by Emily James
I’d been looking for evidence of a drug addiction, and I might have found it.
11
I swung by Dad’s Hardware Store on my way home. I was standing in the aisle, trying to decide whether a plastic lawn bunny or a rock that looked nothing like a real rock would be the least obvious for hiding a spare key, when my phone rang. Mark.
I swiped my finger across the screen to answer.
“I didn’t like the look of her incision, so I called the vet’s office, and they suggested I email a picture. She’s been wearing her cone the whole time, right?”
“I’ve even made her sleep with it.” I selected a rock that I might be able to disguise with a few strategically placed leaves and headed for the locksmith desk to pick up the new copy of my key. The implication of Mark’s words finally sunk in. “Wait, you got a picture of her belly?”
“Yeah. I’m surprised you didn’t think of it.”
That scoundrel dog. Was it worse to have Mark think I’d missed an obvious solution or to confirm that I apparently couldn’t control my own dog as well as someone who wasn’t her owner? He already knew I was the clumsiest person imaginable, so I might as well keep his respect for my intelligence. “I did. She wasn’t having it.”
Mark chuckled. “Children are always worse for their parents, I’ve heard. The vet said that if she wasn’t licking it, then she must have an allergy to the sutures. If you go by before they close, they’ll have some cream you can put on it until the stiches dissolve. And she needs to stay as quiet as possible until the swelling goes down.”
After I paid for my key and pseudo-rock, I headed toward the veterinarian’s office instead of going home the way I’d planned. Mark stayed on the call with me as it switched from my phone to my car.
Velma had already been going stir-crazy, being limited to a single long walk a day. Restricting her even more wasn’t going to be fun for any of us. “I’ve already been having trouble keeping her and Toby from playing in the house. Hopefully the cream speeds things up.”
“Why don’t you take him to a dog park? He could play with other dogs there and maybe it’d be easier to keep them both quiet.”
Amy had been coming home from the dog park near their house when I pulled up. Mark had given me my answer to how to talk to Amy alone in a way that wouldn’t make her suspicious.
I almost told Mark he was brilliant, but I knew how he felt about me taking part in another investigation.
Tomorrow, Toby and I would head to the dog park.
On Saturday morning, I pulled into the gravel parking strip alongside the dog park for the third day in a row. Amy Powers and her dog hadn’t shown up on Thursday or Friday afternoon.
Before I even stopped the car, Toby’s thick tail beat against the back seat. If nothing else, he’d enjoyed being able to run and play again, but if Amy didn’t show up today, I might have to give up and pursue another plan. Every day Nancy asked me if there’d been any progress. Daisy wasn’t sleeping, and Nancy told me that Holly’s father was on the verge of losing his job because he’d been spending all his time searching for Holly, terrified that someone had killed her as well.
We went in through the gate, and I let Toby off his leash. I took a seat on the cool bench. Maybe I’d already spent too much time hoping Amy would show up. I didn’t even have any proof she came every day or even once a week. I’d hoped, since their house didn’t have much in the way of a backyard.
A golden streak blitzed past me.
“Nicole?” a familiar young female voice said from behind me. “What are you doing here?”
Prayer answered. I smiled back over my shoulder at Amy. “I spotted the park when I visited your house and decided to bring my dog.”
Amy held back from the bench and wound her dog’s leash through her fingers. “Can’t you just let him run free around Sugarwood?”
Drat. I hadn’t expected to need an explanation for coming here. Toby’s presence should have been enough. “My other dog was spayed about a week ago and he’s bored without someone to play with.” That I-can’t-decide-if-you’re-lying-to-me-look was still on her face. “And…if I just let him run around where she could see him, I thought she’d be jealous.”
I would have thunked my own forehead if that wouldn’t have given my lie away.
Amy lowered onto the bench next to me. “Makes sense.”
Who would have thought it? She must have figured no one would come up with that silly a lie. If I’d come up with anything better, it might have actually set off her BS detector.
She planted her elbows on her knees but didn’t pull out her phone the way I’d expected.
Finally I’d caught a break. That should make a conversation easier to start.
“I didn’t thank you properly,” Amy said without looking at me.
Or maybe I’d let her lead and I’d follow and wait for an opening.
“You made my dad really happy, and that means a lot.” She picked at the cuticle on her thumb. Her nails were chewed down so that none of the white remained. “He felt like he’d let me down because that was what I wanted to do together for my birthday and we couldn’t afford to pay for another tour.”
