The Son of John Devlin (16 page)

“But it took a while?” Jack asked.

“We got nothing at all for a while,” Farmer said. “Or, I should say, nothing that mattered. Cops getting free meals or special treatment in some places—that sort of thing goes on everywhere. People feel safer having a cop around, so they treat them in a different way. That never bothered me, although I’ll tell you some of the purists were put off by that.

“But, no, we had nothing really for quite a while. There was no shortage in the rumor mill, though. And there was plenty to chase down. We heard lots of rumors
about cops on the take, but for months and months we came up empty.

“So we turned up the heat,” Farmer continued. “We started setting up a target list of people within the department for audits, people we were suspicious of. We thought that kind of an approach would coax a little cooperation out of them. Because up until this point—and this is key—we had had no cooperation whatsoever from the BPD. I mean none. Lip service from the top and nothing but obstruction from underneath. Nothing.

“So we established this list and the subpoenas were served, the first dozen or so, and they screamed bloody murder. I mean to tell you they howled. Civil liberties, intrusive, harassment, all that.”

Farmer took a long drink of tea and wiped his forehead with the towel.

“As obnoxious a tactic as it was—and we knew it was—the fact is, it worked. Pretty soon we were having some reasonable discussions. And around that same time we had a couple of club owners loosen up on us. Two guys, in particular, the Fahey brothers. We immunized them at the start. They were bit players but they did have some firsthand information, and I’m sorry to say it was about your father.”

“Oh?”

“They had made Christmas payments to him for some number of years, I forget, three or four years. And they detailed this.”

“How many others?” Jack asked.

“Did they pay?” Farmer asked.

Jack nodded.

“None they admitted to,” Farmer said.

“And you found that credible?” Jack asked.

“No,” Farmer said. “I didn’t. But we felt very fortunate to have them talking with us at all. Because remember, up until then it had felt like a dry hole. And when you’ve put your time and resources in and come up empty …” Farmer did not have to tell a fellow investigator that that was the worst possible fate.

“No, I did not find it credible, but it was a strong point, and I was convinced we could squeeze the Faheys,” he went on. “And at the same time that we were hearing this from the Fahey brothers, we began to have more candid discussions with people within the department, and the same message was coming back from all of them: There is corruption, but it is very limited and isolated. There were four guys within the department, at various levels, who we talked to in a candid way, and it was from them that we began to believe that maybe it was actually possible that it was limited and contained.”

“Did you believe that then?” Jack asked.

Farmer appeared troubled. “I didn’t have much of a choice, whether I believed it or not. I had to accept it. It was the reality we were dealing with. At least it was something. We had committed resources to this matter on the basis that indications initially indicated that something was going on here, something systemic. Because that’s what we were interested in, let’s put our cards on the table. The idea that a few cops here and there were off freelancing wasn’t of great interest to us, not initially, anyway. But the possibility of systemic rot was something that got everyone excited. And there’s a progression you go through in these things that I think is pretty typical.

“You begin with indications of something large, something with tentacles that reaches into many of the levels
and corners of an organization. There are extravagant claims made by certain people early on, but they seem credible, or more likely, you want to believe; you want to think that you are on to the case of your life. And so you go along for the ride convinced that you are about to untangle a spectacular mess.

“And then reality strikes,” Farmer said, pausing for a moment and taking a breath, frowning as he looked out over the eighteenth hole.

“Reality strikes,” he repeated softly. “And reality is that you can’t get anything meaningful. Reality is that time passes, weeks, months, in some cases years, but time passes and you begin to believe that you may have been delusional up front or that there is the most massive and effective cover-up ever. Conspiracy of silence.

“And you become desperate.”

Farmer tightened his lips and ran the towel over his forehead, leaning his elbow on the table. His tone was confessional.

“And reality is that after a certain amount of time there is an impatience within the system,” he continued. “It’s never stated overtly, at least it wasn’t in this case. But the pressure is there. The attorneys you’re working with evince it in certain subtle and not so subtle ways. Your bosses, locally, show it, although they were probably the most supportive. And you feel it from Washington, where there are people whose jobs were to watch field agents and hound them, dog them.

