CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Explanations weren't forthcoming once they reached Jeannie's apartment. She was out for the count, so deeply asleep that she hadn't even roused when he'd carried her upstairs and tucked her in bed.

After watching her sleep for several minutes, he remembered the brief case, which he'd managed to carry along with Jeannie. God knew how she would've reacted, if she'd awakened and the case had been absent. Scott hadn't wanted to chance her flying into another cycle of adrenalin overload, then crashing again. She'd had enough of that for one day.

Tip-toeing out of her bedroom, he left the door slightly open so he could hear her if she cried out. He feared the trauma of the morning attack would be a large part of her subconscious for a while. Her dreams morphing into nightmares.

Before he opened Pandora's bag, he needed to call and make sure Jeannie's employer knew she wasn't malingering. He didn't imagine she'd phoned Dr. Rutherford from the police station.

Calling the New Orleans Hospital operator he asked for Dr. Rutherford.

"Dr. Rutherford."

"Doctor, this is Dr. Fontenot. I'm a close friend of Jeanette LaFleur. She won't be coming into work today, maybe not tomorrow either."

His listener's sharp intake of breath caused Scott to pause. The noise sounded more like a gasp of shock rather than concern or even anger.

"She's all right?"

Wrong question, doctor, thought Scott. You should've asked "What's wrong?" or "What's happened?" It was as if he hadn't expected to hear from Jeanette at all.

Scott waited to see what the doctor would do. He didn't have long to wonder.

"Fontenot, is it? Answer me. What in the hell happened? Was it an accident? Where is she?" Rutherford's voice came over the phone like a sledge hammer. Each question striking harder than the last, the last sounding harsh with some emotion Scott could have sworn was fear.

"She's fine. She's with me." Chomp on that, doctor. "I'll have her call you when she feels up to it. Just wanted you to know she wasn't goofing off or anything. Good-bye."

Scott heard Rutherford's frantic "But wait..." as he disconnected the phone.

Looking in that briefcase was more important than ever. His shit-detector told him that whatever threatened Jeannie had to do with her job -- and the information was in that bag she'd been guarding like a mother hen.

After picking up the case, he sat in the large over-stuffed chair near the fireplace. From here he could see the front door, the French doors to the balcony, and Jeannie's door. No one was getting in or out of this apartment without him noticing it. Satisfied that he was in the best place to protect Jeannie, he relaxed enough to open the bag.

Pulling out papers, he started to read.

Two hours later, he put the last piece of paper onto the pile lying on the end table.

"Shit," he said under his breath, adding a few more colorful phrases he learned in the Marines. From his careful reading, he found that Jeannie had documented a very complete and detailed case of medical malpractice, fraud, and God knew what else. It stunk.

"Why haven't you gone to the cops, Jeannie?" he whispered.

"Because Charles and I didn't figure we had enough to prove it." She stood in the doorway of her room. "Dr. Rutherford is an important man. He'd say someone set him up. He'd blame it on me, the staff, the people before me, anybody but himself. And he could get off. You know how corrupt New Orleans' police and politicians are. I'd be fired with mud on my name ... well, that's what we figured anyway."

Shuffling into the room, she collapsed onto the couch, an arm's length away from Scott and the pile of papers.

Then, waving her hand at the stack, she said, "I've been bringing the hard copies and CD home every night. Someone has been searching my office, my computer. The only person who knows besides Charles and you is Sally, the clinic secretary, and she's scared stiff of both of the doctors."

"Both of the doctors?"

"Yes. Besides Dr. Rutherford, there's Dr. Randolph..."

"But he's just a resident."

"Well, he's in it up to his eyeballs." Jeannie coughed. Scott handed her his lemonade, and she took a sip. "He dated Sally. She overheard some things she wasn't supposed to. She kept it quiet because she thought the bastard was gonna marry her, and he was making a lot of money off the deal. But, instead, he dumped her."

She paused to take another sip. Scott thought the action was more to collect her thoughts and rein in her emotions, rather than thirst.

"Sally is pregnant -- and it's Randolph's. He threatened her before I came on board, but now he's stalking her, because ... because she's been helping me put all that together."

"Ahh, the woman scorned."

Jeannie sat the drink on the table. Leaning across, she put her hand on Scott's where it lay on the chair arm. She gripped him, her nails digging into his skin.

"Yeah, she's been scorned, but she's scared, Scott. No, more than that, terrified. She wants to quit, to go away and hide, and I don't blame her. I think, ... um ... he's abused her. And I can believe it." Jeannie shivered. "Randolph is damn scary."

