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

Saturday, 10:30 a.m.

“Are you sure this is it?” Riley asked, peering through the windshield and the falling snow at the nondescript building tucked into an unpicturesque corner formed by the elevated innerbelt and East 14th.

“No. But it’s what the GPS says.”

“This is Eighteenth.”

“Apparently, it’s also Fourteenth.”

“It can’t be two different streets.”

“Apparently it can, and is.”

“All right,” Riley huffed as if he’d reached a decision, switched off the ignition, and visibly steeled himself to emerge into the biting wind. “If we can finally run down this Castleman character, it will be worth it.” He continued to grumble over the sounds of the cars along the freeway and their feet squeaking against the inches of snow coating the parking lot. “Though I don’t know what we’re going to ask him. Did you turn your patient Marlon Toner into a drug addict? Did you give his ID to another drug addict? Did an irate sister come looking for you because you turned Marlon Toner into a drug addict? Did you then track her down and leave her to bleed out on her living room floor? Gee, let me think: HIPAA law, HIPAA law, no, and no.” He jerked open the door to the lobby and stamped the snow off his feet onto the already-sodden doormat.

Jack didn’t try to reassure him that they were on the right track, because he had no faith that they were. He didn’t offer any suggestions for an interrogation, either, because of course Riley spoke the truth and even if they did find this doctor, he wouldn’t be able to tell them anything about a patient. But Castleman remained the only lead they had.

A floor directory had been mounted on the wall, but the glass had been broken and the letters rearranged to spell nasty words. The elevator call button produced a grinding, groaning sound and Jack looked around for the stairs. After a shuddering crunch echoed down the shaft, Riley apparently decided a bit of exercise wouldn’t kill him and followed Jack to the stairwell.

The second floor appeared no more welcoming than the first, with worn carpeting and walls that hadn’t been repainted for several decades. At least most of the closed doors were labeled: a dentist, a massage therapist, a CPA, a Dr. Sidney Jeffers, and one that used crayons on white copy paper to spell out “Kayla’s Day Care” in curling letters meant to be whimsical. Business seemed to be booming, to judge from the soup of shouts, crying, and whines boiling behind the door.

Kayla’s Day Care also seemed to be Suite 214. They couldn’t be sure since the crayoned paper had been affixed with enough tape to endure gale-force winds, but it sat between 215 and 2-space-3, and so seemed a good guess. The two men sighed in unison, glanced at each other with identical looks of resigned unhappiness, and then Jack knocked on the door.

The cacophony inside did not shift. Jack knocked again.

No change in the noise level, but the knob slowly turned and the door inched inward, revealing a small boy with dark skin, huge eyes, and a Hot Wheels car clutched in one hand. He stared at the two cops.

“Hello,” Riley said. “Umm—can we speak to—”

A grown-up hand appeared around the boy’s wrist and gently pulled it from the inner knob, then a tall woman with brown hair to her waist opened it the rest of the way. “Jamie, we let Teacher open the door, right?”

Jamie didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue, either.

The two detectives hastily explained their search for Dr. Phillip Castleman in Suite 214.

The woman’s figure could be described as Junoesque, though the expression on her face suggested they should keep any such descriptions to themselves. The playroom inside had chipped paint and no décor other than a mountain of mismatched toys, but could easily have once been a waiting room. Two openings at either end led to hallways with a half wall in the center, behind which supplies were stacked on a desk or table. Preschool-age children roamed everywhere, clutching toys, arguing, chasing, laughing, sniffling, and coughing—at least until they caught sight of the detectives. Then they crowded toward the doorway like teen girls at a pop band concert, forcing the woman to exercise crowd control with both hands and one leg.

As she used this impressive balance to keep her charges from escaping, she told them in no uncertain terms that yes, this was Suite 214 but no doctor worked there or even visited the premises, and she had rented the unit for the past two years.

“Sorry to keep you from your work.” Riley swished his body backward a few inches when a little girl aimed a particularly wet cough toward him. “Is there any way we could—could you tell us where the super or the landlord’s offices are?”

