blue sweater. Will couldn’t help but notice that the only ring she wore was on the third finger of her right hand.

“Dr. Grant, the crime-scene people will be here any moment to go over your office. Is there a place we can speak in private?”

“We have two empty physician’s offices. Either one would be fine.”

“You choose.”

Will led her to Susan’s consultation room, which was on the side of the suite directly opposite Gordo’s. The size and setup of the room were nearly identical to Will’s, but the modern art on the wall and extra touches Susan had added to the basic decor-curtains with a repeating Parisian street scene and a small reading table by the bookshelf-made it quite distinctively hers. Moriarity pulled one of the patients’ chairs away from the desk and motioned Will to the other. Then she flipped open a notepad and slid a government-issue pen from the wire.

“Dr. Grant,” she began, with no pleasantries or even a mention that they had met just twelve hours before, “what on earth were you thinking when you pulled that envelope out of your desk and opened it before calling me?”

Will took a few seconds to stabilize himself.

“I. . I think I was so bewildered and frightened by the call that I wasn’t really thinking straight.”

“And there was nothing about the caller’s voice that you recognized?”

“It was totally mechanical. In fact, whoever it was might have been typing the words into a computer that then read them over the phone.”

“That technology is available.”

Even when she was writing, Patty kept her eyes on Grant. Despite what she had learned of the man-his temper, his history of violence, his suspected though apparently never documented association with an explosion that had killed a man-he had a vulnerability and sensitivity about him that seemed real. She reminded herself that if sociopaths had a major, it was gentleness and genuineness-just ask those who knew charming Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a clown to entertain hospitalized children. As far as she was concerned, until proven otherwise, this man was a suspect in three violent murders.

Will forced himself to remain calm as Moriarity grilled him about his whereabouts at the time each of the three managed-care executives was killed. He expected the questions-even without a phone call like the one he had just received, others in the Hippocrates Society had been interviewed-but not the icy, disbelieving tone in which they were delivered. Even with the help of his calendar, the firmest alibi he could come up with was that on the nights of two of the murders-Morales and Rising-he was on call in the hospital. Of course, he was forced to admit, with his pager he could just as easily have been outside the hospital as in. If there was an emergency requiring his immediate presence, there might have been a problem, but in most situations he could have bought some time by giving instructions to the nurses and the resident on duty. The morning of Cyrill Davenport’s execution, he was at home, trying as usual when he wasn’t on call to catch up on lost sleep.

After writing down his responses, Moriarity again took him step by step through the minutes preceding, during, and following the eerie call. She was clinical if not cold, and even the most innocent attempt on his part to inject anything light or personal was immediately stonewalled. It did not take long before the fact that she had the sort of scrubbed, earthy good looks that most appealed to him was lost in the chill of her interrogation and in the realization that she did not believe his only connection to the murderer was through the phone call.

“Dr. Grant, tell me again why you think there is more than one killer?” she asked.

Will consulted his notes and read off each time the words we or us were spoken by the caller.

“You have no idea how the killer could have gotten your private, inside line?”

“None at all. It’s not like it’s the combination to Fort Knox, though. People do have the number.”

“And you have no idea how the killer or someone associated with the killer could have gotten into your office?”

“The maintenance people in this building probably make eight-fifty an hour. It wouldn’t take much to get one of them to put the envelope in my desk. Hell, with what I earn, it wouldn’t take much to bribe me into doing it.”

“There’s nothing funny about this, Dr. Grant.”

“And there’s nothing funny about you insinuating that I might have murdered three people,” he snapped back.

“Did you?”

“No. Why would I call you about a phone call that never happened and put that envelope in my desk?”

“Crazy is its own definition, Doctor. Sooner or later, most serial killers need attention, and many of them also need to prove that they are smarter than we are. That’s when games like claiming you received a call from the killer begin.”

“I’m not crazy and I didn’t kill anyone. Should I have a lawyer here?”

“If you want one.”

At that moment, Wayne Brasco appeared at the doorway, looking like he just rode into Dodge. He was wearing jeans with a wide, hand-tooled belt, cinched with a massive silver horseshoe buckle, a suede jacket, and alligator cowboy boots. He glared first at Patty, then at Will.

“Why didn’t you call me about this?” he snapped, gesturing to the office in general.

Jesus. Patty felt herself flush at being rebuked in front of someone, let alone a suspect.

