Chapter 10
Gage Caswell plopped into the driver’s seat of his 1993 Mitsubishi 3000GT with an audible grunt. Loafers with no socks, a beige sport coat over a Grateful Dead T-shirt from the Salvation Army, and faded Levi’s. The loafers weren’t Birkenstocks, the Levi’s weren’t actually Levi’s, and the coat was from Sears—but Gage was convinced the world saw him as Nick Nolte playing a Nobel Prize–winning journalist.
Following an anonymous tip left on the newspaper’s voicemail system, Gage pointed his car north, headed for a face-to-face with Robert Lowell at the State Health Division office in Carson City. An eight-hour drive each way through hundreds of miles of desert, broken only by the occasional dusty town the world forgot. The whole trip reminded Gage of a 20-second video clip looped endlessly.
The paper wouldn’t even spring for the one-hour flight to Reno, preferring to pay even more in gas reimbursement. Gage figured it was just Charlie’s way of getting him out of his face for a few days.
His boss had simply said: “Check out this story about narcotics being diverted, whatever that means, at the county hospital.”
“Oh, come on, Charlie,” Gage whined, running his fingers through his shoulder-length gray hair and shifting his weight from foot to foot. “That’s a bullshit story, and you know it. Hell, no one gives a shit about drugs in Vegas, even if it is doctors and nurses.”
“Are you still here?”
“Goddammit, Charlie. Did I fuck your sister? Get your wife pregnant? Run over your dog?”By now in full whine mode, he wasn’t so much demanding as begging.
Charlie finally made eye contact. Fresh out of patience.“It’s been five years since you’ve shown me you can cover so much as a cat in a tree without fucking it up. Now get the hell out of my office and prove me wrong. This smells like a 'nurses-gone-wrong' story if you can stay sober long enough to write it.”
“Fuck you too,” Gage muttered over his shoulder.
Born in Erie, PA, Gage had been the class clown, editor of the school paper and yearbook, voted most likely to succeed. He’d coasted through school (except math and science), earned a BA in journalism at Penn, married a trophy wife by 24, had an 8-pound son and a new BMW at 25, and by 28 was the hottest investigative reporter on national television.
By 32, he was seeing the world through the bottom of a whiskey glass and lucky to land a low-level job at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. No one, not even Gage, could explain the sudden downhill slide.
His trophy wife and seven-year-old son now lived in his home in the upscale Lakes outside Vegas. She’d even convinced the HOA to change the entry code to go along with her restraining order. The first time anyone could remember that happening. The other paper in town had gleefully run the story on the front page:
Reporter’s Estranged Wife’s Garage Door Vandalized
Asshole reporters.They never proved that Gage had scrawled SLUT… WHORE… BITCH in red spray paint.Can seven-year-olds read? Gage wasn’t sure.
The Next Day — State Health Division, Carson City
Sitting in Mr. Lowell’s office—“Please, call me Bob.”
Gage held up a palm-sized digital recorder. After Bob nodded, he switched it on.“Thanks, Bob. Please call me Gage. I was hoping to skip the small talk. Your secretary mentioned something about narcotics?”
“Yes, well, Gage, narcotic diversion…”
Gage interrupted. “Diversion?”
“Yes. In this case, it’s when a nurse signs out narcotics for a patient but doesn’t give them all, or gives only part. Sometimes they sign out two or more times the needed dose, which by law requires a witnessed waste. At least one witnessing nurse seems to be signing off but not actually watching the waste happen.”
Rubbing his jaw to hide a yawn, Gage asked, “And what do doctors have to do with this?”
“Other than writing the orders and expecting someone to carry them out, nothing. They don’t have physical access to the narcotics, or any other drugs for that matter.”
“Bob, are you saying these nurses are drug addicts? Or they’re selling hospital-grade narcotics on the street? How many are involved? Are they working together? What’s the crux?”
“We’re not sure yet how deep it goes, or if there’s collaboration.”Bob folded his hands on the desk and leaned in. “The investigation is ongoing. But the diversion itself is just the surface issue, even though it likely merits criminal charges.”
“And the real issue is?”
Folding his fingers together and letting out a long, controlled sigh, Bob answered slowly.“I... can’t… reveal that. But I hoped I might buy you lunch.”
Gage tried not to roll his eyes. “Sure, Bob. Why the hell not.”
Bully’s Sports Bar & Grill
Comfortably seated at Bully’s, Gage figured squeezing a few rounds of drinks out of this guy might be the only decent thing to come from this trip.
He ordered a Dewar’s and soda—hold the soda.Bob ordered a martini.Strike one.
Gage already didn’t like him. The guy looked like his mother still dressed him and clutched an $8 Walmart binder like it was the Holy Bible. He could’ve been Gage’s evil boss in another life, if his IQ had been 10 points higher.
Bob looked him square in the face. “Gage. Can I speak off the record and expect absolute anonymity?”
Gage, spinning a swizzle stick in his ice and studying Bob’s face with vague interest, made a small show of switching off the recorder.“Sure, Bob. What the hell.”
With a little more dramatic flair than necessary, Bob laid it out: suspicions of murder. Possibly euthanasia.
“No shit?” Gage perked up. This could be a juicy scandal.
“We can’t prove anything. We’re working on family permission, or court orders, for exhumations. The coroner won’t touch it. Too politically hot, I suspect. County owns the hospital.”
“Okay, Bob. So what can I print?”
“You can print anything you want. But you can’t corroborate it through me or my department.”
“So why tell me any of this?”
Bob looked slightly stunned, as if he hadn’t considered that question.
“Let’s just say… the story going public would be in the best interest of Justice.”
Gage nearly spit Dewar’s through his nose.He’d been around long enough to know that the average government worker’s idea of justice had nothing to do with right and wrong.
Pomposity and ambition oozed from this mid-level guy. Gage figured Bob probably could barely afford his leased Beamer after paying his country club dues and Mrs. Lowell’s spa tab.
What Gage didn’t know, and couldn’t know, was that Bob’s boss wanted the investigation buried. When a Clark County bureaucrat called in state-level favors, things happened.
Las Vegas is Clark County. It is Nevada.And this was a county hospital, overflowing with county administrators protecting their own careers.They weren’t about to let a few dead patients open their happy little world to legal and financial risk.
Bob, on the other hand, saw opportunity.A front-page exposé would force his boss to greenlight the investigation.Bob Lowell would be the nucleus of the next big story, hounded daily by media. His quotes in bold. His name in Sunday headlines.Master of his own universe.As long as he kept the evidence close, he could stay in the game.After 20 years less than halfway up the ladder, Bob Lowell was finally reaching for a bigger hand at the table.
“Okay, Bob,” Gage said, finishing his drink. “I’ll keep you out of it. For now. But throw me a bone, will you? Where can I get some verifiable info?
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