13. What I Understood in a Parking Lot
What I Understood in a Parking Lot
Isat in Marcus Oyelaran's parking lot in Goleta at nine-forty at night with a file box on my passenger seat and a dog in my back seat and I worked it out.
Not the murder. The other thing.
Here is what I had: four hundred patients.
Two million dollars, minimum, probably more.
Claims submitted to — I'd looked; it took eleven minutes — Delta, Cigna, Aetna, MetLife, and Medi-Cal.
Electronically. Across state lines, to insurers in Illinois and Connecticut and Minnesota, from a management company that, per the one page of the term sheet I'd read four times, was a Delaware LLC with an address in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Wire fraud. Mail fraud. Interstate.
And I sat in a parking lot with my hands on the wheel and heard Nate Corrigan's voice in an arch on Anacapa Street in August: *How much of your work comes from insurance?*
And: *Practice management. What's that mean, exactly? Legally. She's not a dentist.*
And a man standing at a party looking at a wall of nine hundred tiles for much too long.
He hadn't been quiet at that party because he doesn't love a party. He'd been quiet because he was standing in the middle of an open case.
Which meant — and I worked this out in a parking lot in Goleta over about four minutes, in order, like a differential diagnosis — that on the Monday morning after Preston Hale was found dead in his whitening suite, a federal agent working a healthcare fraud investigation into Luminous had walked into his office and learned that the doctor of record was dead, and that the Santa Barbara Police Department's file on that death contained, on page one, a dentist from across the street with a public grievance, a financial motive, no alibi, and a personal relationship with the agent.
I put my forehead on the steering wheel.
Not don't want to. Not am choosing to. Not able.
If he'd had one conversation with me after that Monday — one, a coffee in a courtyard at eight-forty in the morning, in a town of ninety thousand people where everybody has seen us walking those dogs for eleven months — then every piece of the federal case that touched me was contaminated.
My Saturday second opinions. My twenty-three mouths.
Marisol's releases. The whole thing becomes a defense attorney's first four questions: *Dr. Bennett, were you in a romantic relationship with the case agent?
Did you discuss the investigation? When did he tell you Luminous was under federal investigation — before or after you stood up at a Chamber of Commerce mixer and accused the victim of fraud? *
He hadn't gone quiet to protect the case from me.
He'd gone quiet to protect me from the case.
Because if he talks to me, I'm a compromised witness with a motive, and the only thing standing between Lila Bennett and a very bad year is that on the day Preston Hale died she had no idea Luminous was under investigation, and the only way to keep that true — the only way, the single available mechanism in the entire world — was for the man who knew to stop speaking to her.
Floss put her chin over the back of my seat and breathed on my ear.
"He's been sitting in a room for six weeks," I said, out loud, in a parking lot, to a dog, "knowing I think he left."
It took me a while to be able to drive.
And here's the thing — here's the thing I got to somewhere on the 101 between Goleta and home, with the lights of the harbor coming up on the right and a dead man's handwriting in a box beside me, and it did not make me feel better, it made me feel considerably worse:
He obeyed the order.
He obeyed an order that cost him the only thing he wanted, for six weeks, because obeying it was the thing that protected me, and he did it without one word of complaint or one hint or one cheat, because Nate Corrigan is a man who believes that rules are how you keep from losing people.
And I would never have done it. Not for a second.
If Kessler had handed me that order I'd have been in his office inside an hour telling him exactly what I thought, and I'd have felt righteous about it, and I'd have blown up his career and the case and my own defense in one afternoon and called it loyalty.
I said this to Tess the next morning, in the courtyard, at seven, sitting down, finally, on the other side of the cart, having cried in front of her for eleven minutes first.
"He followed the rule," I said. "I'd have burned the building down."
"Yes," said Tess.
"That's — Tess, that's the whole problem, isn't it. That's the actual problem. Not the six weeks."
"Yes," said Tess Okafor, and put a cortado in front of me, and did not say anything else, because she is my best friend and she knew I had got there on my own and there was nothing left to add.
I had a file box, twenty-three mouths, a term sheet with a gag in it, and the name of a Delaware LLC with an address in Scottsdale.
I did not have a way to call him.
So I did the only thing left, which was to go to work, and wait, and be ready when he came — and to find out, in the meantime, what had happened in Scottsdale.