“You were out of the office when I got the call from Dr. Grant here about the alphabet letters. I felt we needed to get right down here, so I called the crime-lab people and I told Tomasetti to get a- hold of you. Didn’t he?”

Patty flashed on the notes in her shoulder bag dealing with Will Grant’s past. Originally, she had decided to keep the information to herself until she could investigate the charges in more detail and see if there was anything else on the man between the explosion in the lab at medical school and the restraining order taken out against him by his wife. Now, with the phone call and the envelope, whether real or concocted by Grant himself, things had changed. The longer she held information back from Brasco, the worse it was going to be for her.

“This Grant?” Brasco growled, pointedly ignoring her question about Tomasetti.

Patty groaned inaudibly and introduced the two men.

“Lieutenant Brasco is in charge of the investigation of the managed-care murders,” she explained, disgusted with herself for trying to mollify the jerk at all.

Brasco made no attempt to shake hands.

“So, what’s this all about?” he asked Will.

“I. . um. . I’ve been interviewing him,” Patty said evenly.

“So now I’ll interview him. That’s what officers in charge are supposed to do.”

Will looked over at Patty, embarrassed for her. He wasn’t the most socially aware being on the planet, but he certainly knew a boor when he saw one.

“I. . need to speak with you first, Wayne.”

“So, speak.”

“In private?”

They left Will in Susan Hollister’s office and found a spot in the waiting room out of earshot from the crime-scene people and the two uniformed officers who were keeping the office staff from getting in anyone’s way. Patty considered beginning on the offensive by demanding that Brasco apologize for his behavior in front of Will Grant and also by reminding him of his failure to call her from Cyrill Davenport’s place. Instead, she propped herself against the wall, extracted her notes, and ran through them. She could tell from Brasco’s hardly subtle expression that she should have brought up her research at their team meeting with Lieutenant Court. Brasco was a pigheaded brute, but he was hardly stupid.

Stick a fork in Patty, folks, it looks like she’s done, she was thinking.

“So,” Brasco said when she had finished, “let me get this straight. You uncovered this guy with a recurrent history of violence, connection to a murder committed by some sort of social-action group, and current active membership in another social-action group that just happens to hate HMOs, and you didn’t feel this information was relevant enough to share with the rest of us.”

“I. . um. . wanted to dig into things a little deeper before-well, yes, yes, that’s exactly what happened.”

Brasco raised his hands in a “suit yourself” gesture.

“I’ll take over interrogating this suspect from here,” he said.

“Mind if I listen in?”

“I think you’ve done enough for one day. Why don’t you interview the staff? We can discuss this whole business with Jack later on.”

“You’re in charge,” Patty said.

“You’re damn right I am,” Brasco replied.

ERRTBECN

Deflated by this latest round with Wayne Brasco, Patty mulled over the two new letters as she gathered her things and prepared to leave the offices of Fredrickston Surgical Associates. They had to be part of a multiple-word message-a saying?. . a place?. . a company name? She was the last of the investigating crew remaining, but she was reluctant to go, sensing that her involvement in the managed-care murders might soon be over.

You can only do what you can do, sister, she reminded herself. You can only do what you can do. The world was full of Wayne Brascos and Jack Courts. If she was going to make it, she would have to learn how to deal with them. Well, the hell with them, she thought, heading for the door. If they want me off this case, they’re going to have to pry me off.

“Sergeant?”

Will Grant stood just a few feet behind her.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a couple of minutes?”

In addition to the stack of reports she had to write covering the past few hours, there was a session scheduled at the office with Lieutenant Court and the other principals in the managed-care case.

“I’m in a bit of a rush. Perhaps-”

“It’s very important.”

“Something you didn’t tell Detective Brasco?”

“Something I chose not to tell him.”

The vulnerability in his eyes made her uneasy. She reminded herself again about the ingratiating charm of sociopaths.

“I suppose I can listen. You know, we’re wary of people who try and drive a wedge between members of an investigating team. We call it splitting.”

“Forgive me for saying it,” Will replied, “but it didn’t seem to me as if Lieutenant Brasco was treating you as a teammate.”

“Is your office empty?”

Will settled in behind his desk. Patty took the chair directly across from him.

“That was a very frightening session I had with your teammate,” Will began. “I would bet that he’s not a legend on the force for his subtlety.”

“He has other strengths.”

“He thinks I killed those people.”

“Did you?”

“I fix people. I play with my twins every chance I get, and I work at a soup kitchen that I helped start, and when people are broken or hurting, I fix them.”

