“There’s other prisons,” he pointed out. “Vacaville – it’s less than an hour from Rosedale. Or Folsom, almost around the corner.” He tried to keep his voice casual, tried not to probe even though he suspected the story she was telling him was not the whole truth.
She’d been toying with a napkin and now snapped her eyes up to meet his. “Does it matter? Why the interrogation? Crescent City had an immediate opening.”
Frankie Jones was definitely holding back. His gaze wandered back to the cell phone’s cryptic message. What got Slater jazzed up about Dickey’s autopsy?
“Okay,” he said. “What did you find at Pelican Bay?”
Frankie had been suspicious from the first week of work, she explained. An underlying system of graft was lining the pockets of some correctional officers at PBSP. She’d seen the lax protocol of dispensing drugs to patients, and suspected some of the nurses who worked the clinic were pilfering from the medicine cabinet.
The locked one, with her the only possessor of the key.
“Obviously, someone had access to the controlled medications,” Cruz said.
Frankie had made a duplicate copy the second day on the job, disliking the idea that as the prescribing physician she had only one key to obtain the Schedule III and IV drugs needed for her terminally ill patients.
After ten months working at the prison, she had enough proof to nail the guilty officers and inmates.
“That’s it? Stealing and selling drugs?” he asked.
Her gaze shifted away from his. “Yeah,” she answered after a moment.
Cruz knew she was lying. He prickled at the idea. She’d found something else going on at Pelican Bay. But if it didn’t relate to the murders in Rosedale, he didn’t care.
Chapter 45
Cole ran a slight fever.
While Frankie rounded up some old clothes that had belonged to her father, Cruz tried to sponge the street dirt off the ex-con. Together the two of them cleaned and dressed him without disturbing or aggravating his wounds.
Feeling an irrational moment of jealousy, Cruz considered asking Frankie about the male clothing – who did they belong to? – but decided against it.
When they returned to the kitchen, Cruz motioned toward the kitchen chair, and as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted, asked, “So first you noticed the missing drug supplies at the prison. And then what?”
“Yes, it was so negligible I couldn’t be sure.” Frankie smiled wanly. “Everyone thinks items are strictly accounted for – medical supplies, instruments, drugs – but it’s hard to get precise counts. There’s an emergency, staff get careless, the cabinet is left open for easier access. Supplies are dropped on the floor, contaminated, then thrown away.”
She shrugged. “The clinic is a fast-track event one day, a leisure-cruise the next. If we get several days’ worth of emergencies in a row, items... just get lost.”
Some kind of buying and selling was going on in D Block, she explained, but it wasn’t just the drugs that were pilfered from her clinic. After a few months she saw a pattern of visitation to the clinic and disappearance from the secured medications cabinet. The doses were small, so infinitesimal she could’ve considered it a miscount or human error.
Gradually, she heard snippets of conversation among the inmates. The prisoners were astonishingly loose-mouthed around her, as though her white medical jacket separated her from the guards. Like they had immunity around her, or knew she wouldn’t snitch.
She’d finally put the bits and pieces together. Inmates could buy or sell just about anything – cell phones, cigarettes, drugs – and a few of the guards turned a blind eye for a kick back. Since she kept such meticulous records, she was finally able to pin the disappearance of drugs from the clinic on two particular inmates – both white and members of the Lords – and one of her staff nurses.
And this was just the pilfering she’d been able to document within the clinic. Apparently, quite a lot of trafficking went on in D Block, all under the direction of the Lords of Death.
Cruz rested his chin on his fist. “So you started your – what do you call it? – your secret database. When was that?” Cruz asked.
“The beginning of my second week on the job, early in February.” She stretched sore muscles. “Yes, I started inputting data for every patient who visited the clinic.”
“What kind of data?”
“Anything. Vitals, symptoms, drugs,” Frankie enumerated. “My eventual intent was to do a non-critical health evaluation on each inmate in the prison.”
“That’s an ambitious goal,” he murmured. “Is it prison protocol?”
“Yes, ambitious, and no, not protocol at all. Usually the physician in charge responds to requests or complaints from individual inmates. Some go years without seeing a doctor or dentist.”