“Orderlies aren’t allowed to handle medication unless they’re being supervised,” Northlake said. “And this is an enormous amount of the drug, enough for twenty patients for a day—why would he have it? Why did they let him sign it?”
I put on my most saintly, trustworthy face. “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me, Ms. Northlake. Do you recognize the doctor’s name?”
She squinted at the signature. “I can’t make it out.”
Chantal and the male social worker, who’d abandoned any pretense of working, joined her, looking at the form over her shoulder. Northlake started to fold it up, out of their sight, then shrugged and held it out to them. The two frowned over the signature but agreed it could belong to anyone.
“I can take it up to Lydia in Dr. Poynter’s office,” Chantal offered. “She might know if someone had asked Xavier to get the drug.”
Northlake grudgingly agreed that might be a good idea, then demanded to know how I’d gotten the form at all.
“I found Xavier Jurgens in his car this morning; he had a young girl locked in the trunk. When the doctors told me that both the girl and Jurgens had ingested Abilify, I went to his home to talk to his partner. This requisition was in the back of the car he usually drove to work. I’m curious about a couple of things: did he get hold of the drug because he wanted to kill himself? Why did he involve the girl? There doesn’t seem to be any connection between him and her. Unless it’s through the investigator who was murdered two weeks ago—in just about the same place where Jurgens died.”
Chantal looked at her boss, then at me. “Alvina—she might as well know—”
Northlake bristled. “Know what? Not about any patient here, even if she’s the woman’s mother.”
“No, no—about the dead detective.” Chantal turned to me. “You were asking about him going to the locked wing—well, Xavier was the person who let him in.”
The information didn’t startle me. “But Miles Wuchnik, the murdered detective, isn’t the person who gave Xavier the money for the Camaro; a third party did. Any hunches about that?”
“We wondered, or our security director wondered, where Jurgens got the money for it.” The man spoke for the first time. “They did an audit on the controlled substances, and there weren’t abnormal levels of filching. There’s always some in a hospital, you can’t get it down to zero, but no spikes, and nothing of the size that would have the street value of a sports car.”
“What about at the other end of the chain?” I asked, thinking of Mr. Contreras’s and my drug-ring theory. “Could someone be ordering massive amounts of drugs for the hospital, say, double what you’d normally use, and then reselling them on the street?”
Chantal and Northlake exchanged horrified looks with the male social worker. “I hope that isn’t possible,” Northlake said. “We’re supposed to have strict procedures in place for signatures and so on . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the requisition I’d brought in.
“The resale price for antipsychotics can’t be that great,” the man ventured.
“We get plenty of other drugs,” Northlake said sharply. “Percocet, Xanax, all those pain meds and tranquilizers have a good street value. But if you ordered such vast quantities that someone could buy a Camaro with the proceeds, then I think it would set off alarm bells in the pharmacy; it’s their cost center that would be affected. I’ll call around, see what I can learn—the last thing we need is for this hospital to be turned on its ear by having the state investigate us.”
“If you find out anything, please, can you let me know?” I said. “Wuchnik was blackmailing at least one person and likely more. Leydon thought he was spying on her, but she doesn’t have easy access to her trust fund to pay off someone like him, and anyway, I can’t imagine her letting a blackmailer get away with anything. But if you had some corrupt employees who were dealing drugs, I can easily see a blackmailer having a field day. Although how he found out, that’s another question.”
Tania Metzger had come into the bullpen at the tag end of the conversation. “I never heard any talk of Leydon being blackmailed.”
I looked at her. “When I was out here before, you told me that Leydon went into the forensic wing one day. I know you can’t repeat anything she said in therapy, but is there anything you can tell me about why she went there?”
Tania hesitated, then said, “She thought Wuchnik was spying on her and she took the opportunity to follow him.”
“Tania!” Alvina Northlake spoke sharply. “You are crossing a line here on confidentiality, and if you say anything else, you could be suspended.”