Animals: Chapters Fifteen & Sixteen

WHEN SURGEONS OPERATE ON PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED IT, HOW FAR WILL THEY GO TO PROTECT THE SECRET AND KEEP THE MONEY COMING IN?

Chapter Fifteen

Gula walked north from Rittenhouse through the cold, up 19th toward the tower, the city going quiet around him block by block, and rode the elevator to his suite with the key card in his hand and Karen Callahan on his mind.

The plan was in motion now. That was no longer a thing he could adjust, only steer. What he could still adjust was her. She was smart, he’d confirmed that tonight beyond any doubt, and smart was the variable that cut both ways. A smart investigator would follow the trail he’d laid faster than a mediocre one. A smart investigator would also, eventually, look up from the trail and ask why it had been laid, and if the answer she reached was revenge, a bitter man settling a score, the whole structure lost its weight. Grudges were the one thing people like her had trained themselves to discount. He couldn’t let her think this was only revenge. He had until one o’clock tomorrow to make sure she didn’t.

His mind went to Connor’s email. Unhinged was the word for it. Ilana’s death had most likely pushed him over the edge, not that the distance to the edge had ever been far. He thought about the man who’d written those sentences at 2:17 in the morning, and then, the way a calculation runs backward to its first term, he thought about how it had all broken apart.

The meeting had been routine enough, or framed as routine, which wasn’t quite the same thing. Gula had been brought in to review a set of outcome metrics for the spine service, readmission rates, complication profiles, the kind of data review hospitals commissioned periodically as part of quality assurance, that generated a great deal of paper and rarely changed any behavior. He’d done three of these for this hospital in the past four years. They were administrative events. He came, he reviewed, he submitted a report, he was paid a consulting fee, and the administrators filed the report somewhere and moved on.

He’d been on his way out of the building, laptop bag over one shoulder, when Diane Petrocelli found him in the cafeteria.

Diane was executive assistant to the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer, a post she’d held eleven years, which meant she’d served three CMOs and outlasted all of them, which in the hierarchy of large institutions is its own kind of authority. She was fifty-three, compact, with the alertness of someone who has spent a decade and a half sitting outside the room where decisions get made and absorbed, through the walls, a great deal about how they actually get made. She wore reading glasses on a chain and kept a small notebook in her cardigan pocket and had, in Gula’s experience, the most reliable internal compass for institutional danger of anyone he’d met in twenty years in and around hospitals. When Diane found you in a cafeteria, it wasn’t by accident.

“Steven,” she said, appearing at his elbow with the unhurried ease of a person who has timed an approach.

He stopped.

“Sit with me a minute.” Not a question.

They found a table in the corner, away from the lunch crowd, two people having a conversation that looked like colleagues catching up and was something else. Diane got a coffee she didn’t drink and set it in front of her as a prop. She looked down a moment a moment before she looked at him.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, “that I am not telling you.”

“Understood,” Gula said.

“There’s a meeting next week. Executive level. Not on any calendar I’ve been asked to manage, which means someone else is managing it, which means they don’t want certain people to know it’s happening.” She looked at him steadily. “The agenda, as I understand it, concerns the spine service. Specifically a number of surgical cases the quality committee has flagged as...” she chose the word carefully “...questionable in terms of clinical indication.”

Gula said nothing.

“The number of cases is not small. And the concern isn’t outcomes. It’s whether the procedures were indicated in the first place.” She picked up the coffee and set it down without drinking. “I thought you should know.”

“How long has the quality committee been looking at this?”

“Since the spring. Six months, maybe a little more.”

He looked at his hands. Six months. And he’d been brought in today to review outcome metrics that had nothing to do with what they were actually looking at, which was not a coincidence and was not routine.

“Thank you, Diane.”

She nodded once and stood and picked up her coffee and walked away, and Gula sat a moment while the lunch crowd moved around him and thought about the silence that descends when something you’ve not let yourself think about directly is suddenly the only thing in the room.

He got up, collected his bag, and walked to the parking structure.

In the car he sat a moment with his hands on the wheel. Then he took out his phone.

Connor picked up on the second ring.

