A Faint Cold Fear

by Karin Slaughter

  She said, “You know, just come pick him up now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” Sara told him. With another body coming in, they probably needed the space in the freezer.

  “You can have him after the service if you think of anything,” Brock volunteered. “I was gonna drop him off at the crematory around lunchtime.” He lowered his voice. “I like to wait around now to make sure it’s done right, if you know what I mean. People are antsy about cremation these days, on account of that rascal up in north Georgia.”

  “Right,” Sara said, recalling the case of a family-owned crematory that had stacked bodies in car trunks and against trees on their property instead of cremating them. The state had spent nearly $10 million removing and identifying the remains.

  Brock said, “It’s a shame, really. Such a clean way to handle things. Not that I don’t like the extra money with a ground interment, but some folks are so messed up it’s just best to handle it quickly.”

  “His parents?” Sara asked, wondering if Keller had threatened his wife in front of Brock.

  “They came by for the arrangements last night and I tell you . . .” Brock’s voice trailed off. He was very discreet, but Sara could usually get him to talk. Sometimes his candor made her wonder if she had somehow stumbled into the crosshairs of one of his famous unrequited crushes.

  Sara gave him some prodding. “Yes?”

  “Well . . .” he began, his voice even lower. Brock knew better than anybody else that his mother was the main artery to Grant County gossip.

  He said, “His mama was a bit concerned about cremating him after the autopsy. Thought it couldn’t be done. Lord, where do these people get their notions?”

  Sara waited.

  “My feeling was, she wasn’t too happy about the whole thing to begin with, but then the daddy stepped in and said that’s what the boy wanted and that’s what they were gonna do.”

  “If those were his wishes, they should be honored,” Sara said. Even though she dealt with death all the time, Sara had never considered letting anyone know how she wanted to be buried. Thinking about it now made her shudder.

  “Some people come in with their pre-needs,” Brock said, chuckling. “Boy, the stories I could tell you about what some folks wanna be buried with.”

  Sara closed her eyes, willing him not to share.

  Brock took the cue from her silence and moved on. “Tell you the truth, what with them being Jewish, God bless ’em, I thought they’d wanna do it fast, but they’ve done it all normal-like. I guess they’re not real into it like some.”

  “No,” Sara answered. As a medical examiner, she’d seen only one case where her performing an autopsy was contested by a family of Orthodox Jews. While she admired their devotion to religion, she imagined that the family was relieved to know that their father had died of a heart attack rather than purposefully driven his car into the lake.

  “Well . . .” Brock cleared his throat uncomfortably, probably interpreting her silence as disapproval. “I’ll be over in two shakes.”

  Sara hung up the phone, slipping on her glasses as she thumbed through the rest of the messages. The white noise of the morgue was punctuated by the pop and flash as Carlos took pictures of the body. Sara stopped on the last phone message, seeing that she had missed a drop-in visit from a pharmaceutical company’s rep. Sara frowned, knowing he would have left more free samples for her patients had she been there to talk him into it.

  Under the messages was a slick brochure from the rep advertising the fact that an asthma drug had just been approved for children. In fact, pediatricians like Sara had been prescribing the inhaler to patients for years; the drug companies used the new FDA approval for pediatric use to extend their patents on the drug so they could keep gouging the consumer and not have to worry about competition from generics. Sara often thought if they stopped paying for fancy brochures and expensive television spots, the companies might be able to drop the price on their drugs so that people could afford them.

  The trash was across the room, and she threw the brochure toward it and missed just as Jeffrey came into the office.

  “Hey,” Jeffrey said, tossing a manila folder down on her desk. He dropped a large paper bag on top of it.

  She stood up to get the brochure, and he put his hand on her arm.

  “What—”

  He kissed her on the mouth, something he did not tend to do in public. The kiss was chaste, more like a friendly hello or, considering how Jeffrey had behaved with Mason James the previous afternoon, a dog marking a fire hydrant.

  “Hey,” she said, giving him a curious look as she put the brochure in its proper place.