“Basement,” she said, and having reached the limit of her ability to stand on one leg, shut the door. They heard the knob click and the dead bolt, mounted six feet above the floor, give a snick. That would keep Jamie from letting in any Tom, Dick, or non-custodial parent who knocked.

“What were you going to ask?” Jack wondered aloud, ears adjusting to the relative quiet of the hallway.

“If we could look around. Running a pill mill out of a day care would be friggin’ genius. Our Dr. Castleman could have an office in the back, be passing out scripts to customers who pretend to be picking up their kid. But I wasn’t quite willing to risk infection with cold or flu or whooping cough or whatever else those mini-incubators are carrying around.”

“I’m pretty sure she would have refused anyway.” They moved toward the stairwell.

“Take it from me, a kid’s great the first couple years, and then they start school. Once they do, anything some other kid in the class has, they have. And then you have.” Riley paused outside 211, the suite belonging to Dr. Sidney Jeffers. “Think we should try this guy? A doctor, on the same floor. They might have been at least acquainted.”

“Why not?”

Business also boomed at Dr. Sidney Jeffers’s office. At least ten patients lined the walls, one coughing, one with rheumy eyes, one with a cast on his ankle, a tired woman with a squirming toddler on her lap. Their chairs all faced a small television on a rickety end table, away from the receptionist behind an opened, frosted window. It reminded Jack of about every doctor’s waiting room he’d ever been in, the same general miasma of worry and discomfort. No one went to the doctor because things were perfect.

Only a few of the patients even glanced up as they entered.

The receptionist, a young man with his hair cut so short he may as well have shaved it, gave them a polite look but waited for them to speak. The office didn’t stand on pomposity—files sat around in haphazard heaps, at least three used coffee cups had been scattered at irregular intervals, a (hopefully clean) pint milk carton had been cut off to make a pen holder, and a small animal sat in a cage to the receptionist’s left, close enough for patients to get a look at the thing but too far for them to stick germy fingers through the wires for it to nibble on. A questionable precaution since the cage door sat open and the thing toddled out and climbed up the receptionist’s arm to curl up on his shoulder. Jack had never seen a doctor’s office with a resident pet. It looked like a cross between a rat and a squirrel to him, with short gray fur patterned with dark brown and white in spots, twitching ears, creepy pink feet, and eyes so oversized that it resembled an anime character. A tag on the cage read SUGAR GLIDER. Cute enough that the sight of it must lower a patient’s blood pressure a couple millimeters of mercury . . . but it made Jack think of hantavirus.

Riley asked if there were a Dr. Castleman working in that office. No, the guy said, only Dr. Jeffers. Or perhaps on the same floor? The guy said he didn’t recognize the name, and waited for the next question. How long had Dr. Jeffers’s office been at this location? The guy—his name badge read WAYNE—had only been working there for about a year and a half. Could they talk to Dr. Jeffers? He was with a patient. They understood that. They’d wait.

Wayne said he’d let the doc know. True to his word he stood up and grabbed a crutch from the wall at his side, tucking it under his right arm and limping away, toward a door at the back. Perhaps not only an employee, but a patient as well.

Jack quietly turned one of the chairs so that he could sit with his back against the wall, able to see the TV, the door, and the receptionist window. Riley did the same. After a series of wary glances, the other patients uniformly ignored them, no doubt wondering if these interlopers might cut in line. Few things were more cutthroat than the waiting order at a doctor’s office.

As it turned out, they were right to worry. Wayne reappeared shortly and asked the detectives to follow him. The door to the waiting room locked automatically behind them.

The examination rooms they passed didn’t seem any more luxurious than the waiting room, but floors were clean and the counters uncluttered. Dr. Sidney Jeffers turned out to be a fortyish man with already-thinning brown hair, an already-paunching midsection, a stethoscope around his neck, and a few stains on his lab coat that hadn’t quite washed out. “What can I do for you gentlemen? Is something wrong?”

Jack said, “We’re trying to locate a doctor who is supposed to be at this address. A Dr. Castleman.” He didn’t add that by address, he meant the building and not the suite.

To his surprise, Jeffers said, “Yes, but he’s not here anymore. He actually had the room across the hall, though we had a joint practice. He left—oh, I don’t know, at least two years ago.”