“I need to talk to you,” Gula said. “Today. In person.”

A pause. “I’m done at six.”

“I’ll meet you at your house.” He hung up before Connor could answer.

He drove west on the Thruway through the afternoon, the Hudson Valley opening on either side, the October trees doing their seasonal work, and thought about six months of a quality review no one had mentioned to him, and about outcome metrics that were not the question anyone was actually asking, and about Connor.

He’d known, without letting himself examine it directly, that something had shifted in the surgical volume over the past year. The numbers had been growing at a rate the practice’s expansion didn’t explain. He’d looked at the data with the part of his mind that was always looking at data and arrived at an interpretation he’d then filed without following to its conclusion. He was following it now, all the way down, and kept following it in the shower when he got home and in the car on the way to the Connors’ house.

Ilana and Jack lived in Scarsdale, in one of the older sections where the lots were large and the houses sat back from the road behind landscaping established long enough to look inevitable. They’d bulldozed the existing house and built a new one that announced exactly what Connor believed a house should say about the man who lived in it. It was modern, which meant severe, which meant it looked the way Connor wanted to look: controlled, expensive, and not especially interested in your comfort.

There was a gate. Of course there was a gate.

Gula pulled up and pressed the intercom. A few seconds, and the gate swung inward without anyone asking who he was, which meant Connor had been watching for the car. He drove up the long approach and parked in the broad circle in front of the house, the gravel pale under the outdoor lights, the house behind it all lit windows and stone and the stillness of a large property at dusk.

Connor was already outside. He knew.

He was still in his surgical scrubs, just home from the hospital, and he’d come to the edge of the front steps to keep this out of the house. He stood with his arms folded, and even at this distance, in the evening light, Gula could see his jaw set at the angle it set when he’d already decided how a thing was going to go.

Gula got out and walked toward him. Neither offered a hand.

“What’s so urgent,” Connor said. Not a question.

Gula stopped a few feet from him. “Are you operating on people who don’t need it?”

The silence that followed lasted about two seconds and held a great deal.

“What?”

“The surgical volume. The numbers are running ahead of what the case mix supports. The hospital’s been running a quality review for six months that nobody mentioned to either of us. I want to know if what I think is happening is what’s happening.”

Connor unfolded his arms. “Where is this coming from?”

“Answer the question, Jack.”

“I’m a surgeon. I make clinical decisions based on clinical presentation. That’s my job. That’s what I do.” He said it like a man reciting something he’d prepared.

“That’s not an answer,” Gula said.

“It’s the only answer.” Connor’s voice had gone to the place it went, not loud but pressurized, the danger register the OR staff at three hospitals had learned to read and respond to. “You’re coming to my house, in the evening, to ask me if I’m doing my job wrong?”

“I’m asking if you’re operating on people who don’t need surgery,” Gula said. He kept his voice level. “Because if you are, the hospital knows it. Or suspects it. And this kind of exposure doesn’t stop at the OR. It goes to the medical board. It goes to the fucking US Attorney. It goes to every arrangement we have.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Connor stepped down off the front step. The air was cold, his breath visible, and he had the look of someone who’s had this argument in his head many times and is now having it in the actual world and finding the actual world less manageable than his head. “You want to tell me how to practice medicine now? You’re a statistician.”

“I’ve been in more ORs than most physicians,” Gula said. “And I can read an MRI.”

“You can read a film. You cannot interpret it clinically.”

“I can look at a normal study and understand it’s a normal study,” Gula said. “And I can look at how many normal studies preceded a procedure in the last eighteen months and understand what that number means.”

Something moved in Connor’s face. Not guilt, not fear exactly, something more complicated, the face of a man who has been found and is deciding whether to deny it or fight it or simply stand in it.

He chose the third.

“The volume is what it is,” he said. “Patients come in with pain. I treat pain. If you have a problem with how I practice medicine”

“I have a problem with all of us going to prison,” Gula said. His voice had gone flat. “I need the scope of this. I need to know how many cases we’re talking about. I need to know how far it goes and who else is involved, and I need to know it now.”

