The Last Word (7 page)

The headquarters of Gold Mountain Investment Partners was a post office box rented by a Gaylord and Bette Yokley at a Mailboxes America outlet two blocks from their home in Palmdale.

Steve ran a background check on the Yokleys and discovered that the couple, both of whom were in their forties, had criminal records.

Bette Yokley had been arrested several times over the years for marijuana possession, drunk driving, indecent exposure, and disorderly conduct. She liked to party. She currently worked as a dog groomer in a pet salon located in the same strip mall as their post office box.

Her husband, Gaylord, was an ex-marine and former gun dealer who spent five years in prison for selling illegal firearms and unlawful possession of explosives. His defense was that he was an “off the books” military operative for the CIA, supplying weapons on its behalf to groups attempting to overthrow anti-U.S. governments in South America and Africa. The jury didn’t buy it. After his release from prison, Gaylord went into the used-car business.

On a hunch, Steve checked to see who’d sold Teeg his truck. Sure enough, it was Yokley Motors.

It didn’t take a huge intellectual leap for Steve to figure out that Yokley was back in the firearms business and might have sold Teeg some weapons.

So why was Yokley being so generous to Teeg? What exactly was their relationship? It had to be more than a simple truck sale or a gun transaction. And whatever it was, it probably wasn’t legal.

He had an inkling where this case might eventually lead. And it was big.

Steve took a moment to consider his options. He could take this bust and all the glory for himself. Or he could spread the wealth and bring Detective Olivia Morales into it, too. Not that anyone would blame him if he didn’t. He had no professional or ethical obligation to her; he’d found this strand on his own and followed it where it led. It was unrelated to any legwork Olivia had done.

Even so, the last thing he needed was another enemy in the department, especially at a time when his enemies seemed to outnumber his friends by three to one.

The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that this Yokley thing could turn out to be an opportunity to win some favor with a few people in the law enforcement community who’d put him on their shit lists. So what if he had to share the credit for the bust with half a dozen other people? In the long run, it might do him more good than hogging it all for himself.

He picked up the phone and made three calls. One was to Olivia Morales; the next was to assistant district attorney Karen Cross. And then he called down to the holding cells and asked an officer to bring Teeg up to one of the interrogation rooms.

Teeg snarled and tried very hard to appear fearsome, but his swollen lip made the snarl too painful to maintain and he just didn’t have Anthony Hopkins’s gravitas. When Steve walked into the interrogation room, he took one look at Teeg and immediately pictured the guy in his undies, flexing that silly tapeworm tattoo on his chest. Even Teeg, clueless about most aspects of human nature, could read the amusement on Steve’s face and saw himself as he must be seen. It was a pitiful moment of realization.

So Teeg dropped the snarl and slumped in his chair, humiliated and depressed before Steve had uttered even a single word.

“Lousy day, isn’t it, Teeg?”

“Hell yes,” Teeg mumbled.

“We’ve got you on two counts of murder, one count of armed robbery, and that’s just for starters. The evidence against you is so strong, the DA is sending some kid, an intern straight out of law school, to try the case for some courtroom experience. I met the kid. He’s seen cases on
Judge Judy
that are more complex. He thinks it might take him ten minutes to present his case, if he drags things out, and maybe five minutes for the jury to reach a verdict, and that’s counting the time it takes them to get from the jury box to the jury room. All things considered, you could be on death row before lunch.”

Teeg didn’t know who Judge Judy was, but he’d seen parts of two or three
Law & Order
episodes, which just about covered his knowledge and understanding of the U.S. judicial system. The one thing he knew was that cops don’t bother talking to you unless their case is shaky. Maybe his situation wasn’t as bad as the cop was making it seem.

“So if I’m this badly screwed,” Teeg said with all the cocky bravado he could muster, “why are you in here talking to me?”

“Because you’re such a pathetic criminal, and your stupidity has made catching and prosecuting you so easy, I get absolutely no career bump at all for arresting you,” Steve said. “I want something out of this.”

“You think I give a crap about you?”

“No, but I think you care about yourself. You’re going to prison for the rest of your life. That’s a done deal. There’s nothing either one of us can do about that. But it’s up to you whether you get a lethal injection or serve a life sentence somewhere, and whether that time is spent in a hellhole or in a Ramada Inn with bars on the windows.”

“I’m not confessing to nothing, if that’s what you want.”

Steve leaned on the table and got in Teeg’s face. “You’re not listening to me. I don’t need you to confess. I’ve got you. But you could save your ass and enormously improve your future standard of living in prison by telling me about Gaylord Yokley’s black-market arms business.”

Teeg’s eyes bugged out. “You
know
about that?”

Steve did now.

“You bought your guns from him. You bought your truck from him. You were hiding out in a house owned by him. Yeah, Teeg, we know about you and Yokley.”

“Did he rat me out? Is that how you found me?”

That was some mighty faulty logic as far as Steve was concerned. He couldn’t see what possible upside there would be for Yokley to let Teeg hide out in his house and then turn him in to the police. But Steve also didn’t see any benefit to telling Teeg how inane his reasoning was. He decided to let Teeg think whatever he wanted to if it would get him to talk.

So Steve simply shrugged, which communicated volumes to Teeg.

“Damn,” Teeg said. “After everything I done for him? He’s made a lot of money off me and my homeys.”

“What were you doing in his house?”

“I told him I smoked a
vato
and needed a place to go where nobody would look for me until things cooled off. Me and my homeys are his best customers. So he let me crash at his place in Simi.”

“You thought you’d just blend right in.”

“Why not?” Teeg asked without a trace of irony. He honestly didn’t see how a tattooed gangbanger might stand out in a cul-de-sac full of middle-class families. And not just anywhere, but in Simi Valley, the city that let the cops who nearly beat Rodney King to death walk with only a finger-wagging and a stern warning.