“But he was here?”

“Oh yeah. Phil was my partner.”

“Where is he now?” Riley sounded buoyed by this bread crumb of progress.

“Ooo, I don’t know. We haven’t spoken since—well, since he left. Not that we had a falling-out or anything. Only a difference in views.”

“Can you explain that?”

The man paused, leaning against the exam table. It formed the only seating in the room, and if he had an office, he didn’t ask them to it. He had patients to get to, after all. “We met each other in med school, ran into each other after residencies . . . we both felt it important not to become another cog in the big healthcare chains, forced to put profit over patients. I didn’t want to get sucked into that insurance payment morass. So we hung out our shingle, but, eventually, Phil needed a little bit of profit. I get it—he had a wife, kids, a mortgage. We parted ways.”

“When was that?”

“Like I said, about two years ago . . . I think.”

Riley said, “Are you aware that he’s still writing prescriptions using this address?”

The doctor’s eyebrows tilted upward. “Uh, no, I was not. He could be using old pads . . . but the thing is, I don’t think he’s even in Cleveland anymore. When he left our practice he said he’d accepted a position with Columbia in New Mexico.”

“Did you have a problem with him overprescribing meds?”

“Antibiotics. He handed those out like aspirin—hardly unusual, that’s why we’re seeing so many antibiotic-resistant strains of—”

“Do you know where he is now? Where he lives? Phone number?”

“Um . . . no.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Number, let’s see. Yes, still got him in Contacts—” He read off a series of digits, which Riley wrote down. “But that’s our area code, so he’s probably changed it by now. He used to live somewhere in Lakewood. I was only there once, for a barbecue or something.”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding?”

“Oh, honestly . . . he probably did. I think I sent his mail on for the first month or two, but I’m sure I’ve lost any address he gave me by now.” He glanced around as if the worn surroundings would bear him out. “I’m not very good at staying in touch. This place keeps me in a constant state of ‘slightly overwhelmed.’ ”

Jack asked, “Are there any professional organizations that would have his current status on record?”

Dr. Jeffers screwed up his face in contemplation. “Probably the New Mexico state licensing board.”

Jack thought of something. “Maybe the scripts aren’t coming from him. Is it possible a patient or employee might have stolen his old prescription pads?”

More thought. “Sure, I guess so. I try to keep mine in my pocket, not lying out in the open, but I don’t know how strictly Phil ran things.”

Or Phil could have found another way to pay the mortgage, Jack thought, one that didn’t require a move to New Mexico. He held out the photo of Marlon Toner. “Do you know this man?”

The doctor gave the photo his full attention. “I don’t believe so.”

“What about this one?” He showed him the mug shot of Raymond Winchester—the other “Marlon Toner.”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a patient by the name of Marlon Toner?”

“Ah, sorry. I can’t discuss patients. You know—”

“Yes, we know that. But we mention it because he’s the suspect in a murder. So if he does show up here, you might want to give us a call. For your own safety, and that of your patients.”

Jeffers appeared somber. A professional dilemma—call the cops and violate patient confidentiality, or don’t call them and risk Toner harming someone else.

But he would have to work that one out for himself, should the situation arise. The hobbling Wayne showed them out. The patients in the waiting room bothered to turn this time, most of them, so their faces could express the deep disdain they felt for those who jumped the line. Jack and Riley slunk out the door with hasty feet and didn’t even consider the elevator this time.

Descending the stairwell, Riley said, “At least we know our Dr. Castleman isn’t a complete fiction.”

“A real person, who may or may not be in New Mexico.”

“And if he is, who’s using his name?”

In the lobby Jack zipped up his coat before exiting. The snowfall hadn’t abated during their time indoors, and a half-inch already covered the windshield of their car. He didn’t see the attraction of snow, never had. He didn’t ski, and hadn’t done a lot of sledding as a child in a city where the average winter temperatures never dipped below forty. But he did appreciate the quiet, the way the snow muffled sound in the early morning hours, made the whole world feel blanketed and waiting, its voice temporarily lowered. A man could think in that quiet.

Now he said, “There’s one person who might know.”

Riley zipped his parka up to the nose. “Marlon Toner.”