Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [50]
“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.
“Anything else?” Ramona asked.
“There should be two unopened bottles of five hundred pills each in inventory,” Baldridge replied as he peeled off his pharmacist’s smock and stuffed it under his arm. “They’re not on the shelf.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home. I can’t work here anymore.”
Ramona gave Baldridge a sympathetic smile and touched him on the arm. “You’ll need to stay for a while longer, Mr. Baldridge. Lock the front door, arrange for another pharmacy to handle any prescriptions that still need to be filled, and work with me. It might mean the difference between leaving tomorrow on that vacation with your wife or being delayed.”
Baldridge sighed and looked glum. “Very well, if you insist.”
Three hours into the record search at the pharmacy, the detectives had uncovered enough evidence with Baldridge’s help to prove that Kim Dean had been moving large quantities of drugs containing narcotic painkillers, barbiturates, morphine, and amphetamines onto the streets of Santa Fe. Forged and phony call-in prescriptions from a number of local physicians had been used to falsify the records. To hide inventory shortfalls, Dean had altered invoices from suppliers and lied on required reports to the state pharmacy