Free Exposed by Laura Griffin Page A

afternoons, Goran dreamed of one thing: an air-conditioningunit so that his family could keep the windows shut and prevent the entire building from knowing the extent of their dysfunction.
    Goran walked through the hallway now and adjusted the thermostat to sixty-two. Never mind that it was forty-six degrees outside, and he could have opened a window. No one opened windows in his house. Ever. The temperature didn’t fluctuate unless he wanted it to. No one besides himself, not even his wife, was authorized to touch the thermostat.
    He took his drink and settled into his favorite chair to watch the basketball game. The Devils looked strong, possibly even strong enough to win the whole thing. Another reason to celebrate.
    Goran had landed a scholarship to Duke, where his natural intelligence and his striking blue eyes had made both the grades and the women come easy. He’d been denied admittance to Harvard Medical School, but his acceptance at UTMB had turned out to be a stroke of luck that would result in more wealth than he ever could have imagined. What the Texas med school lacked in Ivy League prestige, it made up for in location. Geography is destiny . He’d read that somewhere once, and it turned out to be true, as the pinko kid from Chicago started practicing medicine in the Lone Star State.
    By the time Goran had finished his residency, he was married, in debt, and supremely motivated to get to the earning phase of his career. Rather than waste his time on a narrow specialty, he’d gone straight into general practice, which was sufficiently flexible to suit his ambitions. By twenty-eight, he was already implementing his master plan to achieve his two principal objectives:money and power. It wouldn’t take him long to realize that they were one and the same.
    Goran had set up a clinic in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Antonio and immediately started seeing the sort of traffic he was looking for: housewives with tennis elbow, husbands with erectile dysfunction, everyone with tension headaches and lower back pain. He’d kept his calendar booked, even when it wasn’t, and made sure anyone who called, no matter how desperate, waited at least a week for an appointment. Slowly but surely, he had developed a reputation for being expensive but free with his prescription pad. It wasn’t long before the myth became reality and then exceeded it, and he was making money hand over fist by providing in-house scripts for a long list of patients who waited days and often weeks for a fifteen-minute office visit.
    But then the feds had started nosing around, and the game was up. Temporarily.
    Growing up poor had taught him to be resourceful, though, and it didn’t take him long to circumvent not only the state medical board but also the federal investigators who had begun sniffing around his practice. With the help of a marginally intelligent attorney, Goran had restructured his business and managed not to lose a single patient. In fact, he’d gained hundreds.
    He took out his phone now and composed an e-mail. He would handle things personally this time, and there would be no mistakes. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being afraid to get his hands dirty.

CHAPTER 6

     
    The address listed on Volansky’s driver’s license was about what Brian expected, with a few unpleasant surprises. He stepped through the front door of the apartment unit for the second time that night and traded his shoes for paper booties.
    “I talked to the landlord,” he told Sam, who was standing beside a sliding glass door and watching a crime-scene tech dust for prints. It was one of the few places to dust, as the unit was nearly empty.
    “Where’d you find him?” Sam asked.
    “Called the number posted at the front office. Turns out he lives on the premises.”
    Sam lifted an eyebrow.
    “Don’t get excited. He doesn’t know much. Or so he claims. Says the tenant in this unit wasn’t around a lot. Says he leased the place fifteen months