“And, naturally, you feel it from yourself. And because of all this pressure there comes a day which is a defining moment when you have shifted from looking for the big score to deciding you will settle for just about anything.”

Farmer raised his eyebrows in a look of resignation and sighed heavily. “And that’s what happened,” he said. “That’s what happened.” His tone was wistful, and he turned from Jack and looked back out toward the eighteenth hole.

Farmer fell silent for a minute or more, and Jack waited out the silence.

“It’s strange, you know, after all the years, to think about these things, because I don’t much think of them anymore,” Farmer finally said. “I don’t like the memory of this thing because I was convinced at the time that corruption in the BPD was systemic. I believed—there were so many indications to my mind’s eye—I believed that there were many, many guys of various ranks who had their fingers in the pie. But everybody did his job to batten down the hatches and squeeze everything tight so we would get minimal information.

“There were good people who tried to be helpful from the beginning. I remember that. Is Tom Kennedy still on the force?”

“He’s deputy commissioner,” Jack replied.

“Tom was a young lieutenant back then,” Farmer said. “Bright as hell and ambitious. He helped. Quite a bit.”

“How so?” Jack asked.

“The thing with the department was that most were overtly hostile to us. Wouldn’t say hello, or acknowledge us in any way. Literally. There were guys I’d walk by in the hallway, and they’d tell me to go fuck myself. Then there were guys who would keep away from us, never say anything. And then there were a few who would sit down and have coffee and talk about the department and about the rules and customs. Kennedy was one of
the few, and he was very smart. Insightful. He’s a good man.”

Jack nodded his agreement. “So how did you know my father was making the pickup that day?” he asked.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but, what the hell, I’m an old man now and it’s been so many years, what does it matter?

“I got a tip,” he said. “Out of the blue one day I got a phone call. A patrolman. He’d had nothing to do with anything, and all of a sudden he calls out of the blue.”

“Who was that?” Jack asked quietly.

Farmer regarded him. Jack could tell the old man felt for him. “I remember him,” Farmer said. “His name was Moloney.”

A
t dawn, shafts of light slanted through the kitchen skylight, illuminating the wooden table. Christopher Young, M.D., sat with a mug of instant coffee, working his way rapidly through a stack of papers. He had a massive amount of work to do, and though he knew he wouldn’t be able to do all of it that day, he needed to do enough to get by. He had been doing just enough to get by now for close to a year. Had he sat back and taken a careful look at his life, he would have been astonished at the precipitous nature of his decline. But taking the long view, sitting back and engaging in thoughtful introspection, was not something in which he had much interest.

Young sipped the coffee and rose from the table. He crammed the stack of papers into his worn leather briefcase—a gift from his parents when he’d graduated from UCLA Medical School—and put on his overcoat. He moved quietly, for he knew that his wife and three-year-old daughter would sleep at least another hour. He went from the kitchen into a passageway that led to the garage, got into his Saab 9000, and backed out onto the quiet suburban street. At this early hour his commute to his office at Brigham & Women’s Hospital took fifteen minutes.

Young parked in the part of the garage reserved for physicians and was walking rapidly toward the hospital when the garage attendant called out to him. “Hey, Doc! Lights.”

Dr. Christopher Young turned back and saw that his headlights were on. He waved his thanks to the attendant, went back and shut off his lights, then hurried into the hospital. He rode the elevator to the fifth floor, where the Pharmacology Department was located. His office was down the far end of the hallway, on the corner. All the other offices were still dark. Pharmacology was not like the surgical units or Anesthesiology, where everyone arrived early. At this time of day, Young’s department was deserted. He knew this, since it was the time he arrived each morning. This was the time when he could do what he needed to do without being discovered.