"What's the son-of-a-bitch done to you?"

"Nothing really. It's more ... more how he looks at me and ... talks to me. He and Walter Monnier, you know, the eye tech I told you about..."

"The little creep who calls you Flower. Took you on the tour of the tunnels on your first day. That Walter?"

"Yes, that's the one." Jeannie shivered. "Well, Randolph started to call me Flower, too. When Walter's around, they exchange a look, you know, like certain men do when they're viewing women as sex objects. Like the guys who hang around Bourbon Street harassing women out on the town."

Scott knew exactly what kind of men hung around the bars on Bourbon -pimps, panderers and perverts, plus just plain ole randy and drunk men looking to score. Bourbon Street had more than its share of men who acted as she described. It was sort of a male bonding ritual to comment on curvy rear ends and big breasts and to speculate whether a woman would swallow.

"Darlin, lots of men do that. It's the nature of the beast."

"But not within the hearing of the woman in question. Not at work. You don't. Paul never did. Charles doesn't either. Admiring a woman's body is one thing, but how Randolph and Monnier do it, say it ... is totally something else. More nasty ... violent ... like verbal rape."

Scott wasn't going to argue with Jeannie. Not being a woman, he couldn't imagine what it felt like. He'd have to take her word for it.

Just the fact that they scared the bejesus out of her gave him enough justification to seek the two men out and explain the facts of life to them. They'd treat Jeannie with respect -- or they'd have to deal with him.

Really, it was all his fault. Allowing Jeannie to grieve so long had opened her up to all sorts of importunities. If he'd marked her as 'taken', most men would leave her alone. Well, all that was going to change. He'd stake his claim, mark his territory, and make sure the men she worked with knew she was off-limits. Hell, he'd even caught Rutherford eyeing her up-and-down a couple of times when he'd dropped into the clinic to take her to lunch. The old fart.

Shit. Then there was Charles. He'd like to forget about the ever-present lawyer. He was still in the picture. And she'd confided in Charles before him.

'But when she was hurt and scared, she called you. Your favor, Scott.'

Yeah, she'd called him.

"Scott?"

"I'll take care of Monnier and Randolph." He smiled. "I'll make sure that Randolph leaves Sally alone, also. Okay?"

"Scott," Jeannie whispered. "You read those papers. Something is going on here. Something really bad."

Jeannie caught his eye. The look on her face was identical to one he'd seen on soldiers when they'd come face-to-face with war's death and destruction. It was a look of horror, unspeakable horror.

"Charles and I think that a man has been killed because of what is going on," she said. "That means Randolph and Monnier are involved in more than just harassing me."

Chills raced down Scott's spine. "Who got killed?"

"A man named Stu Thomas."

"I know him. He's the sales rep for Silver River." Scott pictured the slick salesman. "I met him on one of my transplant rotations."

"Was the sales rep for SRP." Jeannie turned even more white, if possible. "He's dead. He died the day after I overheard him telling a group of doctors that SRP supplied all the corneas to the Epi Study."

"I saw that in the papers you've collected." Scott ran his hands through his hair. "Besides lying about the failure rates of the procedures, which is enough to get their licenses suspended and them sued, you think Rutherford, Randolph and Monnier are running some sort of scam with SRP?"

"I knew we were billing out more procedures than we were following up. I found out that patients with failed procedures were going elsewhere for treatment and that their files were destroyed. The data was made to look as if we had a high rate of success. Then I remembered overhearing Stu Thomas and some Eye Bank docs at the convention. I started checking into where we were getting corneas. I actually assisted one day when an SRP lens was used. I saved the bottle, put it in my desk drawer. Now it's missing."

"So you began to think things were rotten?"

"Like oyster shells at low tide on a July day. It gets worse. Sally then came to me and confessed that she'd been destroying patient files on Randolph's and Rutherford's orders."

"You're sure she included Rutherford?"

"Uh-huh. I wanted to rationalize that he was a dupe. Blame it all on Randolph and Monnier, but she was positive about it. She'd overheard Randolph bragging about their deal."

"Okay. Go on."

"I didn't know what to do. I needed legal advice, so I took my preliminary findings to Charles to get his opinion."

Scott sighed. She went to Charles for legal advice -- and to him for safety and comfort. He could live with that.

"I could prove through the patient billings and the study's budget that Dr. Rutherford was misrepresenting what he was doing. Instead of donor corneas and a small processing fee, the patients were billed for a large fee labeled as processing, but in reality is the cost of the commercial corneas. He's also charging against the project budget for the commercial corneas."