“You need to back the hell up,” Connor said. He’d closed the distance by a step. He was broader than Gula and knew it and used it the way he used everything, as leverage. “You come to my house and interrogate me like I’m some…”

“Answer the fucking question.”

“Go home.”

“Jack.”

“I said go home”

“How many?” Gula asked. Quietly. The quiet that’s more dangerous than volume.

Connor looked at him. His jaw was working. His hands, Gula noticed, had closed at his sides.

“You think you understand what I do,” Connor said. “You think you can look at a number on a spreadsheet and tell me what I’m doing in an operating room.” His voice was the voice of a man angry and also, below the anger, frightened, and who finds the fear less acceptable than the anger. “You built this with me. Don’t forget that. Everything we have, we built it together. And now you want to stand in my driveway and act like you’re something different from what you are.”

Gula looked at him a long moment.

“Go fuck yourself, Connor,” he said.

He said it quietly and without heat, the tone of a conclusion rather than an outburst, and turned and walked back to his car. He heard Connor say something behind him but didn’t stop. He got in, turned the car around in the circle, drove back down the approach and through the gate and out onto the road.

He drove twenty minutes without thinking about anything. The evening was fully dark and the Thruway was doing its usual work and the cold was visible on the fields he passed.

He hadn’t gotten an answer to his question. But Connor’s silence had been its own answer, and the thing Gula sat with for the rest of the drive home was not what he’d suspected, which had been confirmed, but what his brother had been seeing in those operating rooms. Case after case, laying out instrumentation for procedures he’d come to understand were not necessary, and saying nothing, because his son was sick and the money was what was keeping the son alive.

He drove north into the dark and called no one.

The next morning he phoned the office and said he was unwell and wouldn’t be in. He was not unwell. He sat at the kitchen table in his condo in Tarrytown with a coffee he’d made and let go cold, and looked at the river through the window, and thought.

He did not call Connor.

Connor, as it turned out, was not waiting for him to call.

That morning, while Gula sat at his table, Connor called an unscheduled meeting. Singer and Cope both cleared their afternoons without being told why. They met in Connor’s office with the door closed, and by three they’d reached the conclusion that had, in all probability, been Connor’s before he placed the calls. Their relationship with Steven Gula had come to an end.

They called the practice attorney at four.

The letter arrived at his Tarrytown apartment at five-fifteen the next day. A courier, not the post; they’d wanted it delivered same-day, which told him how much anxiety was in that office. He signed for it and brought it in and sat back down at the kitchen table and opened it.

White Plains Surgery Centers, PLLC

Via Hand Delivery — Confidential

Steven R. Gula

Re: Termination of Employment Agreement for Cause

Dear Mr. Gula,

This letter constitutes formal notice of the termination of your Employment Agreement with White Plains Surgery Centers PLLC (the “Practice”), effective immediately upon receipt of this correspondence.

Your employment is terminated for cause, including but not limited to conduct unbecoming of a senior officer of the Practice, conduct detrimental to the business interests and professional reputation of the Practice and its physician-principals, and material breach of your duties of loyalty, confidentiality, and professional conduct as defined in Section 7 of your Amended and Restated Employment Agreement dated January 14, 2008.

You are hereby reminded that you remain bound by the following provisions of your Employment Agreement, which survive termination for cause without limitation:

Non-Disclosure Agreement (Section 9): You are strictly prohibited from disclosing any confidential, proprietary, or sensitive information relating to the Practice, its operations, its patients, its financial arrangements, its business relationships, or its personnel, to any person or entity, including but not limited to regulatory bodies, law enforcement agencies, media organizations, or any current or former employees or associates of the Practice. Violation of this provision will result in immediate legal action seeking injunctive relief and damages.

Non-Compete Agreement (Section 10): For a period of three (3) years from the date of termination, you are prohibited from engaging in any business, employment, consulting, or advisory role that competes, directly or indirectly, with the services offered by the Practice within a radius of fifty (50) miles of any Practice location. This prohibition includes but is not limited to any healthcare consulting, biostatistics consulting, administrative leadership, or operational advisory role within the healthcare or medical device industries in the defined geographic area.

