Critical (45 page)

D
etective Lieutenant Lou Soldano quickly stubbed his cigarette out in his car's ashtray when he turned onto 106th Street. Whenever he even got close to Laurie, and even to Jack, for that matter, he always felt guilty about his smoking on account of having promised both of them he was stopping about nine million times. Slowing down, Lou parked in a no-parking access to the neighborhood playground across from Jack and Laurie's. He tossed his NYPD auto identification onto the dashboard and got out of the vehicle.

Although spring often would take a long time to appear in the city, it was doing fine as Lou looked around the neighborhood. A few crocuses had poked their delicate heads out of the ground in a small plot in the playground and even in a few window boxes on Jack and Laurie's side of the street. In the small wedge of Central Park that Lou could see at the end of the street was a patch of lacy yellow forsythia.

Starting across the street, Lou couldn't help but notice how Jack and Laurie's building stood out. They had just renovated it the year before when they had gotten married. Now several other buildings were in the process. The neighborhood was definitely on the upswing.

Before the renovation, Lou could just push in through the outer door, since its lock had been broken some time before the war and never fixed. Jack used to joke that it was the Civil War. Now Lou had to ring the bell, which he did. Jack and Laurie lived on the top two floors. The rest of the building had been divided into rental apartments, but Lou had the suspicion that Jack and Laurie let them for little or no money to deserving families, particularly single-parent families.

Presently, Laurie answered, which made sense, since Jack was still hobbled from his recent operation. Her voice sounded disgruntled. Knowing what they both had been through, he asked if he should come back at another time after identifying himself. Having come directly from court, he'd not phoned ahead.

“Are you joking?” she questioned with exasperation, as if Lou were adding to her woe.

“I was just asking. Maybe I should have called?”

“Lou, for chrissake, get your ass up here!”

Behind him, Lou could hear the door release activated. Quickly, he pushed it open, then held it with an extended foot. “I'm on my way.”

“You'd better be.”

Lou had no real idea what Laurie's mind-set was. At first she'd sounded purely vexed, but then it had seemingly turned to pique. As he climbed the final flight, suffering from all the cigarettes he'd smoked in his life, he vowed once again to quit tomorrow or maybe the next day.

Before he could knock and with his arm raised to do so, the door opened. Laurie was standing just inside the threshold, with one fist jammed in the crook of her hip. “Am I glad to see you,” she said, motioning over her shoulder with her head. “Would you mind talking to King Louis Quatorze over there?”

Lou leaned in and looked into the living room. Jack was sprawled out on the couch, surrounded by all manner of treats, including juices, fruit, and cookies. Lou looked back at Laurie. He had to admit she looked good considering her horrid experience less than a week previously at the hands of vengeful two-bit mafioso types. Her face had her normal color, and her eyes were bright and fully open.

“He thinks he can order in a semirecumbent exercise bike today and just hop on. Can you imagine?”

“That might be rushing it,” Lou agreed.

“Now, don't you gang up on me,” Jack warned, but with a smile.

“I'm not getting involved,” Lou said, raising his hands. “I'm just calling it as I see it. But let me ask the two of you a question: Are you getting a little stir-crazy locked up in here together?” Lou knew that Laurie had been essentially ordered to take sick leave after her abduction and torture.

Laurie and Jack glanced irritably at each other, then simultaneously laughed.

“All right!” Lou ordered. “What's so funny now? Am I the butt of a joke?”

Jacked waved Lou away. “Not at all. I think we both realized at the same instant that you were correct. Is that right, Laurie?”

“I'm afraid so. I think we've been getting on each other's nerves because neither one of us can do what we want to do. We both want to get out.”

Clearly happier than they had been five minutes earlier, Jack and Laurie welcomed a visit with Lou, for whom Laurie had quickly made fresh coffee. Laurie was sitting on the couch next to Jack, and Lou in a side chair on the opposite side of the coffee table.

“So, how are both you guys?” Lou asked, balancing his coffee on his knee.

Laurie looked at Jack and motioned for him to go first.

“I'm as good as can be expected,” Jack said. “The surgery went fine, and, thanks to Laurie, I didn't get anything I hadn't signed up for, meaning a fulminant MRSA infection. I'm chagrined, to say the least, that I didn't give the threat more credence. But I have to say, if a doctor tells you you're going to have a little discomfort after a surgery, don't believe him or her. Surgeons lie like crazy. But with that proviso, in general I guess I'm doing okay. It's just hard looking out my living-room window at night seeing the guys having a run. I feel like a kid quarantined.”

“What about you, Laur?” Louis asked, switching his line of vision.
Laur
had been the name given to Laurie by Lou's kids back when Lou had first met her fifteen years previously.

Laurie flashed a questioning expression. “I feel a heck of a lot better than people think I should. I'm sure it's a function of the Rohypnol I was given. I mean, I'd heard date-rape pills frequently caused considerable amnesia, but I had no idea how total it would be or that it could involve retrograde events. I remember only sketchily confronting Osgood and then being locked in the storeroom. I'm not sure how I got out, although I do remember being chased by what's his name.”

“Adam Williamson,” Lou put in. “A tragic figure, I might add. At least in some regards. He's an Iraq veteran who went through hell and has a lot of resultant mental problems.”

“Did he pull through?” Jack asked. He noticed that Lou used the present tense.

“He did. He's going to make it. What we're not sure about is whether he's going to be willing to plea bargain with us. Obviously, we have him on attempted murder and conspiracy. You do know he was about to shoot you at point-blank range, don't you, Laurie?”

“That's what I was told. Isn't there a witness to the fact?”

“We have two good witnesses,” Lou said. “And the king of all ironies is that Angelo is the one who saved you by shooting Adam before Adam shot you.”