"And getting a clear one hundred percent profit which he pockets, since the patient pays for the lenses."

"Yeah. But it's more than that. From what I can see, he'd been billing out the donor lenses the same way." Jeannie stood up and started to pace in front of the couch. "I spoke to Dr. Beaton from the Eye Bank."

"The day you saw me in the deli."

"Exactly. He told me Walter Monnier was forced on them by Rutherford because of the project." Jeannie paused and stared into the empty fireplace. "Dr. Beaton thinks, but can't prove, that Walter skims donor corneas from the Eye Bank and sends them to the Epi Study. You see, Rutherford makes the same money off the donor corneas with the added advantage that he doesn't have to hit the budget, which is way more risky."

"Illegal profit aside, isn't harvesting corneas and sending them to the Study what Monnier's supposed to do?"

"Yeah, but the Eye Bank cut Rutherford off cold turkey, right before the annual convention, which was when Stu Thomas told everyone SRP was supplying all the corneas."

Scott rubbed the impending headache localizing itself over his eyes. "Okay, I'll play devil's advocate here." Scott held up a finger. "One, all corneas whether commercial or donor have been billed at the same rate to the patients. The doctors and Monnier have been raking in a profit from day one of the Epi Study."

Jeannie nodded.

Scott added a finger. "Two, the Eye Bank cut off the donor corneas before the annual convention, but no one knew that, so when Stu Thomas popped off his mouth, the culprits heard about it and were afraid someone might look at the books to see what was going on."

Jeannie nodded again.

A third finger went up. "And three, for that injudicious bit of salesmanship, you and Charles think they had Stu Thomas killed? Honey, it just doesn't make sense to kill someone over what is basically garden variety fraud."

"That's what Charles and I told ourselves, but it just doesn't ... you know, feel right. Especially in light of the large amounts of money we found going into numbered bank accounts. Charles and I went to Rutherford's office late one night and went through his things."

"You broke into the man's office?"

"No, Sally gave me the key."

"Semantics, Jeannie." Scott sighed. "Go on."

"We found the SRP invoices you saw in the papers -- and something else."

"What? A confession?"

"Don't be nasty. Charles found bank accounts. Numbered bank accounts with millions and millions of dollars. Lots more money than I found going through the falsified project billings."

Scott groaned. "Enough money to kill to protect?"

"Exactly." Jeannie sat on the arm of Scott's chair and looked him in the eyes. "Today, the mugger wanted that case, not because it was heavy and he was afraid I would hit him with it, but because he was told to get that case at all costs. I don't think he'd have killed me -- hurt me maybe -- as a warning, like they've been warning Sally. They couldn't find the stuff in my office. They aren't worried about the computer. That can be erased, the hard drives trashed so nothing can be found. But I had hard copies and back-ups. They had to get those before they scared me into shutting up and going away."

"We've got to go to the cops, Jeannie." Scott pulled her onto his lap, then took her face between his hands. "I don't want you involved in this any longer. Quit your job, take what you have, and go to the cops. Let them handle it."

"The local cops can't be trusted. You know that. Neither can the politicians, judges and prosecutors. Rutherford can buy the whole damn town off and make us look like fools."

"The feds then." Scott stroked her hair, then cradled her head in the palms of his hands. "Go to the FBI. That much money -- it could be money laundering."

"Yes, that's what Charles thinks. He's looking for connections between Rutherford and SRP. We found some indications that Rutherford has more than a buyer-seller relationship."

"Why is Charles stringing this out? What's in it for him?"

"Scott!" Jeannie pulled away, scrambling off his lap. "There's nothing in it for him. He's doing me a favor. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"No. He should have taken this to the feds as soon as he found the money angle." Scott stood up and stalked over to Jeannie and grabbed her arms. "You are in danger. Little Bits could be, also. He ignored that."

"Scott, let go. You're hurting me."

Scott blew out a disgusted breath. "Sorry, darlin'. You know I'd never hurt you. Ever."

"I know. You're just worried. So am I." Jeannie sighed. Reaching for Scott's hands she squeezed them as if to reassure him. "In fact, I was going to call Charles today and tell him we have to take what he's found out so far and go to the government. If not the government, maybe the news media. Sally and I can't go on much longer. I don't want this touching me or my child any longer. I can't sleep, eat, and can barely stomach going into work each day."

"Call Charles. Arrange a meeting. I'll go with you. I'm not letting you out of my sight until this is out of your hands and into the authorities'.

"What do you mean by not letting me out of your sight?"