“That’s reassuring to hear,” Patty said, realizing that, at some level, it was.

“Lieutenant Brasco came in armed with a number of items from my past. I don’t like the man at all, but I have to admit he did an amazing amount of homework in a very short time.”

“And?”

“He didn’t do enough.”

“Did you tell him?”

“He was so aggressive that I was afraid to say a word to him about myself without having a lawyer. And I can’t even afford to get the squeaky brakes on my car looked at, let alone hire a lawyer.”

“You may have to.”

“I sure hope not. That’s why I wanted to speak to you.”

“You should have spoken to Lieutenant Brasco.”

“Do you know about the information he had about me?”

“Yes, I. . I know about it.”

“The restraining order my wife took out on me?”

“Yes.”

Will withdrew a file from the bottom drawer of his desk.

“I admit I have a bit of a temper,” he said, “but Maxine, my ex, makes me look like a puppy. She’s capable of going off like a volcano. The night our neighbor called the police, she had gone absolutely berserk for almost no reason. She threw a pot and a vase through the window, but wouldn’t admit to doing it. In fact, when the police came, she insisted that I did it. At the officer’s insistence, she requested the restraining order. Neither the police nor the court wanted to hear my side of the story.” He passed the file over. “The day after Maxine filed the restraining order, she had it rescinded. Our marriage counselor insisted on it, because Maxine told her the truth. In case I ever needed it, which I haven’t, two of our closest friends wrote notarized letters stating that they had been present at times when Max went off at me almost as violently as she did that night. Fortunately, she has never blown up like that against the kids. In fact, they say she’s done much better at controlling her temper since her lover moved in with her.”

Patty scanned the documents, which were impressive. She knew that in the case of restraining orders, the police and courts invariably sided with the wife until matters could be sorted out. Generally speaking, the policy was as it should be, but there were still times when husbands were penalized unjustly.

“There were other issues, as well,” she said, sensing some thawing of her feelings toward the man, as well as some guilt that it was she who had failed to dig deeper before passing over the information about him to Brasco. “An arrest in college for assaulting a police officer.”

“We were protesting the firing of a black faculty member,” Will said wearily. “The man I shoved was campus police. He wouldn’t stop prodding us with his nightstick. He pushed me, I pushed back. He got his feet tangled up and fell. There were like a hundred witnesses. Eventually, when the truth came out, he was put on probation.” He produced another file from his desk, this one considerably thicker than the other, labeled Medical License Renewals. “I put this stuff together because, when we apply for a medical license or renewal, the form asks about arrests.”

In addition to documentation of the incident outside the dean’s office, there was extensive material dealing with a fight in medical school that resulted in Will’s arrest and subsequent exoneration.

“The guy was psychotic,” Will explained. “He was also tougher than I was, and he beat the snot out of me. Six months later he got expelled for cheating and repeated acts of violence.”

“You seem to bring out the worst in people.”

“I guess you might say that, but thankfully, there are those who would disagree with you.”

“One more thing,” Patty said. “The lab.”

Will rolled his eyes in frustration.

“Brasco almost took my head off over that, but it was like the moment he saw my name and the word murder together in some computer search, he stopped looking.”

Patty used the tip of her tongue to moisten her lips, which had become unpleasantly dry.

“Go on,” she said.

“I was a social activist all the way through school. Heck, I would be more of one now, too, if I had the chance. In med school we formed an organization for protest, mostly against the pharmaceutical industry for giving medical equipment to impoverished students with their company logo on it. We named our group after a comic book-the Justice League-but we never really did much because we were just too busy trying to survive med school. Shortly after the lab explosion, some unnamed source told a reporter that it was us.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t. The newspaper chose to shoot first and ask questions later, just like your Lieutenant Brasco.”

It wasn’t Brasco, it was me.

“Did they ever find out who did it?”

“A Ph.D. who had been booted out of the lab because of doctoring some research results and costing them a big grant. It was in the papers. I don’t have the article, but I’ll bet it wouldn’t be hard to find.”

“I’ll bet it wouldn’t,” Patty said glumly.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I mumble sometimes. So, do I get to keep all this to show Lieutenant Brasco?”

“I’ll make copies and send them to you. I have your card.”

“Make the copies and just hang on to them,” Patty said. “If, as you say, the killer really has adopted you to be his public voice, we’ll be seeing each other again very soon.”

“I’d like that very much,” Will said.

For the first time, there was a glint of mischief in his eyes.

For the first time, Patty didn’t avert hers.