“My mistake,” Steve said. “So tell me what you and your homeboys were buying from Yokley.”

“Guns, man,” Teeg said. “We go in like we’re buying cars, and he delivers the
quetes
in the trunk with the spare tire.”

“But you bought a pickup truck,” Steve said. “What kind of weapons did you need a cargo bed for?”

“Rifles, shotguns, like that.”

Steve glanced at the mirror on the wall. On the other side of the glass, he knew, Detective Olivia Morales and ADA Karen Cross were watching, along with invited guests from LAPD’s Gang Intervention Unit, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF. They were all absorbing the news that Yokley was supplying LA street gangs with weapons and using his profits to buy and sell real estate.

Getting a search warrant and raiding Gaylord Yokley’s home and business with a multi-agency task force would be a no-brainer now.

Steve turned back to Teeg and smiled. “Suddenly your future is looking a little less bleak.”

“Like how?”

“I can guarantee that in return for your testimony against Gaylord Yokley, the State of California won’t be strapping you to a table and injecting lethal drugs into your veins.”

“Can I get a TV in my cell?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, depriving you of
American Idol
would constitute cruel and inhuman punishment.”

“Make it a wall-mounted flat screen,” Teeg said. “I don’t know what prisons are like in Geneva, but the cells here are cramped.”

The executive dining room was another improvement Hollyworld International made after it purchased Community General. The senior staff and upper-level administrators were served the same food on the same dishware as the people dining in the cafeteria, but somehow the dim lighting, tablecloths, and absence of bothersome patients, worried loved ones, and harried interns made it taste better.

Mark hadn’t visited the executive dining room, even though his position at the hospital allowed him the privilege. He disapproved of the class structure that the existence of an executive dining room created among the hospital staff. To him, the dining room personified the insensitivity of Hollyworld towards its employees. The company seemed to be actively sowing bitterness and distrust between administration and the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies who worked there.

So, naturally, the executive dining room was where Janet Dorcott, Community General’s thirty-three-year-old chief administrator, summoned Mark for an urgent meeting.

She’d replaced Noah Dent after his mysterious, and quite unexpected, departure from the job a year or so earlier. Dent slashed budgets, laid off dozens of nurses, and tried to shut down the adjunct county medical examiner’s office, which Mark had established. It was run by Dr. Amanda Bentley out of the hospital’s morgue. But no sooner had Dent made those massive changes than he abruptly reinstated everything and left. That was one mystery Mark had never felt compelled to investigate.

Janet was recruited by Hollyworld from a big box retailer, where she’d been in charge of the company’s aggressive efforts to build superstores on the outskirts of small towns. The retailer dramatically undercut local, family-owned businesses on price and selection and drove them into bankruptcy, leaving behind empty storefronts and deserted streets. When the local businesses died, so did the culture and character of the rural communities they’d served for generations.

She saw that as a successful outcome.

Of course, Janet would argue that she was bringing much-needed jobs and a wide range of affordably priced products to the poverty-stricken communities that needed them most and, in doing so, was revitalizing stagnant local economies. She didn’t care that, at the same time, the superstores were stripping the communities of their character and history, assimilating them into a homogeneous landscape of bland box stores.

That was her idea of progress.

She brought that same attitude to medical care, treating hospitals as box stores and patients as customers. The only difference was the products weren’t cut-rate; only the service was.

Janet liked to paint herself as a simple country girl and play up her Texas twang to disarm people. But Mark saw the performance for what it was—a show of contempt for her rural upbringing and anyone who was charmed by it.

Mark toyed with refusing to meet her in the executive dining room and instead making the woman come to him in the cafeteria. But then he’d be playing the same kind of power games that she did, and he didn’t want to lower himself to her level. So he met her in the executive dining room as requested.

Janet smiled at him when he came in, her unnaturally whitened teeth gleaming in the pinpoint halogen light that illuminated her private booth. He figured that his presence reaffirmed her sense of superiority in the hospital hierarchy and his tacit acknowledgment that he was answerable to her.

She set aside her BlackBerry, her chef’s salad, and her glass of ice water, which Mark assumed she kept cold by holding it against her bosom.

“Dr. Sloan, it is so good to see you,” she said. “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.”

Mark shivered, struck by the eerie parallel between her greeting and the one Carter Sweeney had given him twenty-four hours earlier.

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” he said, sliding into the booth across from her. “I’ve been avoiding Clarke Trotter.”

“It’s the same thing,” she said. “The legal counsel works for me. As a matter of fact, so do you.”

“And here I am.”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to discuss with you,” she said. “We’d like you to go.”

“Already? I haven’t even ordered lunch yet.”

He was being facetious. He knew what she meant. She was hardly the first chief administrator who’d wanted to get rid of him. She was the fourth or fifth.

“I have no doubt that you were an excellent physician once, respected in your field, and that Community General was proud to have you on its staff,” she said. “That time is long gone.”

“You’re questioning my competence as a doctor?”

“I wouldn’t know. Since I took over this hospital, I haven’t seen you practicing much medicine. Most of what I know about you I’ve learned from reading the
Los Angeles Times
,
The New York Times
, and
USA Today
.”

She picked up a stack of newspapers from the seat beside her and dropped them on the center of the table. The papers had been collected over the last few months. The front pages were filled with stories relating to the killer nurses scandal that Mark had uncovered.

“That’s your problem, Janet. Instead of learning about the hospital by walking the halls, meeting the staff, and getting to know people over lunch in the cafeteria, you sit in here reading newspapers and spreadsheets,” Mark said. “You won’t discover what I’m doing as a doctor by reading the
Los Angeles Times
.”