A Discount for Death (22 page)

Chapter Thirty

The drive from the sheriff’s office to the clinic on Escondido was scarcely more than a mile, but it took Estelle Reyes-Guzman fifteen minutes. She walked out to her car and then sat in the silent interior for a few minutes, the radio and telephone off, windows tightly rolled up. Her mind refused to focus on a specific direction, instead circling from all points of the compass.

There could be such simple explanations. The boxes under the seat of the van could be innocent gifts, perhaps fragile wood carvings or spicy Mexican candies. George had packed them securely so they wouldn’t be jounced on the rough ride north from Acámbaro to Regál. That could be.

George might have been fascinated by the world of medications and read the drug reference guide as a hobby, idly marking various drugs that caught his fancy or that he’d taken over the years. That could be.

He had loaned Owen Frieberg an expensive handgun to take along on a hunting trip or maybe just to blow holes through cans. Frieberg had returned it after a short time, and when he’d heard that the revolver had been involved in Enriquez’s death, had felt compelled to tell police that he’d used the gun earlier…a logical thing to do if he feared his prints would be found on the weapon. That could be.

It
could
be that beyond those possibilities, the affairs of George Enriquez and Owen Frieberg were not related in any way.

“I can give you Guzman,”
Estelle whispered. She glanced in the rearview mirror, as if Enriquez might be walking across the small parking lot toward her at that very moment. “George, what were you doing?” she said.

Estelle started the car and backed out, turning first west on Bustos and then south on Grande. Less than a block down that street, she pulled into Tommy Portillo’s Handi-Way convenience store. With her mind still wandering through the field of “
coulds
, ” she ambled into the store, purchased a bottle of flavored tea and a package of fudge chocolate-chip cookies. The young man behind the counter could have fleeced her out of most of the change for the twenty-dollar bill that she handed him. She pocketed what he gave her without a glance and left the store.

Back in the car, she opened the tea, took a drink, and grimaced. “Yuck,” she said aloud. She started to open the cookies, and stopped, looking at the package as if surprised that they’d materialized in her hand.

The trouble was, all the innocent “
coulds
” might as easily be replaced by sinister ones, and a troop of worst-case scenarios trooped through her mind, with those scenarios focused on the only connection that she could imagine that might involve her husband.

She dropped the unopened package of cookies into the center console, screwed the top onto the tea, and started the car. The dashboard clock reported ten minutes before six. Irma Sedillos would already have started dinner for the boys and
Mamá
. With any luck at all, Francis would be finished at the clinic, with no calls waiting at the hospital. She should have been walking through the front door of her home, before her family forgot what she looked like.

But the itch remained, and she pulled out onto Grande again and turned south. A few minutes later, she saw Louis Herrera’s Mustang convertible nosed into its reserved slot in front of the clinic’s pharmacy, shaded by a grove of small oaks that the bulldozers and various contractors had avoided. She parked beside his car and sat quietly, looking at the oak grove. She remembered them clearly before the construction, when
Padrino
’s five acres had been a tangled, scruffy woodlot buffering his old adobe home from the drone of the interstate.

She closed her eyes, almost a flinch as if someone had jabbed her, as the dark possibilities crept into her mind. “Ay,” she said softly and then shook it off. She reached across for the massive prescription-drug text and let its weight fall against her chest as she got out of the car.

Estelle trusted Robert Torrez implicitly, yet she hadn’t shown him the book of drugs. When he knew about it, his agile mind would make the same connections she had, and she knew that she wasn’t ready for that. Why would George Enriquez bother to study a drug book, using a Hi-Liter to mark the best-seller list as if he were studying for an exam?

An elderly man carrying a plastic bag of purchases held the door for her as she entered the pharmacy. The store was bright with wide aisles and low shelves, designed so that no products were either lower than twenty-four inches from the floor nor higher than five feet. The woman behind the register smiled at Estelle.

“I didn’t have the chance to say hello when you were in yesterday,” she said.

“Ella, we were so busy yesterday,
I
didn’t have a chance to say hello to me,” Estelle replied, and the woman laughed. “I need to see Louis for a minute, if he’s still here.”