  When she turned back around, Jeffrey was cupping one of the carnations in his hand. “You don’t like these.”

  She was more pleased that he had remembered this detail than if he had actually sent the flowers. “No,” she said, watching him take the card out of the envelope.

  “Please, go ahead and read it,” she offered, though he was doing just that.

  He took his time tucking the card back into the envelope. “That’s nice,” he said, then quoted from the card, “ ‘I’m here if you need me.’ ”

  She crossed her arms, waiting for him to say whatever he needed to say.

  “Long morning,” he said, closing the door. His expression was neutral, and she could tell he was trying to move on when he asked, “Tess the same?”

  “Better, actually,” she told him, slipping on her glasses as she sat down. “What did you want to talk about?”

  He poked his finger at one of the flowers. “Lena was hit this morning.”

  Sara sat up. “She was in a car accident?”

  “No,” he said. “It was Ethan White, that punk I told you about. The one she’s been seeing. The one who tried to push me down.”

  “That’s his name?” Sara asked, because for some reason the name sounded harmless to her.

  “One of them,” Jeffrey said. “Frank and I went to talk to her this morning . . .” He let his voice trail off as he stared at the flower. Sara sat back in her chair as he recounted his morning to her, ending with Jill Rosen’s showing him the bruises on her neck.

  Sara stated the obvious. “She’s being abused.”

  “Yes,” Jeffrey said.

  “I didn’t see any signs of abuse when I autopsied Andy Rosen.”

  “It’s possible to hurt somebody without leaving any evidence.”

  “Either way, an argument could be made that Rosen killed himself to stop the abuse,” Sara said. “His note was to his mother, not his father. Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “It’s possible,” Jeffrey agreed. “Except for Tessa, we wouldn’t suspect anything with Andy.”

  “How likely is it that they’re not connected?”

  “Shit, Sara, I don’t know.”

  Sara reminded him. “We don’t have any evidence that Andy Rosen was murdered. Maybe we should take him out of the equation and go with what we know.”

  “Which is?”

  “Ellen Schaffer was murdered. Maybe someone thought they would take advantage of Andy’s suicide and make it seem like she copied him. That sort of chain reaction is not uncommon on college campuses. MIT had twelve suicides one year.”

  “What about Tess?” he reminded her. Tessa was always the wild card, the victim who did not make sense.

  “That could be a different crime altogether,” Sara said. “Unless we find some sort of connection, maybe we should treat them as two separate incidents.”

  “And this one?” Jeffrey indicated the body out in the morgue.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “How did his parents take it?”

  “About as well as you would expect,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate.

  “We might as well get started,” she told him, moving the brown paper bag off the folder so she could read the report. Jeffrey had made copies of his notes, and there was an inventory from the scene. Sa
ra skimmed these, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Jeffrey touching one of the bell-shaped purple flowers.

  When Sara had finished, she pointed to the stack of journals in the only other chair in the office. “You can put those on the floor.”

  “I’m sick of sitting,” he said, kneeling beside her desk. He rubbed his hand on her leg. “You get enough sleep?”

  She put her hand over his, thinking she should have Mason send her flowers every day if it made Jeffrey this attentive.

  “I’m okay,” she told him, returning her attention to the file. “You got these back fast,” she said, meaning the scene-of-crime photos.

  “Brad did them in the darkroom,” he told her. “And you might want to watch it the next time you take a U-turn in front of the police station.”

  She gave an innocent smile, then indicated the brown paper bag. “What’s this?”

  “Prescription bottles,” he said, dumping the contents on her desk. She could tell from the black powder on the containers that they had already been dusted. There had to be at least twenty bottles.

  She asked, “All of these belonged to the victim?”

  “His name’s on them.”

  “Antidepressants,” Sara said, lining up the bottles one by one across her desk.

  “He was shooting Ice.”

