“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 Acambaro, 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 Acambaro, 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.
The thought curled Estelle’s gut into a tight ball as she pulled the county car into her driveway. More than anything else, she wanted to find a quiet corner and talk with her husband, to listen as his soft, husky voice assured her that her nightmares weren’t true.
She sat in the car, its engine silent. She gazed at the house, knowing every smell, every sound, every soft touch inside. George Enriquez was a persuasive salesman. Her eyes narrowed with anger, and she twisted the ignition key. The county car started at the same time that the front door of her home opened.
Francis Guzman peered out at her and then stepped out on the stoop, closing the door behind him. She rolled down the window as he approached. He bent down, both hands on the door.
“You lose your way?” He reached out and touched her cheek.
“No, I don’t think so, Oso. But I forgot something. Half hour. I promise.”
“One of the other docs is covering for me tonight,” he said and thumped the door gently with the heel of his hand. “As soon as the kids are done with dinner, I’m going to send Irma home. Okay? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Fine. I’ll be right back. But there’s one more thing I need to do.”
“Siempre uno mas, querida. Always one more.”