Ella raised her short, matronly frame on her tiptoes, looking over the sea of racks and displays toward the pharmacy. “I see his pointy little head,” she said. “Go back there and catch him before he slips out the back door.”

“Thanks.”

Herrera was bent over, both hands grasping the edge of the work counter, a thick ring binder open in front of him. Estelle stood quietly at the end of the counter, watching him as his lips worked. After a moment he shook his head impatiently, looked up and saw Estelle, and immediately brightened.

“Hey, guy,” Estelle said. “You look seriously busy.”

“That’s okay, that’s okay,” Herrera said. He frowned at the big drug reference book that she thudded onto the counter. “You’ve grown a new appendage,” he said. “That thing was stuck to you yesterday, too.”

“Oh sí,”
she said. “This baby and I are becoming old pals.”

He sighed and straightened up. “Is there something I can help you with, or are you just thinking of changing professions?” he asked, nodding at the book. “We could use the help.”

“I had a couple of questions I needed to run by you,” Estelle said. She opened the reference to the illustrated pages, turning first to page 311. “Francis tells me that Petrosin is a popular drug.”

Herrera frowned and nodded. “Sure. Depression is a popular condition, whether the customer actually has it or not.” He grinned. “He’s thinking of putting you on it, or what?”

“I think I’m getting closer all the time,” Estelle said. She turned to page 315. “And Bicotin Six?”

“What about it?”

“It’s popular?”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d use the word
popular
, Estelle. It’s prescribed a lot, yes. Both Bicotin and Petrosin are.”

She idly turned several pages, stopping as if at random. “I’ve never heard of this,” she said, and turned the book toward Herrera, pointing at the capsule. “Watrusil?”

“You don’t need it,” he said, with mock severity.

“What’s it for?”

“An appetite suppressant.”

“Ah.”

Herrera watched her with amusement. “And yes. We sell a lot of it.”

She stopped at page 332. “Deyldiol?”

“Sure. Oral contraceptives. Do I get to ask what it is that you’re after?” He glanced at her sideways, half smiling.

“Four more first,” she said, and stopped at each of the remaining highlighted drugs. In each case the answer was the same. Francis had been right. The eight prescription medications topped the list of brisk sellers.

“Now,” Estelle said, and abruptly stopped. “You have some time?”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m yours. You’ve only marked the eight?”

“I didn’t mark any of these,” Estelle said easily.

“Well, highlighted, then.” He tapped the last page, indicating the large capsule of Diamitrol. “This is white, not yellow. That’s true of all the ones you’ve showed me.”

“Ah,” Estelle said. “Okay. But that’s not what I wanted to ask. Let’s say I had a prescription for…” and she leafed backward. “Petrosin.” She looked up at Herrera. “How much would that cost me?”

“How much would it cost
you
?”

“A customer. A regular customer, no prescription insurance. No co-pay thing.”

Herrera pooched out his lips in thought. “Normally? Probably about thirty-six bucks for thirty caps.”

“That’s what the insurance company is charged?”

He nodded. “We don’t have separate pricing, Estelle.” He straightened up. “I won’t mention any names, but you can check with the competition, and I’ll bet my month’s salary that we’re lower. We decided—Francis, Alan, and me—that we were going to keep prices as low as we can. And a lot of the time, as I’m sure you’re aware, we don’t get paid at all. A lot of our Mexican friends, for example.”

“So thirty-six dollars for thirty.”

“Yup.”

“Of the eight, what’s the most expensive one?”

“No contest,” he said without looking at the book. “Daprodin. That stuff is almost four bucks a pop. It’s one of those new powerhouse antibiotics that hit the best-seller’s list after the anthrax scare.”

“So thirty pills would cost me more than $120.”

“Just about.”

“What if I went to Mexico and bought them there?”

He grinned broadly. “I’d be unhappy with you.”

“No, really.”

“You don’t even need to go to Mexico, Estelle. You can buy almost anything on-line from a Mexican pharmacy that’s dipping into that business and have it shipped right to your door. The loophole will be plugged some day, but right now, it’s wide open.”

“How do the Mexican pharmacists handle validating the doctor’s prescription?”

