“Who said anything about prison?”
She looked into my eyes for a long moment. She was searching now to find what could live inside me that could take Ricky down.
“You think you can kill him?” she asked.
It wasn’t a question I could answer out loud. I could only hold her gaze and hope she would see in Ryan the tacit but unspoken fact that it would be his professional and personal pleasure to clip Ricky Messina.
“Then do it,” she said. “When he’s dead I’ll tell you every last thing. Until then I have nothing to say.”
Ryan and I didn’t want to be seen leaving the house together, so he stayed in a dark corner behind the garage. I told him I’d wait for him at the car.
I would have too if it weren’t for the woman leaning against the passenger door of the Dadmobile, arms folded tightly across her chest. About forty in a light mauve suit, with blue eyes and shoulder-length red hair that had been straightened. It looked as dry and stiff as an old paintbrush.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
She said, “That depends.”
“On what?”
“How badly you want to stay out of jail.”
CHAPTER 46
Her name was Christine Staples and she had the credentials to prove it, professionally presented in a genuine leather case. “I’m with the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigation. We’re the investigative arm of the agency. The FBI of the FDA, if you will.”
“A woman of letters,” I said. She suppressed any sign of finding it funny. No Katherine Hollinger, this one. All business, down to her square-toed loafers.
She asked for ID and I showed her my licence. If it provided any credibility, she didn’t show that either.
“I’ve been watching that house,” she said. “Only today I’ve been watching you watching the house. What’s your interest?”
“I’m house hunting,” I said.
“From Ontario?”
“Society is tilting too far left there,” I said.
Some people appreciate a little humour to help break the ice before intense discussions or negotiations. And some, like Christine Staples, look at you like they’re fitting you for a dunce cap. “Do you know where our office is, Mr. Geller?”
“I’m looking for residential space, not commercial.”
“We share a building downtown with the Buffalo field office of the FBI. Should we continue our discussion there?”
“You have powers of arrest?”
“No, the police and border enforcement folks do that for us. But I can have someone here real quick.”
I could have told her to go to hell. But that would likely have meant exposing Ryan to the local feds, something he wouldn’t care for in the least. I was about to ask Staples if we could talk somewhere else-give Ryan a chance to lose himself-when she surprised me by suggesting it first.
“Here’s my best offer,” she said. “We go to a Starbucks a few blocks from here and you tell me what you saw inside that house, or we go to the Federal Building and I lose your paperwork.”
“The first one sounded better.”
“Which is not to say the second won’t follow if you don’t come up with a better story than house hunting.”
“I’ll try.”
“Are you armed?” she asked.
“No.”
“Mind?”
“No.”
She ran a hand around my waist. I lifted my pant legs so she could see there was no throwaway tucked in down there. “All right,” she said. “We’ll take my car.”
It was a brown Crown Victoria with no markings on it. Not that a brown Crown needed any to scream government car.
At Starbucks we both ordered tall dark roasts. No foam, no flavours, no bullshit, each trying to show the other we were straight talkers.
“I’m going to start by giving you the benefit of the doubt,” Staples said. “I’m going to concede that you are probably- probably — not involved in a criminal way with whatever is going on in that house. I won’t say it in front of a lawyer, but that’s what I think.”
“Thank you. That’s a good start.”
She took out a small spiral notebook. “You’re here in an investigative capacity?”
“Yes.”
“On whose behalf?”
“My employer. Beacon Security of Toronto.”
“More specific, please. Who hired Beacon to look into what?”
“That’s two questions in one.”
“So answer the first one first. Who hired you?”
“That’s confidential.”
“Not in New York State, it’s not, because you’re not licensed to operate here. You want to get home any time today?”
I looked at Christine Staples with her pale suit and eyes and helmet hair. “Without divulging the client’s name,” I said, “I can tell you what’s been happening on the Canadian end. Then you tell me how it connects to Buffalo.”
“No promises on what I tell you,” she said. “And if I need your client’s name down the road, for an affidavit or whatever, you can bet I’ll get it.”
Yeah, maybe if she battered me with her hair. “Okay. Someone hired us to investigate a local nursing home where a family member had died. They thought the staff might have been negligent in handling her medication. Our investigation led in two directions. One was a company called the Vista Mar Care Group, which owns a chain of nursing homes in Ontario, including the one where the death occurred. The other was a group of independent pharmacists who own large drugstores in Ontario. Nothing has been proven in court, you understand, but it seems these pharmacists were shipping medications illegally to the States, with the help of Vista Mar, which I believe is a front for a local Mob crew.”
“As in the Mob? You’re joking.”
“I wish.”
“Why would organized crime be interested in nursing homes?”
“It kept people from getting suspicious about the quantities of drugs being ordered by the pharmacists. They would supply far more to the nursing homes than they actually needed, and there are more than a dozen homes in the chain. At least two thousand residents. They could fake hundreds of prescriptions and ship the meds down here. The medical director at Vista Mar, a guy named Bader, signed all the prescriptions.”
“And because he was director of the chain,” Staples said, “the number of prescriptions he wrote never rang a bell with anyone.”
“Right. And most of the pharmacists had wholesale licences, so they didn’t ring one either.”
“Have you actually met this Dr. Bader?”
“Yes.”
“At Meadowvale?”
“Yes.”
