Seated in the pleasing quiet of the office, Patty logged on to a second site, the WMS-Warrant Management System. It took only a short while to learn that Grant had no outstanding arrest warrants against him. Patty sensed that in spite of herself, she felt strangely relieved at the news. Still, there was the aftermath of the disturbance in Ashford.
With several choices available to her, Patty next logged on to the Board of Probation site. The BOP recorded every court action in the state and was in the process of merging with the data banks of all other state boards of probation, as well. CORI, the Criminal Offenders’ Records Information segment of the BOP, was her first stop. Willard Grant (Ashford address) lit up immediately in the form of a three-month restraining order, taken out by Maxine Grant the day after the incident reported in the Ashford newspaper. Patty opened a spiral-bound pad and noted the information. She had intervened in enough domestic-violence cases to find them totally abhorrent, and that was even before her grisly first homicide case. What little warmth she still held for Grant vanished, replaced by heightened interest in him as a suspect in a string of murders that until now had no suspects.
A few minutes later, that interest expanded like a party balloon.
She had searched through the Interstate Identification Index (III) and the NCIC-the National Crime Information Center-without adding anything to what she already knew, and was about to call it quits when she decided to visit one last site-the Criminal History System Board. The CHSB, located in Chelsea, just north of Boston, was manned twenty-four/seven and contained a vast data bank, overlapping some of the others but also including information on lawbreakers who either hadn’t yet made it onto other sites or had been overlooked for one reason or another.
Willard Grant was forty-one. Teaming up with the night officer on duty, a young-sounding man who introduced himself as Matthew MacDonald, Patty searched through the CHSB for Will or Willard Grant, beginning with the year he turned seventeen. When she reached twenty-one, Will Grant again lit up. It was an arrest at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for leading a sit-in at the office of the dean. Public service and two years’ probation.
There was no mention of the cause for which the sit-in was held, but the zealous action against a perceived social injustice fit well with the man who, twenty years later, was active in the Hippocrates Society and vehemently opposed managed care.
“There’s more,” MacDonald said from his desk, twenty miles south and east of where Patty was seated. “In addition to being booked for illegally blocking the egress and entrance of a public building, Grant was charged with shoving a security guard. It doesn’t look as if that charge led to a court appearance, but I can’t be sure. There are still holes in some of these reports.”
Patty’s spiral pad was filling up.
Just three years later, there was more-another arrest, this time for assaulting a fellow med student at some sort of book burning.
“Book burning?” Patty asked.
“That’s what it says here,” MacDonald replied. “The other student’s name was Streeter-Owen Streeter. Apparently, no official charges were filed.” Patty was recording the information when MacDonald said, “Wait, this is interesting.”
“What?”
“Will Grant was picked up as a suspect in the bombing of a lab at the medical school. Same year.”
“Arrested?”
“I don’t think so, but the Amherst police were impressed enough to put him in the data bank.”
“I wonder why?”
For a few seconds, MacDonald was silent.
“I think I know,” he said slowly.
“Go on.”
“There was someone in the lab at the time of the explosion-a janitor, it says here. He was killed.”
MURDER!!!
Patty wrote the word across the center of a blank page in her notebook, then added drops of blood coming off the legs of the M and Rs. She noted the date and for the time being ended her conversation with MacDonald, but not before extracting his promise to keep searching the intervening years for more on Grant and to call her if anything additional turned up. Her shift was about to begin, and even before this latest turn of events, she was behind in her paperwork. Still, strongly sensing that this was no dead end, she was unwilling to put matters on hold. Using the Net, she jotted down the names and URLs of the newspapers in Amherst, as well as the nearby towns and cities, including Northampton and Springfield. Before she could make her way into those newspapers’ back issues, the door to the office opened. It took just a few seconds to recognize the voices of two men as Jack Court and Wayne Brasco.
“I don’t care if she did embarrass you in front of the Norfolk guys, Wayne, there’s no way I can take her any further off the case unless she fucks up.”
The overhead fluorescents flickered on. Patty’s cubicle was farthest from the door-just a few paces from Court’s office. Brasco’s was just inside the door.
“I could work better with Sonnenblick or even Tomasetti,” he said.
“You don’t have to work with her, Wayne, just put up with her. Throw her a crumb here and there. Show her how real detectives handle a murder investigation. The moment she steps out of line, she’s off the case.”
Patty heard Brasco grunt as he settled in front of his desk, then Court’s footsteps as he headed down the row of detectives’ cubicles toward her. He stopped when he realized she was at her desk, the nonplussed expression on his hawklike face clearly stating that he was calculating how much, if anything, she had heard.
“Morning, Patty,” he said.
“Lieutenant.”
Patty slid her arm over the notebook to cover up the macabre rendering of the word MURDER.
There was an unpleasant pause before Patty’s CO favored her with one of his most engaging, yet insincere, smiles.
“We’ll be meeting in the conference room at eight,” he said. “Carry on.”
The moment she heard the exchange between the two men, Patty conducted and resolved the internal dialogue surrounding whether or not to share her information and suspicions regarding Will Grant. She returned Court’s nod and remained motionless until she heard the door to his office close. Then she slipped the spiral notebook off her desk and into her shoulder bag.
CHAPTER 9
Impassioned Plea Helps Doc Lambaste Managed Care
Four hundred of the city’s best and brightest, including Governor John A. Fromson, sat in stunned silence at Faneuil Hall last night as Fredrickston surgeon Willard Grant emotionally and effectively chastised managed-care companies for placing profits before patients and before physicians. .
The article was the headliner in Section B of the Globe-the City Section. There were two copies of the paper on Will’s desk when he arrived at the office, along with two copies of the article itself, neatly cut out by the Associates’ dauntless receptionist, Mimi. There was also a copy of the Herald, which contained an article saying essentially the same thing, albeit in many fewer words.
Will had begun his day as usual by making rounds at the hospital, where nearly everyone seemed already to have heard about the forum and his unofficial victory over Boyd Halliday. Several people-two nurses, a lab tech, and a ward secretary-buttonholed him to share their own angry managed-care stories. Two others felt the need to tell him how pleased they were with the care their HMOs were providing for their families. Even his patients seemed to have heard some version of the debate.