  “Handsome and smart,” Sara noted wryly, still lining up the bottles, trying to classify them into sections. “Valium, which is contraindicated with antidepressants.” She studied the labels, all of which had the same prescribing doctor. The name didn’t ring any bells, but the scripts were setting off all kinds of alarms in Sara’s head.

  She started to read off the prescriptions. “Prozac, about two years old. Paxil, Elavil.” She paused, noting the dates. “Looks like he tried them all and settled on the Zoloft, which is—” She paused, then let out a “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “Three hundred fifty milligrams of Zoloft a day. That’s high.”

  “What’s the average?”

  Sara shrugged. “I don’t give this to my kids,” she told him. “Educated guess for an adult would be fifty to one hundred milligrams tops.” She continued with the bottles. “Ritalin, of course. His generation grew up on that crap. More Valium, lithium, amantadine, Paxil, Xanax, cyproheptadine, busiprone, Wellbutrin, Buspar, Elavil. Another of Zoloft. Another.” She grouped the three bottles of Zoloft together, noting that they had each been filled at different pharmacies on different dates.

  “What are these for?”

  “Specifically? Depression, sleeplessness, anxiety. They’re all for the same thing, but they work in different ways.” She rolled her chair back to the shelf by the filing cabinet and found her pharmacological guide. “I’ll have to look these up,” she said, rolling back to the desk. “Some of them I know, but I have no idea about the others. One of my Parkinson’s kids is on busiprone for anxiety. Sometimes you can take these together, but not all of them. That would end up being toxic.”

  “Could he be selling them?” Jeffrey asked. “He had the needles. We found a stash of pot and ten tabs of acid in his closet.”

  “There’s not really a market for antidepressants,” Sara told him. “Anybody can get a prescription for them nowadays. It’s just a matter of finding the right—or in this case the wrong—doctor.” She indicated a couple of the bottles she had set aside. “Ritalin and Xanax have street value.”

  “I can go to the elementary school and score ten pills of each for around a hundred dollars,” Jeffrey pointed out. He held up a large plastic bottle. “At least he’s taking his vitamins.”

  “Yocon,” she said, reading the ingredients. “Might as well start with this one.” Sara thumbed through the book, finding the appropriate entry. She scanned the description, summarizing, “It’s a trade name for yohimbine, which is an herb. It’s supposed to help the libido.”

  Jeffrey took back the bottle. “It’s an aphrodisiac?”

  “Not technically,” Sara answered, reading further. “Supposedly it helps with everything from premature ejaculation to maintaining a harder erection.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of it?”

  Sara gave him a knowing look. “You never needed to.”

  Jeffrey smiled, setting the Yocon back on her desk. “He’s a twenty-year-old kid. Why would he need something like this?”

  “The Zoloft could cause him to be anorgasmic.”

  Jeffrey narrowed his eyes. “He couldn’t come?”

  “Well, that’s another way of putting it,” Sara allowed. “He could achieve and maintain an erection but have a problem ejaculating.”

  “Jesus Christ, no wonder he was choking himself.”

  Sara ignored his comment, double-checking the drug in her guide just to be sure. “ ‘Side effects: anorgasmia, anxiety, increased appetite, decreased appetite, insomnia . . . ‘ “

  “That might explain the Xanax.”

  Sara looked up from the book. “No doctor in his right mind would prescribe all of these pills together.”

  Jeffrey compared some of the labels. “He used about four different pharmacies.”

  “I don’t imagine one pharmacist would fill all of these. It’s too reckless.”

  “We’ll need something solid to get a warrant for pharmacy records,” he said. “Do you recognize the doctor?”

  “No,” she said, sliding open the bottom drawer of her desk. She pulled out the phone book for Grant County and surrounding areas. A quick search revealed that the man was not listed. “He’s not affiliated with the health clinic or the school?”

  “No,” Jeffrey told her. “He could be in Savannah. One of the pharmacies is listed there.”

  “I don’t have a Savannah phone book.”

  “They’ve got this new thing,” Jeffrey said, teasing her. “It’s called the Internet.”

