Animals: A Novel Based on a True Story
What happens when ambition, greed and medicine collide?
Animals is the novel comes out next spring. You don’t have to wait that long. Paid subscribers can read the first ten chapters here on Substack.
It opens with a woman dead in a Mercedes in a New Jersey parking lot. It moves through a surgeon who fused ninety-seven spines that did not need fusing, an insurance investigator who will not stop pulling the thread, and a few men in very good suits who assumed no one was counting. They were wrong about that.
Prologue
The call came in at 6:47 p.m.
Bergen County Sheriff’s dispatch logged it as a welfare check — a woman unresponsive in a vehicle at the Dunkerhook Area lot off Dunkerhook Road in Paramus. The reporting party was a male hiker, mid-fifties, who had parked his Subaru next to the Mercedes at half past four, noticed the woman slumped over the wheel, figured she was sleeping, and thought nothing of it. Two hours and four miles of trail later, he came back to find her exactly as he’d left her. Same angle. Same stillness. He stood there a moment with his hands on his knees, catching his breath, and then called 911.
Deputy Frank Ostrowski of the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office took the call on Route 4 westbound and was in the lot within six minutes.
It was the kind of April evening that made you forget New Jersey existed. The light came through the tree canopy at a low angle, all gold and amber, and the Saddle River moved quietly beyond the tree line. The lot was nearly empty. A few cars remained from the afternoon — a minivan, the hiker’s Subaru, and at the far end, a black Mercedes-Benz GL 450. New Jersey plates. The rear of the vehicle faced the wood’s edge. The driver’s side faced the lot.
Ostrowski pulled in slowly and parked two spaces over. He sat for a moment with the engine running, watching. The Mercedes didn’t move. Nothing moved. The lot was quiet except for the sound of the river and, somewhere behind him, a cardinal going through its calls with mechanical patience.
He killed the engine and got out.
The evening air was cool and damp with the smell of river mud and wet leaves. His boots were loud on the asphalt. He approached from the rear of the vehicle, standard procedure, keeping the driver in his peripheral as he moved up the passenger side. He could see her through the window — a woman, dark hair, perhaps early fifties, her head resting against the steering wheel at a forward angle that suggested sleep, or unconsciousness, or worse. Her right arm hung loosely in her lap. Her left was out of view. She was dressed well. A silk blouse, pale blue, visible above the door panel.
He came around to the driver’s side and stood a foot from the glass.
“Ma’am.” He rapped the window with two knuckles. Hard enough to wake someone sleeping. She didn’t move.
He rapped again, harder this time, the heel of his hand flat against the glass. “Bergen County Sheriff’s Office. Ma’am, can you hear me?”
Nothing. Not a flinch. Not a breath that he could see.