Young entered his office, switched on the light, and locked the door. It was a good-size space, tastefully furnished with a dark Oriental carpet, a burgundy leather sofa, maple coffee table and desk, and bookshelves built into the walls. On the wall behind his desk were his degrees—a B.S. from UCLA (summa cum laude) and an M.D. from UCLA. On the far wall was an Audubon print. He’d sold off the original for $11,000 a few months earlier, though that had hardly made a dent in his financial situation.

Dr. Young pulled the blinds shut and hung up his overcoat. He was sweating moderately now and his breathing was shallow.

Behind his desk there was a small alcove containing a sturdy lead file cabinet, fireproof, theftproof, intended for the most precious research and other documents. Young spun the dial on the combination lock and opened
the second drawer. He reached inside and removed a small plastic container. He opened the container with great care and used a very small spoon to remove a small amount of white crystalline alkaloid: morphine. With water from the bathroom off his office, Dr. Christopher Young diluted the alkaloid and absorbed it into a syringe. Undoing his belt buckle, he pulled down his pants and, sitting on the edge of a chair, picked a spot just below his boxer shorts. He pointed the needle up into the air, drew back the plunger, held the needle just above his thigh, and slowly slid it into a clear spot, several inches from other needle marks. He pressed the plunger forward slowly, feeding the narcotic into his bloodstream. The impact was nearly instantaneous. Then he placed the syringe and box of morphine back in the file safe and shut the drawer, went across his office, and shut off the light. Stretching out on the sofa, he soon fell deep within the seductive grasp of Morpheus, the son of Hypnos and the most important mythological god—the god of dreams.

At midday, Christopher Young walked through the lobby of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, his white physician’s coat crisply starched. Young was tall and lean, six feet three inches, 180 pounds. His dirty-blond hair was on the long side, stylishly cut and swept back in waves. He was an attractive man, thirty-four years old. On the outside, it seemed Young had it all: He was adjunct professor of Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and heir apparent to become chief of Pharmacology at the Brigham, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world. He had a beautiful wife and daughter, and it appeared that his life could not be more perfect.

But ever since he’d broken his leg in a painful mountain biking accident, Young’s life had been sliding out of control. Initially, the morphine had been administered when he was in the hospital having his leg set. Once out of the hospital, he’d continued to take it. When his prescription ran out, he took some from the Pharmacology Department’s own supplies. Before he was aware of what was happening, Young had raided the department stock to the point where he was forced to doctor the books—books governed by state and federal law, available for inspection by FDA officials at any time, and reviewed carefully by the hospital’s auditors every year.

State and federal narcotic statutes are extremely precise, and major medical centers are rigorous in their enforcement of those rules. Young was an extremely bright and resourceful young man, and he managed to create a bookkeeping system that masked the truth of his morphine consumption. But ultimately it was a Ponzi scheme, and Young knew it was only a matter of time before hospital auditors would discover that he’d embezzled funds from the hospital to pay for additional shipments of morphine, all for his own use.

By now, he’d stolen nearly $114,000 from the department over a ten-month period. Young knew that unless he was able to come up with that money and return it to the hospital accounts, he would inevitably be discovered, and discovery would mean the ruination of his career. If he were caught, he would be prosecuted and no doubt convicted, and a felony conviction would surely mean the loss of his license to practice medicine, and that would destroy his life.

And so he had done what people through the ages had done to cover their crimes: He’d committed other crimes.

The two sales that had been made by Young—through channels Coakley had identified—involved the sale of amphetamines, but yielded only a modest amount of money. When Young had gone to Coakley seeking a much bigger deal, Coakley and Devlin had found their man.

The agreement had been simple: Young provided Coakley with detailed information about where large supplies of morphine were held; Coakley would arrange for their theft; Young would meanwhile seek to sell the drug through distributors identified by Coakley. It was a very neat package in which everyone was a winner. Young had provided the relevant information, Coakley had arranged for the theft and storage of the drug. And Young had successfully made contact with the distributors Coakley identified. All was set. When the deal was done, Young would use his share of the proceeds to pay back the hospital accounts and he’d be a free man once more.