A Whole New Crowd (A Whole New Crowd 1)

I glanced to the hallway. There was a pile of boxes lined up by the front door. “Are you moving?”

“Taryn.” He grimaced. “Just tell me what you want to know and I’ll tell you. I won’t hold anything back. I’m tired of all the lies. I want it over.” He closed his eyes. Resting his elbow on the counter, his fingers rubbed at his temple. “What do you want to know, Taryn?”

I laid the knife down. “Everything. Start with what you did for Jace.”

He nodded. “Okay.” His shoulders lifted and fell. “I did anything Jace wanted. Mostly, I wrote prescriptions for whatever name they gave me. He sent people to me to treat. I was their physician on hand, their medical bitch.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“Money. I got a lot of money. Both Mandy and Austin have their futures set. They can go to any college they want, and I put enough in their trust funds so they should never hurt in life. Shelly wanted to adopt a child a long time ago and we started another trust fund for that person.” Regret and pain flared in his eyes for a moment. “We had someone picked out. She even stayed with us, but there was a problem with the paperwork and she went back to her real family.” He turned away. His hand dropped from his temple and his shoulders drooped. “She died three months later. Her father beat her to death.”

“You had another foster kid that you wanted to adopt?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t Mandy or Austin say anything?”

“We never told them. They didn’t know who the girl was. We told them she was a daughter of a friend.” There was anguish in his voice. He dropped to a whisper. “Shelly cried every night for months, but the kids never knew. We didn’t want to get their hopes up.”

I frowned. “Let’s get back to your work with Galverson and Jace. How did everything start?”

A soft chuckle left him. He nodded. “Yeah, okay.” His hand went back to pinching the top of his nose. “Uh, Jace recruited me. He said he wanted a physician on hand to treat their people and to give them pills when they needed. It went on for years. Then things changed a few years ago—”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe five years? I think. I was stupid, Taryn. Jace recruited me when he was young. I took him as a real patient. He built a relationship with me. He came in with broken ribs, bruises all over him. It was obvious that he was getting beaten at home. I’m supposed to report that, but he asked me not to. He told me it wasn’t what I thought and that he was getting out. I think I was worried that if I reported anything, something would happen like—”

I nodded. The pieces were beginning to connect and I said for him, “Like the girl who went back home and was killed. You thought Jace would get hurt like that.”

“Jace was just a kid to me.”

“Yeah.” I picked up my knife and stood it upright. The tip rested on the table, grinding into it. “He manipulated you.”

“Yeah.” His head bobbed slowly. “I can see that now. I think they picked me because of what happened with the foster girl.” He looked at me again. A shine of tears in his eyes. They were sitting there, but they never spilled. “He talked to me about Brian, his brother, and about you. He talked about their dad. How their mom left them. I was emotionally involved before I realized it. I cared for Jace like he was my own son. I started talking to him about Mandy and Austin. I told him about the other girl. Her name was Cara. God,” he laughed bitterly, “I can’t believe I even told him her name, but he knew. Thinking back, he never reacted. He knew all of it. He probably knew everything about my children.”

I gritted my teeth.

He kept going, “A lawsuit was brought against me. I messed up in a surgery, and the case against me didn’t look good. I was going to lose my practice. Jace picked up that something was wrong, and I told him about it.” He paused for a moment. Then another moment. I sat and waited. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “He took care of it. Just like that. The case against me was gone. I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t want to know, but it was gone and I still had my future.”

“That’s when you started working for him?”

He nodded. “It started with one prescription, for his brother. Then his cousin. Then his friend. Then there was a list of five every day. I panicked. I didn’t want to keep working for him.”

He stopped, and I waited.

“Then the money started coming in. He paid me in the beginning, but it was nothing compared to what he paid me after I tried to stop. They dumped money in my bank account. If I had gone to the police, I would’ve looked guilty. I already looked guilty with the lawsuit. I still don’t know what Jace did to get the case dropped against me. I don’t know if I could handle that on my conscious.”

“This kept going?”

He nodded. “Years. I got in so deep. I was too far in and there was no way out and then I got a call one day. Someone died and the overdose came from a prescription I wrote. I didn’t know the person, but I had to pretend I did.”

I frowned. “Who called you?”

“It was a family member. They didn’t know who I was. They were trying to figure out how their sister got a bottle of pills when their family doctor had referred her to a treatment facility.” He stopped again. His breathing was becoming labored and his hand went to the counter. It was balled in a fist, but he forced his fingers to flatten. “I panicked. I hung up the phone and called Jace. He—”

He cut himself off.

“Let me guess.” My tone was wry. “He took care of it again.”