  “All right,” Sara said, forgoing the lecture on how wonderful technology was. She could see its application for someone like Jeffrey, but as far as Sara was concerned, she saw too many pasty, overweight kids in her practice to appreciate the benefits of staring at a computer all day.

  Jeffrey suggested, “Maybe it’s not a doctor?”

  “Unless the pharmacist knows you, you have to have a DEA number when you call in a script. It’s on a database.”

  “So maybe someone stole a number from a retired doctor?”

  “He’s not prescribing narcotics or OxyContin. I imagine these wouldn’t throw up any red flags with government regulators.” Sara frowned. “Still, I’m not sure what the purpose is. These aren’t stimulants. You can’t really get high off any of them. The Xanax can be addictive, but he’s got the methamphetamine and pot, which do a hell of a lot better jobs.”

  Carlos would count and classify the pills later, but on impulse Sara opened one of the Zoloft bottles. Without taking them out, she compared the yellow tablets to the drawing in the book. “They match.”

  Jeffrey opened the next bottle while Sara took the third. He said, “Mine don’t.”

  Sara peered into the bottle. “No,” she agreed, opening the top drawer of her desk. She found a pair of tweezers and used them to remove one of the clear capsules. A fine white powder was packed inside. “We can send it off and find out what’s in it.”

  Jeffrey was checking each bottle in turn. “Is there money in the budget for a rush?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Sara told him, slipping the capsule into a small evidence bag. She helped him check the contents of the other bottles, but all of them had some sort of imprint identifying the maker or drug name.

  Jeffrey said, “He could be using the capsule shells for other drugs.”

  “Let’s test the unknown ones first,” Sara suggested, knowing how expensive a wild-goose chase would be. If they were in Atlanta, she would certainly have the resources, but the budget in Grant County was so tight that some months Sara had to borrow latex gloves from the clinic.

  She asked, “Where is Dickson from?
”

  “Right here,” Jeffrey said.

  Sara tried her earlier question, thinking Jeffrey was in a better place to talk about it now.

  “How did his parents take the news?”

  “Better than I thought,” Jeffrey said. “I gathered he was a handful.”

  “Like Andy Rosen,” Sara pointed out. She had filled him in on Hare’s impression of the Rosen family during the drive back from Atlanta.

  “If our only connection here is that we’ve got two spoiled twenty-something boys, that means half the kids at the school are in danger.”

  “Rosen was manic-depressive,” Sara reminded him.

  “Dickson’s parents said he wasn’t. He never mentioned anything about therapy. As far as they knew, their son was as healthy as a horse.”

  “Would they have known?”

  “They don’t seem very involved, but the father made it clear he was paying all the bills. Something like that would have come up.”

  “He could see someone at the health center on campus for free.”

  “It might be tricky getting access to clinic documents.”

  Sara suggested, “You could ask Rosen again.”

  “I think she’s tapped out,” Jeffrey told her, a dark expression on his face. “We interviewed the entire dorm, and nobody knew a damn thing about the kid.”

  “From the smell in his room, I’d guess he spent most of his time there.”

  “If Dickson was dealing, nobody’s going to admit to knowing him anyway. Every toilet in the dorm started to flush when it got around that we were asking questions.”

  Sara mulled over what they had. “So both he and Rosen were isolated loner types. Both were into drugs.”

  “Rosen’s tox screen was clear.”

  “That’s hit or miss,” Sara reminded him. “The lab only tests for the substances I specify. There are thousands of other drugs he could have used that I just didn’t know to screen for.”

  “I think somebody wiped down Dickson’s room.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “There was a bottle of vodka in the fridge, half full, but no prints. Some beer cans and other stuff had prints from the victim and a couple of latents probably from the store clerk or whoever sold them to him.” He paused. “We’re gonna try to run the syringe to see what was in it. The one on the floor is pretty trashed. They scraped the wood, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to get a good sample.” He paused again, as if there was something else he did not want to say. “Lena found the syringe.”