Skinny-dipping (21 page)

I felt like crying. I looked up at Sam to see if he looked sad, and he did.

He'd had a dog once, so I guessed he remembered this part.

“Let's go home,” I said.

But whose home? I wondered, for a moment facing up to the fact that despite those flashes where he seemed like a soul mate, the truth was I really didn't know a thing about this man. Except he was older than me, he was an expert lover with obvious experience, and he didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor. Also, he didn't seem to be much of a detective, judging from the Trusdale and Randolph investigations, but then, maybe I was being too harsh.

My phone rang again.

“Oh, gosh, hon,” Newly said. “I forgot to tell you. I dropped off Johnny Winter at your house. You never changed your lock or anything. I put him in the bedroom. Olivia can't keep him with all those dogs at her house, and I can't take him with me to Mississippi. Angela's just too upset to deal with Johnny. I knew you'd take care of him. Let him out of the cage now and then, okay?”

I didn't say anything. But I remembered now why I'd wanted Newly to move out.

“You don't mind, do you, hon?” he asked, the sound of traffic coming through the phone.

Of course I minded. What if the ferret wizzed on my new couch and matching chair? Even used, they weren't cheap. But then, the ferret was already inside my house, and Newly and Angela and Crosby surely were in the next county by now. What could I say? At a loss, I didn't say anything at all.

“Thanks, hon. I knew we'd always be friends,” Newly said to my silence.

The line went dead.

“Damn that Newly. He didn't forget to ask or tell me. He knew perfectly well that once the damn ferret was in my house and he was in the next county I wasn't going to make him come back and get it. Another Newly trick—why he—” I stopped, inhaled, looked at Sam, who had surely heard what Newly had said.

Okay, memo to file: Don't complain about the old boyfriend to the new boyfriend.

“What'd he say about the Trusdale bills?” Sam asked.

What had Newly said? “Something about Trusdale billing the guy's insurance for procedures he didn't do. On his hip.”

“I didn't see anything in your file about hip procedures or charges. Are your medical records complete?”

“Yeah, they should be.” I went over to the couch, where Sam had been studying the file, and I looked at the records myself, as if somehow he would have forgotten something he'd looked at no more than an hour before. “Could just be an insurance company screwup.”

I had the records that Dr. Trusdale had provided me, and nothing about a hip showed up in them. Of course, if the dead doctor had been defrauding his patient's insurance company, he'd hardly have supplied me with documented evidence of it, so it was no big deal that his records didn't show anything.

I flipped over to the computer printouts of the bum-knee guy's health insurance claims for the last few years. One of my first steps in any malpractice case is to get copies of the plaintiff's health insurance claims for at least the last ten years. A good defense attorney can usually find something in such records to use either as a defense at trial or to coerce a better settlement before trial. Sometimes it is a bitch to get this information and takes a hearing and a court order, but I remembered that in this case it had been surprisingly easy. Standard interrogatories on my part and the bum-knee guy's attorney supplied the records from the insurance company. I took my time looking at them again. The first time, I'd looked at them just for something really embarrassing to the bum-knee guy, something he naturally wouldn't want revealed to a jury of his peers, or for something that suggested a predisposition toward infections. Of course, I'd concentrated on the surgery and presurgery records.

In other words, I hadn't paid much attention to anything after the fateful knee surgery once I saw that there was nothing outrageous in the guy's health records that I could use to my advantage.

But now I looked.

Nothing about any hip.

But something was amiss. The next to last sheet of the insurance claims summaries ended on March of one year. The next sheet started in January of the next year. True, it was possible to go that long without filing a single insurance claim. But not when you've been hit with the kind of catastrophic infection that this man had suffered. Quickly, I double-checked the claims printouts with Dr. Trusdale's records and saw a couple of things in the records after that March date that were not on the claims printouts.

At least one sheet of the insurance company's claims records was gone from my file.

I would have noticed this gap in the dates if these insurance claims forms had come to me that way. That's the curse and the blessing of the obsessive compulsive.