Return of Property (Section 11): You are required to return all Practice property, including but not limited to documents, files, electronic data, equipment, and any copies thereof, within five (5) business days of the date of this letter.

The Practice reserves all rights under the Employment Agreement and applicable law. Please direct any further correspondence to the undersigned.

Very truly yours,

Lawrence T. McGuire

Harmon, McGuire, Fiske & Wade LLP

Gula read it twice. Then he set it on the table and looked at the river.

What he felt, reading it, was not anger and was not fear. What he felt, arriving with the weight of a thing that has been building a long time and has finally been given a name, was relief.

Connor, in his way, had done him a favor. Connor knew, had always known, had known since the first evening they sat together with data printouts and beers and talked about what the spine business could become, that Gula would say nothing. Not because of the NDA and not because of the non-compete, but because Gula was in it as deeply as anyone, and because Gula understood the value of silence was structural, not contractual. Connor knew it the way he knew other things about people, not through affection or trust but through the same cold assessment that had made him a very good surgeon and a very effective operator and, Gula had come to understand over the preceding twenty-four hours, something else as well.

He called a lawyer he knew in the city the next morning.

Over five days, through counsel, they negotiated a severance. The amount was not discussed directly between the principals and didn’t need to be. The lawyers understood the parameters. The non-compete was narrowed. The NDA stayed. A mutual non-disparagement clause was added, which Gula accepted without objection. The severance was paid in a single wire transfer.

But Gula never forgot that he’d been terminated from a business he designed. And in the design he’d built a secondary administrative user account, with a password no one but he knew existed. So while the lawyers hashed out the settlement, Gula spent a few quiet days downloading the practice’s records onto large external hard drives he’d gone out and bought at OfficeMax.

The termination itself, its abruptness, coupled with the rumors that had started to simmer the way they do in an industry, and the non-compete, made work in healthcare at Gula’s level impossible. So he reinvented himself. He moved to Pennsylvania, bought the house in Bethlehem, started the PhD, defended it in 2022, and took the position at Lehigh later that year. He’d always felt lucky the group dissolved quietly, and in his interviews, asked about his previous work, he downplayed everything there was about White Plains Surgery Centers, casting his role as mid-level management in a group that had been absorbed by a larger one. Neither the hospital nor anyone from the group had any reason to say otherwise.

He and Connor never spoke again.

In the suite, Gula crossed to the bar and made himself a drink. The city lay below the windows, Friday night running itself down, the square he’d walked up from a dark rectangle among the lights. He carried the drink into the bedroom and thought about tomorrow, one o’clock, the quiet restaurant downstairs, and what he needed from her, which was not belief, exactly. Belief was cheap. What he needed was her buy-in, her own reasons for going where he was taking her, arrived at in her own mind, the way the best conclusions always arrive. The thought had arrived at her tonight. He’d watched it land. Tomorrow he’d find out what she’d done with it.

He walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, and the man who looked back was neither the professor with the worn backpack nor the suit from the corner table at Parc, just a man of sixty-two holding a drink at the end of a long day, and he stood there a moment and understood, with the same clarity he brought to any calculation, that there was going to be a blast radius from what he was doing.

A big one.

Chapter Sixteen

Her condo on Spruce Street was a converted nineteenth-century row house, divided into six units and keeping, in its bones, the sense of having once been a single family’s idea of serious living. Her condo was on the third floor, two bedrooms, high ceilings with the original plaster medallions still intact, wide-plank floors that had been refinished once since she moved in and were already taking on the warm patina of boards walked on by someone who doesn’t take her shoes off at the door.

The living room faced the street, and at this hour the windows held the amber geometry of streetlights through old glass. She’d furnished it over time and without a plan, which meant it had the character of a room that knows what it is: a deep sofa in a green that had looked different in the store and was right anyway, a reading chair from an estate sale in Chestnut Hill reupholstered in dark linen, bookshelves on two walls she’d run out of room on and supplemented with a floor-to-ceiling unit she’d built herself one Sunday with a glass of wine and her father on the phone talking her through it. A small kitchen off the back with good morning light and a window onto the narrow garden of the building next door, which in spring had a pear tree that bloomed extravagantly for two weeks and then went back to being just a tree.

