“I could have twenty people on this and not get through it,” Jessie says.

“It’s like proofreading the Library of Congress.”

Jessie is sitting at her computer in her house; when everything you do is online, it’s pretty easy to bring your work home with you. Nate and I don’t have that luxury, unless we decide to hold a criminals dinner party.

“Talk to Uncle Dougie,” I say.

“Uncle Dougie is going to find himself sleeping on the couchie with Bobo if he keeps talking like that.”

“Sorry. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay. The hospital records and the drug company records have been coming in, and by ‘coming in,’ I mean we are being flooded with them. Do you have any idea how many drugs a hospital this size uses? Do you know what their damn aspirin bill is?”

“No.”

“Good. You don’t want to know. But it’s huge, and Tylenol is even more.”

“Those aren’t the drugs we’re interested in.”

She stares a dagger at me; this is not going well. “I know, but what I don’t know is what the hell we are looking for. You know all the opioids, all the names of drugs that would have street value? And then their generic names?”

“No.”

“Then how the hell should I?” she asks.

“Maybe we need to get you some consulting help, like a doctor, or better yet, a pharmacist.”

“Doug, this is impossible.”

“Don’t focus on the drugs,” I say. “Focus on the money.”

She shakes her head. “No, that’s what I’ve been doing, but it doesn’t work. Let’s say the hospital bought a million dollars’ worth of drugs from a company, and believe me I’m using a low amount just to make it easier.”

“Okay.”

“So the books show that they paid the company a million dollars, and the company’s books show that they received a million dollars. Looks good, right?”

“In that case, yes,” I say.

“But it’s not, or at least we don’t know one way or the other. Because we don’t know what happened to the drugs. Let’s say the hospital actually dispensed three-quarters of what they received to patients. That leaves a quarter million dollars of drugs at wholesale price that were never dispensed. You know how much street value that would have? A fortune.”

“Okay, I see what you’re saying. So focus on the dispensing side.”

“How? If it says Sylvia Swathouse got twenty OxyContin for pain, how can I know if she did? For all I know she’s allergic to the stuff, or she had pneumonia and no need for pain meds, or there was no Sylvia Swathouse in the first place.

“And if I knew how to get through all of this, there still might be nothing to find. Galvis said that Lewinsky covered his tracks, remember? The dispensing would be the easiest thing for him to fake, because it’s all internal.”

I have no answer for any of this, so instead I just ask another question. “And how would Rita Carlisle know about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she was in hospital administration. How would she know if the medicine was actually prescribed? That wasn’t her area at all.”

She nods. “True. Maybe she was told about it by someone else. Or maybe she overheard something she shouldn’t have. Or maybe she was the ringleader. Who the hell knows? We need Galvis to catch him in the act.”

“Won’t happen,” I say. “Galvis is scared to death, and sorry he came to me in the first place.”

“He should be scared, because based on what that FBI agent said, Silva might be about to kill a lot of people, maybe blow up the hospital.”

The FBI briefing, if that’s what it was, is something I’ve been trying to ignore. I simply cannot make the connection to the Carlisle case. Maybe Silva and Tartaro are planning some terrorist plot, but it seems very unlikely and out of character. These guys are interested in money and power; they are not ideologues. What would they have to gain by killing a bunch of people, or taking down a building, or both?

Whatever that is about, I’m operating under the assumption that it is separate and apart from our Carlisle drug investigation. It is not stretching logic to think that organized crime figures can do two illegal things at the same time. They can steal and chew gum.

The only similarity and possible connection is that it involves both Tartaro and Silva, possibly working in tandem. But even that is not a surprise; if they have a good and profitable working relationship, it can be varied.

“Let the FBI handle that side of it,” I say. “We’ve got enough on our plate.”

Jessie nods. “More than enough.”