For some reason, even with my mom’s voice in my head telling me I was a fool, the honest approach seemed like the right way to go. Maybe it was because Amy’s expression suddenly looked like fine china teetering on a table edge.
“I noticed your dad didn’t look well when I was at your house this week,” I said softly.
“Cancer.” The word sounded like a punch, like she wanted to attack something but there wasn’t really anything she could fight against.
I felt the blow in my stomach nonetheless. Cancer explained his weight loss and frail appearance. And the anti-nausea meds I’d seen in their medicine chest. Many cancer treatments made patients sick to their stomachs.
It explained the Oxy, too. Depending on what type of cancer he had, he could be in a lot of pain.
It even explained the financial troubles. Most health insurance only covered a certain percentage of medical bills and had limits. If he’d had a prolonged battle, the co-pay could have added up, and they might have even exceeded their coverage.
Amy was carrying the burden of all that alongside her dad, after having already lost her mom.
My heart felt like it sank down until I was sitting on it. I didn’t want to keep poking into their life. I didn’t want to know what she might have been doing wrong. If George Powers had cancer, he might not have even had the strength to stab Drew, so continuing to investigate could lead nowhere. And yet I had an obligation to Holly and Nancy and Daisy, too.
Amy looked up at me from her hunched-over position, reminding me a bit of Drew’s mom when she came to my door, just needing someone to lean on for a few minutes.
Regardless of what trouble she might have gotten herself into, she was still a person who was hurting. If Amy didn’t have a grandma or an aunt she was close to, it might have been a long time since she’d had anyone offer her the kind of hug that said it’s going to be okay.
I held out my arms and Amy fell into them.
Screw my parents’ ideas of right and wrong and how to handle suspects. They thought my ability to get people to open up to me was some kind of superpower. It was the one thing they’d seemed to respect about me.
It wasn’t a superpower. It was that I cared about people, and they sensed it. The ironic part was that my parents saw that caring as a flaw. So the thing they valued about me most was made possible by the thing they wanted to break me of.
Amy’s body shook against my shoulder, and I rubbed her back. She pulled herself together quickly, like she was used to having to let her emotions out in a quick burst and then hide them again. She probably was. She wouldn’t want her dad to know how hard this was on her and only let herself cry in the shower or when she came to the dog park with their dog and no one else was looking.
She swiped under her eyes with the edge of her sleeve, pushed ou
t by her thumb. “You were a lawyer, right? Before you came here.”
If my head hadn’t been attached to my shoulders, she would have set it spinning with the topic change. “I’m still a lawyer, yes.”
“If you get caught doing something that’s technically wrong, but you’re doing it for a good reason, do juries go easier on you? Like maybe let you off with community service or something.” She was back to avoiding my gaze.
My chest felt like it was trying to split down the middle. Now that I didn’t want to keep pushing, she was going to tell me what she’d done, and if it pointed to her or her dad being guilty of Drew’s murder, I’d have to use it against her, betraying her trust.
But I was in too deep to back out and betray the trust Nancy placed in me. I gave Amy the space she seemed to need in order to talk about this by watching Toby sniff and paw at the grass forty feet away.
“It depends on the crime,” I said.
“Not anything that hurt anyone.” Her face snapped in my direction again. “Hypothetically of course. That means I’m just asking about a situation out of curiosity and not that I’m saying I did anything. I’ve seen that on TV.”
The girl was too sharp for a seventeen-year-old. I didn’t know what she wanted to do when she finished high school, but she’d make a good police officer or lawyer.
I nodded. “Of course. What were you thinking of? Hypothetically.”
She went back to examining her cuticles. “Like if a person couldn’t afford expensive prescription pain killers, but someone they really loved was suffering, and so they wanted to try to buy them from a drug dealer instead. If they got caught, and it was their first time getting in trouble, and they told the court why they did it, would they still have to go to jail?”
Double holy crap. That must be what Drew saw her doing. Or trying to do. But she’d said not anything that hurt anyone. And the tense she’d used in her question sounded like she hadn’t actually bought any drugs yet, which meant neither she nor her dad would have any reason to hurt Drew.
But it was time now to stop the hypothetical. I had to get some solid answers from her, and then I had to make sure she didn’t go through with buying drugs from a dealer. Despite what she seemed to think, dealers’ product didn’t tend to be less expensive unless it was cut with something. And if they convinced her to take product on credit and she couldn’t pay it back, the way they’d extract payment could ruin her whole life.
I shifted on the bench so I was angled toward her. “Are you hoping I’ll tell you something different from what Drew said?”
Her face turned so red it was nearly purple. “You know about that?”