She finally shed her coat and dropped it over the back of the reading chair, kicked off her shoes, and stood at the sink filling the kettle. The apartment was quiet in the way of a space used to one person and comfortable with it.

It was past ten. She knew she was pushing the hour. Sam had a baby still shy of his first birthday, a full caseload, and an early morning, and she wouldn’t have sent the text for anything less than what she had.

She picked up her phone. Is it too late? If so call me in the morning. I have something. It’s significant.

She set the phone on the counter and found the ginger tea in the cabinet, the bags, not the good loose kind she kept meaning to buy. She was dipping the bag in the mug when the screen lit up. The blue dots bubbled and resolved.

Give me a minute. Need to step outside. Baby’s almost asleep.

She smiled, leaned against the counter, and waited.

The phone rang two minutes later.

“Thank you for calling,” she said. “I know it’s late.”

“Honestly I needed the air,” Sam said. She could hear the city behind him, traffic, a distant siren, the acoustics of a downtown sidewalk at night. “Elliot has decided bedtime is a philosophical position he’s willing to negotiate. Dana’s handling it.” A beat. “Tell me what you have.”

“I just had dinner with Steven Gula.”

A silence.

“Gula,” Sam said. “The CEO from the practice. Now the history professor.”

“The same. He reached out while I was in Ireland. The email was waiting when I got back.”

“Last time we talked about him you said he was a dead end. Told you to your face you’d wasted the drive.”

“He did. What changed is that the same night we had the New York meeting, two in the morning, Sam, Connor sent Gula a threatening email from his personal address. Unsigned, but it’s his account. ‘I know what you’re doing. Keep your fucking mouth shut or God help you.’ It goes on. It ends with Connor promising Gula will be paying legal bills until he’s in a home.”

“Jesus.”

“Gula showed it to me over dinner. I think that’s what shook something loose.”

“Do you believe that?” Sam asked.

“I don’t think an email like that, however angry it made him, actually gets him talking after all this time,” she said, turning the idea over. “But maybe it did.”

“And how was he? After the deep freeze you described at the university?”

She moved to the sofa, tucking her feet under her. The streetlight made orange parallelograms on the ceiling. “Completely different. I almost didn’t recognize him when I walked in. Different clothes, different manner, a custom suit. He was...” She searched for it. “Arresting, honestly. The Lehigh version and the Parc version were not the same person. Or they were the same person and I’d only ever seen one side of him.”

“What did he tell you?”

She told him everything. The full account, in the order Gula had given it, how he and Connor met at Westchester General, the weekend data sessions, the business plan, the partners’ meeting and its humiliations. The password-tracking software on Val’s computer, the forged emails built to make a founding partner look as if he were losing his mind, the canceled and double-booked appointments, the whiskey spray bottle, the burner phone and the DWAI. The woman at the bus stop, and what Gula had done with her.

When she finished, the line let a silence sit.

“They’re both sociopaths,” Sam said.

“Without question.”

“Did he get to the kickbacks?”

“No. That’s tomorrow. Just getting through how the group started and what they did to get there took hours. The kickbacks came after. We’re meeting at one.”

“Where?”

“Four Seasons. He’s staying there. Said he’d be more comfortable not meeting at my office.”

“Smart,” Sam said. “His turf.”

“Or neutral ground. Either way I agreed.” She paused. “Sam, I want to work with him on this. But I need to know what kind of exposure he’s looking at if he cooperates. What’s realistic?”

She heard him exhale, a man working through it in real time. “Going to depend on timing and specifics. A lot of what you’re describing tonight, the email fraud, the identity spoofing, engineering the drunk-driving stop, that’s old. New York has a five-year statute on most computer fraud. Wire fraud theories can go longer, but you’d need a creative argument and a willing prosecutor. Tax exposure’s trickier, that can go back six years or more with demonstrated intent.” He paused. “Honestly? If it’s just what you described, nobody’s spending resources on a case this cold unless there’s something more recent. Or more serious.”

“The kickbacks would be more recent,” she said.