“Somebody took something out of this file,” I said. And I remembered the Sunday I'd realized somebody had rifled through this file at my house and I'd gone to accuse Newly, but then we ended up fooling around, and I settled for bringing the files back to the office, where I'd kept them locked up.

“Who had access?” Sam asked.

“Newly, Bonita, me.”

“Newly?”

“Look, Newly wouldn't steal something out of my file and then tip me off about it in a phone call, okay?”

I noticed I hadn't said that Newly wouldn't steal something out of my file, period. I wondered if Sam had caught the distinction.

“This is my copy of the file. A duplicate. I keep duplicates at home and in off-site storage. CYA,” I said, hoping to talk past the implied taint on Newly's character. “The original file is probably still upstairs in the master storage closet. We tend to keep closed files there for a couple of months, in case something comes up, then they're moved to our warehouse.”

“Your firm has its own warehouse?”

Nobody except other lawyers understand how much paper a lawsuit produces. You can't throw it out until at the very least all the remotely possible statutes of limitations have run out, but I didn't bother to explain that to Sam, who, after all, should have appreciated this given that cops keep evidence for about forever. “Come on.”

We went upstairs, where it took me longer than it should have to find the cabinet with the fairly modest Dr. Trusdale file in it. The cabinet was locked. I didn't have a clue who had the key, and it took me less time than it should have to break into the filing cabinet with an impressively strong letter opener and my own bad attitude. Sam showed insight in not getting in my way.

In the original file, the complete set of insurance claims summaries showed a couple of office visits, an ultrasound, an X-ray, and a series of in-office physical therapy sessions related to the bum-knee guy's hip. All these claims, missing from my set of records, were charged by Dr. Trusdale to his then very former knee surgery patient, all allegedly filed by Dr. Trusdale's office against the man's insurance.

Just like Newly had said.

“I need coffee,” I said. Smashing the file into Sam's hands, I went into the upstairs kitchen. Of course there was a pot on one of the many eyes of our industrial-size coffeemaker. Grimacing at the thought of how long it might have been sitting there turning to sludge, I poured two cups, added a big teaspoon of sugar and white fake dairy chemicals to mine, and handed the other to Sam.

We drank.

Halfway through my cup, which was outstandingly evil in taste and texture but potent, the rest of my brain started working.

“Mierda,”
I said. Fraudulent billing to the HMO? Was that what had escaped both my attention and Sam's? Of course, Sam had been at a disadvantage: He hadn't had the Randolph files lying around on his floor for weeks, and he wasn't in the room when Newly reviewed the HMO claims and raised questions about the bills.

What had Newly asked about the records in Mrs. Goodacre's MIB file? Records that showed claims for additional visits to Randolph after Jason was born. Why would she go back to a doctor she plainly distrusted, probably hated, for ultrasounds after she had delivered her child?

Throwing the rest of the coffee in the sink, I grabbed Sam's hand and pulled him back down the stairs into my ground-floor office, where I pulled out the purloined MIB printouts Ronny had kindly provided and the medical records from Dr. Randolph's office.

Of course, there was no corresponding account of any such ultrasounds in Dr. Randolph's own records, just as there had been no corresponding account of any hip visits in Dr. Trusdale's own records.

“So somebody is ripping off the HMO?” Sam asked when I pointed this out.

“Yes, but how in the world do you do that? I mean, the claims come from the doctor's office, and the check goes to the doctor, and the company usually sends an EOB to the patient.”

“EOB?”

“Explanation of benefits.”

Sam nodded and furrowed his brow in the perfect cliché of a man thinking hard as I added up the numbers in my head and rounded off. Between the two sets of what now appeared to be fraudulent bills, the HMO had paid out roughly an extra grand in each file. Of course, the company would send its hounds from hell after whoever had done this for less than a grand, but the point was, as I asked Sam, “Would somebody kill to cover up a fraud of only two grand?”

