Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Monday, 5:00 p.m.

Her cop babysitter had fitted Shanaya with a wire—as in, an actual wire that ran from a two-inch square digital recorder and battery clipped to her underwear up to a fake gold pin that looked like a sunflower weighing down the edge of her collar. The stupid thing only recorded, didn’t transmit, so no one at the police department would be listening in real time. They didn’t have the manpower for that, thanks a lot. They gave her a phone to use for emergencies, while the recording would be made for future prosecutions. No one was supposed to notice that the patterned center of the sunflower was actually the sieve covering a microphone. Or that a woman her age, with her style, would ever wear anything as old-lady as a tacky pin.

Not to mention if the pit boss felt her up again, something he’d been doing with increasing regularity, he’d rub on that wire and she’d be dead before she ever got the chance to call her cop babysitter. No matter where he stationed himself along East Ninth Street, she would be inside a locked building with one exit, surrounded by men ruthless enough to steal little old grannies’ life savings. They wouldn’t hesitate to choke the life out of one girl with a headset and dump her body in the same alley where Eric Hayes had attacked her. And since that idiot had been released on his own recognizance, he would make the perfect fall guy.

She stepped into the foyer and rang the buzzer.

But if the pit bull kept his hands to himself, she could still pull this out. She’d let the wire record what it could. She would write down every coworker’s name and their position in the hierarchy, as best she could. She’d keep a record of names, credit card numbers, phone numbers, how much money each lost. And she’d try to snap as many pictures with the new phone they’d given her—yeah, like that wouldn’t attract attention, and they hadn’t even given her a decent phone to do it with. But she’d do it.

Then, she might, just might, get to keep some or all the money she and Evani had worked so hard to accumulate if she made the cops too grateful to ask where it came from.

For that, she’d walk into the mouth of hell itself. The door lock buzzed and she pulled it open.

And this place was pretty close.

Monday, 5:15 p.m.

“Wayne Hawk,” Riley mused as he drove, dodging another car, all four tires sliding on the slush-covered pavement. “Wayne, our little receptionist, or Hawk as in Hawking Industries and Mark Hawking?”

Maggie tensed as they approached a red light. The vehicle slid to a stop by some margin not visible from the back seat.

“Good question,” Jack said. “We could have walked there faster than this.”

Indeed, the distance from A to Z to Dr. Sidney Jeffers’s office building might have been one and a half city blocks, tops. But—“You want to walk in this? Your shoes would be soaked through before they tapped 14^th.”

“I guess not.”

“What makes you so sure this doctor’s office has something to do with it?” Maggie asked. They hadn’t wanted to take the time to drop her back at the station, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to hang out with Ralph until someone could send a ride.

“I don’t even have a guess,” Jack said. “Somehow they’ve got to be part of the same concern. We have the same killer in all three cases, but no connection between Evan Harding and Jennifer Toner except for Marlon. Castleman is providing Marlon with pills, maybe through Jeffers, or Wayne, because Wayne’s pet’s fur winds up on Rick.”

“Maybe,” Maggie corrected, ever the scientist. She hadn’t even seen Jeffers’s office pet yet, much less examined its fur.

“Marlon is laundering money in exchange for the pills, through Ralph. Ralph nearly has a heart attack when he hears us discussing Castleman.”

Riley said, “Yet he gives up ‘Wayne Hawk’ without hesitation. . . or without much hesitation. Because he didn’t recognize the name? Assumed it was fake and couldn’t be traced back to anyone?”

“Or because he’s willing to sacrifice them?”

Maggie said, “And this Dr. Castleman is in hiding?”

“Apparently,” Jack said. “Because he’s sure impossible to find.”

“But he’s a legitimate doctor?”

“Sure. But in the pill mill craze most pushers were actual doctors, too, though not always in the specialties they were supposed to be.”

“So why is Castleman in hiding?”

“Because he’s a pill pusher,” Jack said. “Why are you turning?”

Riley said, “You can’t get there from here. Not with that weird fork at 18^th.”

“But a legitimate one,” Maggie persisted. She knew something about the pill mills that had swept the country only a few short years before. One of the most frustrating things about them proved to be their brazen operations, with billboards and large parking lots, lobbies that didn’t try to hide the quick in-and-out of patient visits where physical exams were reduced to a few questions on a form. Granted, new laws had been put in place specifically to combat such mills, so perhaps that had forced such doctors underground. “If you can’t find him, how do his patients?”

“Same way they find the drug dealers, I guess. Word of mouth.”

Maggie said, “Maybe Castleman started taking his own product and lost his license. Fell on hard times, started selling pills. I can’t see any other reason for him to stay out of sight if he’s legit. Do you know if his license is still in good standing?”

Jack said he had no idea. Riley didn’t answer, waiting for a break in the next lane. A large pile of snow outside a parking lot had collapsed into the street and then frozen again, hard as a glacier. It blocked the far right lane.