“Depends when they stopped. If they ran through the life of the practice and the practice dissolved in 2018, that’s still borderline. Anti-kickback violations have their own timeline.” He took a moment. “You said you had a feeling.”

She looked at the ceiling. The orange light was steady and quiet. “I have a feeling. He hasn’t said it. Hasn’t come close to saying it. But there was a moment tonight when he talked about Ilana. He stopped. Just for a second, but he stopped in a way that had weight to it.” She paused. “I think he has something to tell me about her death, Sam.”

Sam whistled. Low and slow, the whistle of a man recalibrating.

“That’s a very different case,” he said.

“I know.”

“Karen, do you feel safe?” He said it the way you say a thing you’ve been holding back until the right moment.

She laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her. “Yes. Gula is...” she thought about it. “He’s a gentleman, Sam. In the most precise and faintly unsettling sense of the word. Picked up the check without discussion. Walked me out. He’s a sociopath, I genuinely believe that, but not the kind that hurts people. There’s a difference.”

“That’s a very fine distinction to be drawing at ten-thirty on a Friday night.”

“I know,” she said. “Go back to Elliot.”

“He’s asleep by now. Hopefully.” A pause. “Call me after the one o’clock.”

“I will.”

They hung up.

She sat a moment on the sofa with the ginger tea going lukewarm in her hands and the streetlight on the ceiling and the quiet of the apartment around her. She thought about tomorrow at one, and everything still to come, and a woman found in a car off Dunkerhook Road in Paramus with the engine off, and the way Steven Gula had stopped mid-sentence at a restaurant table when her name came up, just for a second, and what that second had held.

She rinsed the mug, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.

She was asleep before midnight.

Chapter Seventeen

She was at her desk by eight-thirty with a coffee she’d made in the break room, the Keurig, her one concession to weekday mornings, and the Connor file open in front of her the way it had been open for weeks now, less a working posture than a thinking one. She’d been staring at it twenty minutes without reading anything when the phone rang.

Sam.

“Good morning,” she said.

“I’ve been in since seven,” he said, which was his way of saying he’d found things.

She pulled the legal pad toward her and uncapped her pen.

“First, the exposure question. Everything you described last night, the email spoofing, the schedule manipulation, the OPMC complaint, the drunk-driving setup, most of that falls outside the statute. New York’s five-year limit on computer fraud, and we’re well past it. Wire fraud has a longer reach in theory, but you’d need a prosecutor who wanted to get creative, and I don’t see that for a case this cold. Unless there’s something ongoing, or something that crosses into violence, you tell him he’s reasonably clear on the old stuff. Tax exposure’s the wildcard, six years with demonstrated intent, but that depends on what the money looks like.”

“Speaking of which,” she said.

“Right.” She heard him shift papers. “Gula has more money than you think. Considerably more. He’s been taking consulting fees from a company called Real Health Partners Consulting. Portuguese registration, offices in Lisbon. Over the past four years those fees total just north of two million dollars.”

Karen set down her pen.

“He pays taxes on it,” Sam went on. “It’s on his returns, properly filed, nothing hidden in the obvious sense. But a Portuguese consulting company paying an assistant professor of history in Bethlehem two million dollars over four years is not a thing with a simple explanation.”

“Did you find anything on the company itself?”

“Very little. It exists, it’s registered, it claims to do legitimate healthcare consulting in the European market. Beyond that it’s a wall.” He paused. “Which is itself interesting.”

Karen wrote Real Health Partners Consulting on the pad and underlined it twice. She thought about the house on Market Street, the deliberate plainness of it, the L.L.Bean backpack, the man who’d arranged his visible life to look like one thing while the actual thing sat somewhere else.

“There’s more,” Sam said.

She waited.

“Chris Gula was killed in a boating accident on Lake George,” Sam said. “April 2022.”

She was silent a beat. “How did we both not know this?”

“The case had been closed a year or so by the time I was looking. And the obituary.” He paused. “Small. Local paper. The kind that doesn’t migrate to the major databases. People put things on Facebook now instead of running paid notices. If you’re not looking for it, it disappears.”

Karen rolled her eyes at the ceiling. She had opinions about Facebook as a repository of the historical record and kept them to herself.

