Animals: Chapters Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five & Twenty-Six

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 Twenty-Four

February 2025

The Connor file had grown. Webb kept it in a separate stack on the left side of his desk and had been adding to it in the deliberate way of a man who understands that what he is building will eventually need its own space. His office on the third floor in Hackensack had a window that looked out over the courthouse parking garage and a whiteboard he had stopped erasing months ago. Ilana Connor’s name was on it, in the upper right corner, in his handwriting.

He had two investigators on the case: Diana Ruiz and Phil Gerrity. Diana was forty-two, twelve years in the office, the kind of investigator who read a file once and retained everything and asked the questions that made witnesses understand they had been genuinely heard. Phil was fifty-five, former state police, with the specific patience of a man who has conducted a very large number of interviews and has learned that silence is a tool if you are willing to use it.

They were in his office on a Tuesday morning in February with the file between them and their own legal pads.

Webb looked at his whiteboard. “Where are we.”

“Bida was useful,” Diana said. She had her notes open. “He confirmed the nature of the conflict with Connor. The locker room incident, the anger management referral. He said that in his experience Connor was someone who operated without limits when he felt his authority was being challenged. His exact phrase was ‘no off switch.’ He also said, and I want to be careful about this, that there was a period of two or three years where the word among the OR staff at the previous hospital was that Ilana Connor came in for procedures on a few occasions with bruising that was explained as exercise injuries.” She paused. “Bida said he has no direct knowledge. He heard it from a scrub tech who is no longer at that facility.”

“Hearsay on hearsay,” Phil said.

“For now. We haven’t found the scrub tech yet.”

Webb nodded. “Gula.”

“Gula met with us in January,” Phil said. “He was...” he looked at his notes, though Webb suspected he didn’t need to. “Controlled. He told us the terms of his departure from the practice, termination for cause, the NDA, the severance negotiated through lawyers. He confirmed the ‘allegations’ around the unnecessary surgeries but was clear that he is not a physician and cannot provide clinical substantiation. His words were that he ‘observed a pattern’ and that the pattern was ‘consistent with a significant departure from standard clinical indication.’ He declined to characterize it more specifically.”