19. Aftermath
Aftermath
Dana Kirsch was arrested in a long-term parking structure at Phoenix Sky Harbor eleven days later with two suitcases and a printer.
I want to put that first because it is, in the end, the whole shape of it: the woman who actually ran the billing was a person almost nobody had ever met, with no license, no title anyone could explain, and no face on any banner anywhere.
She had been a "regional clinical compliance coordinator" in two states.
She had credentials to a billing platform that a dentist could not see into.
And when the thing came down she did what she had done in Arizona, which was drive to an airport with the hardware.
Serena Locke was charged, eventually, with a great deal: conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy against the United States, and — in Santa Barbara County, ten weeks later, after the phone records came back — with the murder of Preston Hale, together with Kirsch.
The county's theory, which I sat through twice, was straightforward and horrible.
Hale had told Locke on the Friday that he was self-reporting on the Monday.
He had told her cheerfully, in her office, at four in the afternoon, because he was a decent man who had made his decision and believed he was doing it to a partner rather than about one.
She called Kirsch that night. Kirsch flew into Burbank on the Saturday and drove up.
On the Sunday evening they met him at the building — he came in willingly; he had a key and no reason on earth to be afraid of two colleagues — and there was an argument in the back of a closed dental office about a box of ledgers he had already, unbeknownst to either of them, driven to Goleta twenty-four hours earlier.
The mechanism doesn't need to be in this book. The county called it asphyxia. What matters is the sentence a prosecutor said in a preliminary hearing while I sat in the fourth row with my hands in my lap: *Preston Hale's error was that he told the truth to the wrong person first.*
He had also, it turned out, told it to the right person four hours later. Marcus Oyelaran's file box — four hundred patients, annotated in blue ballpoint, NO in the margins — went into evidence as Exhibit 4 and stayed there.
What broke it open, in the end, was not the box and not my ninety mouths.
It was thirty-one minutes of audio from an operatory in a small dental practice on Anacapa Street, in which a woman explained to a frightened dentist that the previous two dentists who had planned to file on a Monday had not made it to Monday, and offered, warmly, to make sure she wasn't the third.
Her lawyers fought the recording for four months.
They lost, on the two-party question, because a sign the size of a postcard had been on the door of my operatory since the day Diane Kessler made me put it there, in the place such signs go, and Serena Locke had walked past it without reading it — which is, if you think about it, the exact same failure as not looking in your own mouth.
The rest, in the order it landed:
Luminous never reopened. The lease went to a company that sells extremely expensive sofas. The tile wall came out in a single afternoon and I stood in my arch and watched a man in a respirator take nine hundred smiles off a wall with a chipping hammer.
The insurance recovery took nineteen months and is, as of this writing, not finished.
Four hundred and eleven patients were identified.
Delta funded the remediation of the first hundred and six; the rest is litigation.
And here is the thing I am proudest of in my professional life and will be until I die: Santa Barbara Smiles, Anh Trinh, Marcus Oyelaran in Goleta, and eventually eleven other practices in this county saw every single one of those patients for free, on Saturdays, for fourteen months, and fixed what could be fixed, and told the truth about what couldn't.
Ruben Obregón never got the graft he never needed. He did get a very good night guard.
The two Luminous associates were cleared. One of them, a young man named Theo Park — no relation, a coincidence that gave me a bad half hour — now works two days a week in Goleta for Marcus.
Preston Hale's daughter finished at Stanford. Bettina Hale wrote me a letter in March that I have not shown to anybody, which said, in its entirety: *You asked me how many syllables. Nobody else asked me anything. Thank you. — B.H.*
Danny Obregón came back. So did thirty-eight other people, over about five months, sheepishly, one at a time, and Marisol booked every single one of them without one word of commentary, which given Marisol is roughly equivalent to sainthood.
By March the red pen was gone off the printout.
By June I opened the drawer, looked at the loan statement, and put it back in without doing any arithmetic at all.
Ray Dominguez sat in my courtyard in December with a coffee he actually drank.
"You called me first," he said.
"I did."
"You called me first, on a Thursday, at eleven in the morning, before you did anything.
" He pointed at me with the cup. "I want that noted somewhere.
I want it written down and notarized. Because I have told you twice in two years to call me first and you have finally done it once, and I would like to die knowing it happened. "
"Ray, technically Kessler called you."
"Do not," said Ray Dominguez, "spoil this for me."
And Diane Kessler.
She came on a Friday, alone, and had tea in my waiting room again, and told me two things. The first was that I would be deposed for a very long time and that I should get my own lawyer, and she gave me three names, and the one I used cost a fortune and was worth it.
The second thing she said standing up, with her jacket already on.
"Corrigan broke a direct order on the ninth of November," she said.
"You were there. You'll be asked about it under oath eventually, so I'd like you to have the accurate version rather than a romantic one.
" She adjusted a cuff. "He came into my office at nine-forty in the morning, having just watched a pen register hit, and he said — verbatim, I wrote it down — 'Ma'am, the subject has just made an appointment to be alone in a room with a witness, and I am not going to sit here, and you should fire me at two o'clock, but I am going to Anacapa Street at ten. '"
I didn't say anything.
"He gave me twenty minutes' notice," said Kessler.
"Which is not what a man does when he's lost his head over a woman.
It's what an agent does when he's decided the order has stopped serving its purpose and he'd rather tell you so to your face than go around you.
" She put her cup down precisely. "The order had stopped serving its purpose.
I'd have got there myself by eleven. He was twenty minutes ahead of me and he was right, and I have been doing this for nineteen years and I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever been right at me in that particular way. "
"Is he in trouble?"
"He's in a file," said Diane Kessler. "Everyone's in a file.
" At the door, she paused, and looked back at the sea otter poster, and at Floss asleep under the reception desk, and at the framed photograph of a golden retriever in a bow tie.
"Dr. Bennett. The dog on the woman's feet. Was that trained?"
"No."
"No," Kessler agreed, "I didn't think so," and left.