“You're thinking in too small a box,” Sam said.

“You mean, like the jail time is the same whether you embezzle two thousand or two million, so go for the two million?”

“That, and what if whoever was doing this defrauded a couple hundred dollars on a couple hundred patients over a period of months? That'd add up.”

“Yeah. Like that case a few years back where the hotel chain—I forget which one—added a made-up surcharge of one dollar on everybody's bill. For a buck, nobody complained, and a buck on every room in every hotel in the chain turned out to be big money. While it lasted.”

“Missed that one,” Sam said.

“Ah, a plaintiff's lawyer figured it out. Brought a big class action. Made a ton in legal fees. Guess that wasn't played so big outside of the legal newspapers.”

And then I thought, It's the same game a lot of insurance defense attorneys play. Feeling a tad like I was ratting out my fellow lawyers, I explained to Sam, in possibly more detail than he needed, the theory of the little fifteen-minute cheat, the simple trick of adding fifteen minutes to most of the entries on your daily time sheet. Myself, I had (really) never done this, because I was as busy as hell and billed accordingly without the need to cheat. But I knew it was done. An attorney attends a hearing, and it takes one hour. Instead of billing that one hour, he (or she—billing fraud not being solely a male practice) instead bills one hour and fifteen minutes. The theory is that nobody is going to notice, or check, or bitch about fifteen minutes. But then you repeat it, over and over, and the ten-hour day an attorney legitimately puts in working on a variety of cases for a variety of clients suddenly becomes at least a twelve-hour day. Multiplied by an average work year, that's roughly, rounded off, an unearned bonus closing in on an additional hundred grand. All raised in little increments of fifteen minutes.

“So, lawyers cheat, huh?” Sam said.

“Oh, yeah, and there aren't any crooked cops,” I snapped.

“But, yeah, couple hundred here, a couple hundred there from the HMO, and it adds up. Small enough claims on a variety of patients and the company doesn't see anything amiss. No heart transplants or anything like that, just a few ultrasounds and some physical therapy. But how would it work? I mean, if all these bills were being done by the same doctor, I could see how it might work, with the checks coming into his office. But two different doctors?”

“I don't know. I don't get it.”

But under the influence of adrenaline and stale caffeine, something was ticking inside my head. My own little neurotransmitters were connecting the dots even as I said I didn't get it.

Explaining the theory of the little fifteen-minute cheat made me think of Ashton. Ashton espoused that theory, had explained it to me when I was still a pup wet behind the ears. He had acted offended when I politely declined the chance to join the club.

No doubt Ashton had explained it to Jennifer.

Jennifer, who worked at a “service” that did medical transcriptions and billings and filed insurance claims, and did who knew what else for doctors too cheap to hire their own employees. How closely would the doctors monitor that service?

Grabbing my cell phone from my purse, I punched in Ashton's number. Then I hung up.

“What are you doing?” Sam sounded like a cop.

“I don't know,” I said, telling the truth and not liking his tone one bit.

If Ashton was involved in some way, I didn't want to get him in trouble. Beyond that personal loyalty thing, a code I'm pretty big on, a code Delvon and I had lived by in the rough years, there was the immediate problem that if a partner in Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley went down the tubes as a major crook, then the firm was done. The publicity would kill us. I still had a huge mortgage on my apple orchard. I needed at least five more years of the Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley gravy train.

But then another little dot got connected. The Trusdale file had been in my den the Saturday Jennifer and Ashton had come home with me. Jennifer had disappeared into the powder room and could have detoured into the den and taken the now missing evidence of insurance fraud. Or she could have unlocked the back door and then let herself in later that night while Newly and I were playing in the pool at Ashton's.

Anger bubbled up in me until I thought of Jennifer curling beside me in bed that Sunday morning after the I-75 car trip from hell, squeezing my leg and saying how glad she was that we were best girlfriends, especially now that she knew I could keep a secret. Somehow, she'd wiggled into being my friend, and friends kept each other's secrets.