“Did you call the A.M.A.?”

Silence. Which meant they had not, and neither of them wanted to admit it.

“I have a friend who’s the national secretary. I could—”

Yes, the detectives said in unison. Call her.

While Riley negotiated their way through three lanes of traffic where snow obscured the lines on the asphalt, Maggie Googled the number for the A.M.A. She listened through two sets of phone menu instructions, then connected with the main office and asked for Tanya Schroeder. They had met at college, played in the band together, and still exchanged birthday cards.

“Tanya! I got your Christmas card. First one of the season, as always.”

“Gotta send ’em out the day after Thanksgiving. My mom’s training.”

“Isn’t that kind of cheating? You should at least have to wait until December.”

“It is not,” Tanya assured her firmly. “Check Emily Post.”

Maggie explained why she called, that they needed to ask the mysterious Dr. Phillip Castleman some questions regarding a murder. Actually, several murders.

Mentioning murder did not open any floodgates when it came to Tanya Schroeder. Any woman who would not violate Emily Post would also not violate even an unimportant regulation of the American Medical Association. “I can’t tell you anything about his record, or any personal information—”

“No, no. All I want is the most impersonal information possible. His office address. That’s it.”

“That’s all you want?”

“Yep.”

A pause. “Have you tried the phone book? Or, today’s version of the phone book, Google?”

“Yep.”

Another pause. “Okay, let me see what we’ve got. Hey, how’s your brother doing?”

In their dorm days Tanya had invariably shown up to “help” Maggie move in or out when Alex was there as well. “Today? Playing a gig in Hilton Head, the lucky stiff, then they’re off to a ski resort. And yes,” Maggie told Tanya before she could ask, because she always asked, “he’s still married.”

“Damn.”

“Tanya, so are you.”

“Don’t bother me with trifles.” Keys clacked in the background.

“Would a woman who sends out her Christmas cards on a strict schedule really be happy living and raising kids in constant motion from town to town, gig to gig?”

“Maybe I yearn to leave schedules behind.”

Maggie doubted it but didn’t argue.

“Okay. Dr. Phillip Castleman, licensed in Ohio. What a name. Sounds like something out of a romance novel.”

“It does.”

“His license is in good standing.”

Maybe not for much longer, Maggie thought.

“But currently on hold for renewal.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s a number of reasons . . . I probably can’t tell you, you know, but . . . it’s not . . . oh. That’s cool.”

“Cool? What’s cool?”

Riley had maneuvered the car into the lot and plunged into a spot at the edge. If there were any lines to indicate separate parking spaces, they had been lost under six inches of snow, but that hardly mattered since only a few vehicles dotted the lot. He and Jack made no move to get out, waiting for her to finish her call but, mercifully, left the engine running along with what heating element it had.

“I see why you’re having trouble finding the dashing Dr. Phillip Castleman. In light of this info, I might throw Alex over for him on the spot.”

“Tanya—”

“He’s in North Kivu.”

Maggie waited.

“In the DRC. Democratic Republic of Congo.”

“Congo?” Jack and Riley had both turned in the front seat, watching her with a uniform, unsettling intensity. “As in African Congo?”

“You know another? Your very good doctor is currently attached to Doctors Without Borders, working in a war zone with the worst Ebola outbreak—Ebola. I may still throw Alex over for him but not until Phillip is out of quarantine. That stuff is nasty.”

“How long has he been there?”

“Aboouuuttt . . . a year and a half.”

“Huh. Could someone be here still prescribing meds under his license number?”

“They shouldn’t be.”

“Yes, I assume that. But if they were—”

“They’d probably get away with it for a while.” Tanya sounded as if she were musing this over. “Nobody’s going to check the license number every week, and even if they did, it’s still good. Until the handsome Dr. Castleman returns from serving as the salvation of millions.”

“How do you know he’s handsome?”

“Did you miss the part about him taking care of Ebola patients in the Congo? How much more beautiful can a soul get? Besides,” she added before ringing off, “he has a cool name.”

Maggie put her phone away. “Get this.”

From their expressions, the two detectives were more than ready to get it.

“So Dr. Castleman’s identity was stolen,” Riley said, when she had finished.

“More like borrowed. And who better to borrow it than ex-partner Sidney?” Jack said. “He turns addicts into high-cost patients with fictitious diabetes or whatever. They deposit the government funds into his account and he pays them with pills and a little cash. If anyone comes around asking questions, he shifts the blame to the ghostly Dr. Castleman.”

“But whose account is it? Jeffers? Nurse Wayne? Or Mark Hawking of our illegal call center?”

“Which we just sent Shanaya Thomas back to.”

Riley said, “I wouldn’t worry about her. That girl can take care of herself.”