Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

Since Spalding had died in California, Ramona wondered if the case even technically qualified as a local homicide. Maybe an argument could be made that murder was committed the instant Spalding’s medication had been switched. That made it a slow kill, Ramona thought.

With a new search warrant in hand and three detectives to assist her, Ramona walked into Dean’s pharmacy to find Tilly Gilmore, the clerk, and a pharmacist talking in low voices behind the counter. The pharmacist wore a name tag on his white smock that read GRADY BALDRIDGE.

She showed them the warrant and explained what the detectives were about to do.

“Where is Kim?” Baldridge asked. “He should be here for this.”

“I wish he was here,” Ramona said as she motioned to the officers to get started. Matt Chacon steered Tilly to a back office, while the other two men began looking through the filing cabinet and desk behind the pharmacy counter.

“Do you work for him full-time?” she asked Baldridge.

He shook his head and the folds below his chin jiggled. Ramona put him in his late sixties. The smock he wore bulged at his hefty waistline. His pasty skin almost perfectly matched his gray hair.

“No,” Baldridge said. “I’m basically retired. Kim uses me as his relief pharmacist. This is the last day I can be here for three weeks. The wife and I are leaving tomorrow on vacation.”

“Were you supposed to work yesterday?” Ramona asked.

“No, Kim called me at home early in the morning and asked me to come in.”

“Did he say why?”

“Just that he needed coverage,” Baldridge replied.

“Was that unusual?”

“I’d say so,” Baldridge said. “In fact, Tilly and I were just talking about it. He’s only called me to come in on short notice before when he’s been sick. We don’t know what to do if he doesn’t come back tomorrow, except refer his customers to other pharmacies. I only came in today because people were waiting to have their prescriptions filled.”

“What a nice thing to do before your vacation,” Ramona said. Baldridge smiled at the compliment.

“Do you know Dean’s customers well?” she asked.

“Most of them. I’ve filled in here for the past five years.”

“How about Claudia Spalding?” Ramona asked.

“Oh yes, she has several current prescriptions on file.”

“For what?”

“Unless your warrant specifically permits you to gather prescription information about our customers, I can’t tell you that.”

“It does,” Ramona said, showing Baldridge the appropriate paragraph in the search warrant.

“I’d have to look it up,” Baldridge said.

“Please do,” Ramona replied.

Baldridge spent a few minutes at a computer, then returned and rattled off Claudia Spalding’s current prescription information. Ramona had him translate it into language she could understand. Baldridge told her one script was for a mild muscle relaxant and the other was for a narcotic painkiller. She asked Baldridge to pull the hard copies, and while he went off to do so, she called the doctor who’d prescribed the medications and asked him to verify the information.

“The muscle relaxant, yes,” the doctor said. “But I never gave her any painkillers.”

“What did she need the muscle relaxant for?” Ramona asked.

“You know I can’t tell you that, Sergeant.”

“If you talk around the subject a little bit, Doctor,” Ramona said, “I might not have to pay you a visit.”

“Do you ride horses, Sergeant?”

“Not since I was a little kid,” Ramona replied.

“Let’s say you did, and you took a bad fall from a horse and strained the muscles in your back. Not severely, but enough to cause discomfort. The muscle relaxant, in a very low dosage, provides relief.”

“That helps,” Ramona said. “What about the narcotic painkiller?”

“It had to be forged,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Spalding has no medical condition I’m aware of that requires it.”

“Your records confirm that?”

“Absolutely,” the doctor said before hanging up.

Baldridge hovered next to her with the hard copy scripts in hand. Both looked real, but who better to forge a doctor ’s prescription than a pharmacist?

“Tell me about this painkiller,” Ramona asked.

“It’s hydrocodone acetaminophen, a Class III controlled substance,” Baldridge said, “which means it doesn’t have to be as strictly inventoried and accounted for as Class II drugs under federal regulations.”

“How is it accounted for?” Ramona asked.

“We do an annual report and give an estimate of how much was dispensed and what’s on hand. It doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate.”

“Would the painkiller give the user a high? Make them nod out?”

“It’s a downer, so I’d imagine so,” Baldridge said. “In normal dosages, other than relieving pain, it tends to cause drowsiness, dull the senses, and flatten the affect.”

“Can you find out how many other people have had this medicine dispensed to them at this pharmacy?”

“Easily,” Baldridge said, returning to the computer. He came back with the names of twelve individuals, all with scripts written by Claudia Spalding’s doctor.

“Did you fill any of these?” Ramona asked.

Baldridge shook his head and pointed to a line on one of the scripts. “Each prescription must be numbered and initialed by the pharmacist who filled it. All of these were filled by Kim.”

“What about phone-in prescriptions?”

“That’s in a different computer file,” he said, stepping back to the monitor. He printed out another ten names of persons receiving the medication, all supposedly phoned in from the same doctor who’d treated Claudia Spalding.

Ramona called the doctor again and asked about the names on both lists Baldridge had provided.

“I’ve never treated any of those people,” the doctor said.

“You’re certain of that?”

“I don’t like your implication, Sergeant,” the doctor snapped. “I do not supply narcotics to drug users. You can come here any time you want and look at the master chart log and my patient appointment calender.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Ramona replied. “We may have to do that.” She disconnected and turned to speak to Baldridge, who was pulling hard copy files and printing information from the computer. He brought everything to her, and she scanned them quickly one by one. On the hard copies, she noticed that although the doctor’s signature and prescription information looked real, the patients’ names seemed to have been written with a slightly different slant. The printouts from the phone-in scripts showed Kim Dean’s initials as the dispensing pharmacist.

“Do you have a sample of Dean’s handwriting?” she asked Baldridge.

He nodded, stepped into the back office, and brought out a large, leather-bound address book.

Ramona paged through it and noted the same slight backward slant. She wrote out a list of all the scripts, added Dean’s address book to it, gave a copy of the list to Baldridge, and told him that he needed to keep it as part of the inventory of seized evidence.

“Show me the narcotic medication,” she said.

Baldridge took her to rows of freestanding medication shelves and handed her a large, almost empty white plastic bottle.

She looked at the pills, snapped the lid back on, and shook the bottle. “How frequently does Dean reorder this?”

It took Baldridge a while to dig out the invoices. He finished with a distraught look on his face, and asked Ramona to give him back the hard copy prescriptions and printouts.

One by one, Baldridge tallied up the total number of narcotic pills Dean had dispensed, including refills. He shook his head sharply, mouth tight with disapproval. “Kim’s been ordering three times the amount he needs,” he said.