“Many of them don’t. That’s part of the trouble.” He turned and tapped the keyboard of the computer beside him.
“Mira,”
he said. In a moment, he’d accessed the search engine and typed in the name. “I know about these guys,” he said. “Let’s see what they have. I’d be surprised if you could get Daprodin from them. But maybe.”

Estelle waited while the computer thought. In a moment a flashy web page advertising pharmaceuticals appeared on the screen. Once past the promises of instant delivery and lowest prices, the site became a simple typed list of drugs and prices in dollars.

“Well, I was wrong,” Herrera said. “There it is right there. Daprodin: eighteen bucks for thirty, thirty-two bucks for sixty.” He turned and looked at Estelle. “Eighteen bucks, compared with $120.”

“The $120 is your price? The price you charge?”

He nodded. “And that’s below market,” he said. “At least in this country.”

“Wow.”

“Un huh.” He ran the cursor down the list. “Here’s Petrosin MN, which is the same thing as you’ve got there. “Seven-fifty for thirty. That’s instead of the thirty-six bucks that we charge.”

Estelle studied the screen.

“Where do you get your pharmaceuticals?”

“Our wholesale supplier, you mean?” He glanced at Estelle sideways, and she felt as if she’d just stepped into deeper water. “We have regular distributors, like anything else,” Herrera said easily. “The companies lobby us pretty hard all the time. Lots of samples.” He patted his pocket and grinned. “Tons of nifty pens.”

“Why not just order it there?” she said, pointing at the computer.

“Well, for one thing, that would be illegal for us. For another, most of those Mexican companies
try
to be legit. So they’re going to sell individual prescriptions, but they’re not going to ship a couple thousand caps of Petrosin MN across the border.” He glanced back at the computer. “Although I’m sure that you wouldn’t have to look very hard to find a site that would. There’s one for anything, I think. But like I said, it’s only a matter of time before shipments across the border are blocked,
especially
for pharmaceuticals.”

“There might be questions of drug purity?”

“Of course. That’s already a problem.” He pushed himself away from the counter. “So what’s going on? You found a car full of best-sellers, or what?”

“Nothing that simple, Louis.”

“Well, if I had to list the top ten or twenty most popular drugs, the eight you marked there would be on the list.”

Estelle patted the reference book’s cover. “Popular stuff.”

“Yes, indeed. More so all the time. It’s a good business to be in.”

And someone convinced George Enriquez of that
, Estelle thought.

She chatted with Herrera for a few more minutes, then drove straight home from the pharmacy, torn by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, moving prescription drugs north out of Mexico fitted what little she knew of George Enriquez’s recent activities. It would have been simple, during the three-hour window of opportunity in Acámbaro, to rendezvous with a supplier and load the van.

The number of individual capsules of Petrosin or any other medication that would fit in an eight-inch cardboard box boggled the mind. In Lori Schmidt’s video, there was no way to accurately judge the number of boxes stowed under the seat of the senior citizens’ van, but there would be room for more than a dozen under the three seats, maybe more.

Crossing the border staffed by custom agents familiar with the Posadas Middle School outing to Acámbaro, the van was in good company with the two school buses. On top of that, it was filled with a load of trash from a children’s party. The setup hardly matched the illicit drug trade “profile.”

There was also the possibility that George Enriquez carried an invoice with him for the drugs. If the order for the medications was from a pharmacist and the drugs were accurately invoiced, there was no smuggling involved, only the government’s cut to be paid at the border.

Once in the States and in possession of a pharmacist, the prescription drugs were virtually untraceable, and when dispensed through a physician’s prescription, they’d be laundered to the consumer. The state board of pharmacy was like any other state agency, Estelle knew—understaffed and underfunded. It would be impossible for state inspectors to conduct inventories of common drugs that were not controlled as stringently as narcotics were. But birth control pills? Antibiotics? Antidepressants? All flowed in a river from vendor to pharmacy to patient as the doctors ordered.

I can give you Guzman
. The drugs needed a vendor on the American side of the border. If George Enriquez had thought that the drugs he brought back from Mexico were headed for the Posadas Clinic and Pharmacy, if he had thought that physicians like Francis Guzman and Alan Perrone were crafting prescriptions to favor drugs whose Mexican wholesale cost produced soaring profits even at discounted retail prices, then his cryptic promise to District Attorney Daniel Schroeder made sense.