“If you’re afraid you’ll get in trouble, please consider that you are already in trouble,” Staples said. “Very deep trouble. And I am your only way out.” She sat down at the table, from which all pill boxes and vials had been cleared. Amy sat down across from her. I sat next to Amy. Staples snapped open her briefcase and took out her notebook and pen. She closed the briefcase and said, “From the top. Please.”
Amy started her story with her diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in her late thirties. “I’ve needed anti-inflammatories and other medication for years. Plus I’m going through the… um, the change now. And Barry, God bless him, he’s a delicate soul and he needs drugs for anxiety, for sleeping, for his back, you name it. But the prices are so high for everything, even with insurance. So a few years back, we all started using Canadian pharmacies that advertised on the Internet.”
“‘We all’?”
“People from the New Fifty.”
“The what?” I asked.
“It’s an association for people fifty or older who like staying active.”
“How did you go from that to this distribution racket?” Staples asked.
“It’s hardly a racket,” Amy huffed. “I was vice-president of our New Fifty chapter and I knew so many people in the same boat. We got together so we could order in bulk and get better prices. We even organized bus trips to Toronto where you could fill your prescriptions and see a show. ‘Pills and Pops,’ we called it.”
“Just stick to the story,” Staples said.
“Everything was fine until they changed the law in Canada and pharmacies couldn’t sell to us anymore. Luckily for us, Mr. Silver said he could keep sending us medications, only on the sly. We took a vote and decided to keep going. I would take people’s orders and email them to Mr. Silver, and a week or so later a van would bring them down.”
“How did Kevin Masilek become involved?”
“You know about-”
“Oh, yes. Keep going, please.”
“Mr. Silver called one day to say we had to get our orders from Kevin. No more direct deliveries or trips to his store. We didn’t like it. It cost more and we missed dealing with Mr. Silver. He was so much nicer. But he said we shouldn’t contact him anymore and that was that.”
“And what happened to Kevin?”
“He moved, I guess.”
“Just up and moved?”
“We don’t know. We can’t get in touch with him.”
“I’ll bet you can’t.” Staples tapped her pencil absently against the knuckles of her other hand. “So how did you come to take over?”
“We were… we were asked to.”
“By whom?”
Blood was draining from Amy’s face as if she’d been fatally gored somewhere below the neck. “He didn’t say. He just… just offered our medications free and we jumped at the chance, that’s all.”
Staples didn’t look like she was buying that-not at market price anyway. “Did Mr. Silver ever mention partners?”
“No.”
“No one else in Toronto?”
“No.”
“Did he ever mention a Steven Stone?”
“No.”
“A Stefano Di Pietra?”
“No.”
“Any Di Pietra?”
“No.”
“What about the men who made the delivery today?”
“The driver is Frank. The big one never talks.”
“They ever mention anyone else in Buffalo?”
“No.”
Staples made some notations in her book. “Where’s the rest?”
“What?”
“Only part of today’s delivery came here,” Staples said. “Where’s the rest?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “We just took what was ours and they went on their way.”
“You’ll have to do better than that if you want to stay out of jail.”
Amy glared at her. “I have no idea. They could have gone to Mars for all I know.”
I said, “Maybe I can help.”
Staples looked at me expectantly.
“There’s a warehouse on the west side,” I said. “We followed them there and saw them unload the rest of the goods.”
“We?”
Shit. Dumb mistake. “I did. I followed them.”
“Then why did you say-”
I had to get her back on track. “They’re probably still there as we speak.”
“You should have told me this before,” Staples snapped. “You might have cost us a chance to catch them in the act.”
“I needed to know you were being frank with me,” I said, throwing her own words back at her.
“Where exactly is this warehouse?”
“Everything square with Ms. Aiken?”
“Yes, yes,” she said.
“And me?”
“The address, please?”
I gave her the address. She wrote it down, then opened her briefcase and stowed away the yellow pad and pen.
“What happens now?” Amy asked. “Am I going to be charged?”
“No,” Staples said. “I can personally guarantee it.”
She reached into her briefcase, pulled out a pistol with a silencer threaded onto the barrel and shot Amy twice in the chest.
CHAPTER 48
“ I wish you could see the look on your face,” Staples said. “It’s priceless.”
Amy Farber lay dead on her kitchen floor, the front of her white blouse soaked in blood. Her eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling.
Staples sat in her chair, aiming the pistol at my chest. “You were right about one thing,” she said. “You were never going to get within a mile of the Federal Building. Not where anyone could place us together.”
“You knew you were going to kill me.”
“Once I saw how much you knew, yes. Or did you think I invited you out for the pleasure of your company?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Not this time.”
“Are you really an FDA agent? Or is the real Christine Staples lying dead somewhere too?”
“I’m the real Christine Staples,” she said.
“The one nobody knows.”
“You got that right,” she said, nowhere near prim now, her smile ugly, almost lascivious. “Let’s face it. A girl can only go so far on what the FDA pays. Steven was able to take me a whole lot farther.”
“So you’d look the other way when the shipments came through.”
“Which is what you should have done. You should have stayed in Canada. You’re in the U.S. of A. now and we do things different here.”
The gun looked like a 9-millimetre. Now-finally, Ryan might have said-I wanted a gun in my hand, my own Beretta Cougar with the slide racked and safety off. But as Ryan had predicted, I was caught empty-handed.
The silencer on the end of her gun was about three feet from my chest. I wondered if I could grab the end of it and twist before she fired.
“You going to shoot me here?” I asked.
“Yes. Then I’ll wait until Hubby gets home from the movies and shoot him too.”
How had this hellish piece of work passed any kind of employment screening?
“When the police find me here, it’ll all blow open. Too many people in Toronto know what I’m working on.”
“But they won’t find you here,” she said. “Frank and Claudio will collect you and dump you elsewhere. Nothing will connect you to the Aikens or their house.”
“Except my blood, my fingerprints and the thirty people who saw me here tonight.”
For a moment she looked less sure of herself. I made my move, lunging across the table to grab the gun barrel. But she pushed her chair back and jumped out of reach. She stood well back of the table, her thin lips stretched in a sick-looking smile. “Nice try, Geller. Quick and decisive. I like that in a man.”
She levelled the gun at me, gripping it in both hands. She looked like she was ready to fire so I kept talking.
“It’s quite an act you put on,” I said.
“You bought it,” she said. “So does everyone at the FDA. I’m the wallflower who jumps if someone says boo. That’s why no one will ever connect me to this.”
“Don’t be so sure. The Toronto Homicide Squad knows about Stone and Bader. How do you know they won’t talk?”
“I know Steven won’t.”