“That part I don't remember,” Laurie admitted. “In fact, I don't remember anything else until gradually waking up in the hospital.”

“It's a good thing,” Lou said. “When we got there in the middle of Upper New York Bay, they had you rigged up with what they used to call cement boots.”

“So I heard,” Laurie said with a shudder.

“That reminds me,” Jack said. “First, how did you know she was out there, and once you did, how in tarnation did you find them out there in the middle of New York Bay in the dark?”

“That's the best part,” Lou said. “And truthfully, I don't mind taking a little credit. The floater we picked up Monday night scared the bejesus out of us, making me worry about a Mob war breaking out, like I told you. When I found out that the word on the street was that Vinnie Dominick was behind it, I went over to Paul Cerino's old organization to tip them off, thinking the floater might have been in cahoots with them. As it turned out, he wasn't, but the Vaccarros were concerned enough to follow Vinnie's principle enforcers, Angelo and Franco, and discovered Vinnie had squirreled away a sizable yacht, which they were using for nasty purposes. The next part is the cleverest. What they did was to figure out a way to get the city, meaning me, to get rid of the competition Vinnie represented. And how they did it was secretly to put a GPS tracking device on the yacht and then wait until a good opportunity arose. Louie Barbera, Paul Cerino's replacement, called me up Thursday evening right at the point I was despairing and offered me the website and the password and user name for the GPS device. He also told me what he thought was about to happen so we wouldn't waste time, and we didn't. It was just lucky we got there when we did for your benefit. At the same time, the opportunity couldn't have been any better from a law-enforcement angle. We reeled in Vinnie Dominick and all his top guys in one fell swoop, plus another guy by the name of Michael Calabrese. And best of all, we got them all for attempted first-degree murder, hardly a minor charge. Furthermore, while the crime guys have been poring over the boat, trace blood was discovered that belonged to the two floaters, whom we have identified as Paul Yang and Amy Lucas, both from New Jersey, and both worked for Angels Healthcare.”

Laurie stiffened. “Angels Healthcare that runs the Angels hospitals?”

“None other. It's a relatively complicated story and the investigation is ongoing, involving the FBI and the SEC. Sadly, it is just another one involving huge amounts of potential money, the kind of corruption we've all heard a bit too much of these days, although in this case there was a generous amount of old-fashioned crime involved, like murder, as well as the newer white-collar variety. As you correctly sensed, Laurie, the MRSA was being purposefully spread, and not just for terrorist purposes. There was a method to the madness. What a group of people was trying to do was sabotage the IPO and, in a sense, the specialty-hospital concept.”

“Who was responsible?” Laurie asked.

“Ultimately, the people behind it are lobbyists, mostly former lawyer-politicians who had morphed into becoming lobbyists after either retiring or being voted out of office. Of the particular organization we are speaking of, they had landed the perfect clients: the AHA and the FAH. What they had been hired to do was to make absolutely sure that the Senate moratorium on building specialty hospitals and registering them with CMS, or Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, be changed into law. But they didn't do it. Somehow, they dropped the ball. Wanting to keep the AHA and the FAH as clients, they shouldered the responsibility to make absolutely certain the first IPO after the moratorium was lifted would not be successful. Hence, they conjured up the MRSA initiative, as I've been calling it. Their thinking was that it would be viewed as a natural phenomenon, and that investors would be driven away by the cash crunch the post-op infections would cause.”

“So it was they who recruited Walter Osgood. Was he just a pawn in this affair?”

“I'm afraid so. We know that he wasn't extorted but did it on his own free will. He had both the background to pull it off and some very specific needs that motivated him. As I think you know, he trained in microbiology, so it wasn't difficult for him to requisition the MRSA from the CDC and the amoeba from National Culture. He had a little private lab where he cooked up what turns out to be a pretty good bioterrorism agent, at least that's what our consults have been telling us. He got the MRSA to invade the amoeba, proliferate, and then he got the amoeba to encyst. Once he got the amoeba to form cysts, which is apparently easy, he could dry the cysts to form an airborne infectious agent. Perhaps the cleverest part, he could use the cysts to flood an OR at the moment when patients with anesthesia with endotracheal tubes are about to be awakened. Timing was critical, and it didn't work a hundred percent of the time, but as Osgood became more and more familiar with particular surgeons and the lengths of particular procedures, he got better and better.”

“Sounds like you have all these terms and concepts down pat,” Laurie said.

“On a case like this, I needed to be prepared for the sake of the prosecutors. All the arraignments were this morning.”

“What were Walter Osgood's needs you mentioned?”

“He had a son who came down with a very severe form of some sort of cancer. The only treatment was deemed experimental, and the Angels Healthcare employees' health insurance company would not pay. Walter had been paying on his own. The involved pharmaceutical company had been charging him twenty thousand a month. Can you believe it?”

“You certainly have learned a lot in a few days.”

“It's a hot case, as you can well imagine. I'm lucky the FBI got into it big-time. They have been carrying the ball. The lobbyist organization is in Washington, D.C., as you might imagine.”

“So, in a very real way, Angels Healthcare has been subverted for the last number of months.”

“That's a good way to describe it. But they have not been lily-white by any stretch of the imagination.”

“I should say!” Laurie agreed. “Even if they didn't know the MRSA was being deliberately spread, they kept on doing surgery, even though people kept dying.”

“They are guilty of a little more than that in these days of Sarbanes-Oxley. This part of the case is being handled by the SEC investigators. Once Angels Healthcare got into financial difficulty with their cash flow, they were required by law to have conveyed the information to the SEC so investors could protect themselves, especially if there was an imminent IPO. And this isn't the kind of thing you get slapped on the wrist for and told you are bad. Nowadays, this kind of oversight means big fines and stiff prison sentences. The government is intent on making examples of these white-collar criminals, because it is the little guy who is always hurt.”