“Boating accident,” she said. “Lake George.”

“Sudden,” Sam said. “That’s the word they used.”

They sat with that a moment.

“The kickback scheme,” Sam said. “Anything Gula tells you today, I want to know. Especially any sign it was still running after the practice closed. Or that any of the old partners were involved.” He paused. “And Karen. If Connor’s still doing it at his current hospital, that’s active. That’s a very different conversation.”

“I know.”

“What’s your read on the claim? You said you were probably going to pay it.”

She looked at the file. “The claim is clean. That hasn’t changed. But these are two men who spent years proving they have no relationship with limits, and they love money. Both things are still true.” She paused. “Murder is a different category. I know that. I’m not saying it. I’m saying I’m not closing the file until I know what Gula wants to tell me.”

Sam was quiet. “Call me after,” he said.

“I will.”

They hung up.

She set the phone down, opened a browser, and typed Chris Gula into the search bar. Common enough name that several pages came back, and she worked through them until she found it. A funeral home notice out of Glens Falls, dated April 14th, 2022.

Christopher James Gula, 49, passed away suddenly on April 11th. He was a graduate of the University at Albany with a degree in accounting and had spent the early part of his career in financial services before founding Precision Medical Devices in the early 2000s, a company he had grown and eventually sold before retiring to the Lake George area, where he had been a beloved fixture of the community and had worked for the past several years at George’s Boats on the lake’s eastern shore. He was known for his easy laugh, his generosity, and his particular talent for untangling a fouled outboard motor. He was preceded in death by his parents. He is survived by his children, Tyler, fifteen, and Addison, twelve, his former wife Patricia, extended family, and a wide circle of friends who will feel his absence for a long time.

She read it twice. Sold, the obituary said. The corporate filings said the LLC had been dissolved in 2018, papers filed, nothing sold to anyone. Families wrote what they needed to write, or what they’d been told. She filed the gap between the two words and scrolled to the condolences. Forty-three of them. The usual gravity of these things: shocked, gone too soon, prayers for the family, he was one of the good ones, the lake won’t be the same. She read through them all.

Steven Gula was not among them.

She was not surprised.

She closed the browser and opened her email.

The note to Charlie was brief, because there wasn’t yet enough to make it long. She told him she was meeting today with Steven Gula, the former CEO of White Plains Surgery Centers who’d worked alongside Connor, and that while she didn’t have anything definitive, the case was developing in ways that warranted closer attention. Her gut, she used the word without apology, because Charlie had learned to respect it, was telling her something was off, and she’d like to bring in legal. She’d update him after the one o’clock.

She read it back, sent it, and picked up her bag.

She stopped at her assistant’s desk on the way out. “I won’t be back this afternoon. Anything urgent comes in, call my cell.”

The November air hit her on Walnut Street, cold and clear, the kind of Friday morning that had made up its mind about what it was going to be. The Four Seasons was a few blocks north on 19th, a walk she knew well enough to do without thinking, her mind free to do what it had been doing since she woke up.

Why was he meeting with her.

She’d turned it over in the night and again over her coffee, and it hadn’t resolved into a simple answer. He hadn’t been compelled. He’d reached out, made the reservation, arranged the evening with the deliberateness of someone who plans things. The threatening email from Connor had clearly been the trigger, but a trigger wasn’t a reason. A man like Gula didn’t sit down in a restaurant and spend three hours telling an insurance investigator the detailed story of how he and a surgeon had systematically destroyed a medical practice because he’d gotten an angry email. He’d done it because he wanted something. Or because he was afraid of something. She didn’t see much fear in him.

She also didn’t think he was dangerous. She’d sat across from him all evening and felt nothing she’d have called threat. But she’d done this work long enough to understand that the absence of personal danger didn’t mean the absence of danger. Gula was comfortable around people who operated without limits. He’d been one of them, and in some respects still was. And Jack Connor, the man with the Aston Martin and the Ativan and the fury that moved behind his eyes like a weather system looking for somewhere to land, was the other.

Was Connor a dangerous man?

She walked through the hotel entrance and thought: yes. She thought he probably was.

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