“I know that Drew caught you doing something illegal and tried to warn you to stop.”
Amy dug the toe of her boot into the muddy ground. “I wasn’t actually doing anything illegal yet, but Drew saw me waiting for the dealer and he somehow knew what I was planning. He made me go with him to get a cup of coffee to talk about it. He was a senior on the boys’ swim team when I was a freshman, and he helped me improve my times. He knows—knew about my scholarship to college and said if I got busted, I’d lose it.”
Holly’s friend must have seen them having coffee together. Drew’s attempts to convince her to stop trying to buy drugs could have easily been misinterpreted by someone walking by. “He was right. And I don’t think your dad would want drugs you’d gotten illegally.”
She shrugged with that practiced nonchalance that teenagers seemed to have a market on.
Drew’s presence at her meeting place couldn’t have been coincidence. Perhaps I hadn’t been entirely wrong in my theory that he’d been trying to break a story. If he’d been working on a story about a local drug dealer, that could have easily gotten him killed.
I didn’t know how they’d managed to kill him with my tour group around without anyone spotting them, but it was my best lead at the moment. It might turn out to be what broke the case if Amy could identify the person she was supposed to meet.
“I’m not going to tell anyone that you were trying to buy drugs, but I do need you to tell me more about it. It might help me figure out why someone would have killed Drew. How did you learn about where to get drugs?”
Amy picked at her fingernail, and a bead of blood appeared. She sucked it away. “I overheard a couple kids at school talking about getting high over the weekend. I asked them where I could get some. They gave me a phone number I was supposed to text with this weird string of numbers and letters. It was like a code so he’d know you weren’t a cop.”
The dealer was smart, meaning it was possible he’d come up with a way to kill Drew in the midst of all of us. He was also going to be hard to identify if Amy didn’t know who he was. He no doubt hadn’t listed his phone number under his real name. “So when you sent the code, he sent you a time and place to meet?”
“Yeah, and he said to bring cash.”
Then Drew showed up at that same spot and foiled the deal. “Do you have any idea who you were texting?”
She shook her head. She chewed at her nail bed again like she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she couldn’t. There was only so much stress a human psyche could hold inside before it had to vent somewhere.
“I think he must have seen me with Drew,” she said, “that day of the original meet-up, because it seemed like he didn’t trust me anymore after. When I tried to set up another meeting, the texts said I needed to send my schedule and they’d find me.”
My muscles knotted into little balls under my shoulder blades, sending lines of tension up into my neck. If Amy told him she’d be on the Sugarwood tour and the dealer tried to meet her there, only to see Drew again, he could have thought it was a setup. That would be reason enough to kill Drew.
“Did you text him your schedule the day of the tour?”
Amy did a single shoulder shrug. “Yeah, but he never showed.”
I wasn’t about to tell Amy that her text might have been a domino in the line that eventually got Drew killed. She couldn’t have anticipated the results of her actions, and she certainly didn’t need that extra weight to haul around.
At least I knew what to investigate next.
But before I left her and her dad alone, there was one thing we still needed to settle, because she’d admitted that even after Drew warned her away and gave her good reason for it, she’d still tried to contact the dealer again.
I got to my feet and called to Toby. “Please call your dog. I’m going to meet you at your house.”
Amy’s hand sagged down from her mouth but stayed suspended in mid-air. “You’re not going to tell my dad, are you? Because I’ll deny it.”
I rolled my eyes and made sure she saw it. “I’m not going to tell him. I’m going to take you to the pharmacy, fill your dad’s prescription, and leave my credit card on file, with instructions for them to charge it whenever he needs his medication refilled.”
The half-scared, all-ego look on her face told me she was considering saying something about how they couldn’t let me do that, that they’d manage. But the way her lips twitched like she was holding back tears again also told me how bad she wanted to accept.
I pointed a finger at her and gave her my best grown-up stare. “If you argue with me, I’ll tell your dad everything you told me today. I have a feeling you know as well as I do that he’ll believe it.”
12
Over dinner at A Salt & Battery, I confessed to Mark how I’d spent my day and flashed him my best don’t-be-mad smile. “I don’t know how to pass the information on to Chief McTavish, but I feel like I should.”
I munched another “chip” from the plate of my favorite fish and chip dinner. The restaurant was so busy tonight that we’d had to wait nearly twenty minutes for a table.
Mark rubbed the space between his eyebrows with his pointer and middle finger. “It’s going to be Alderaan versus the Death Star when he finds out you’re investigating this.”
Lovely. “I don’t suppose I’m th
e Death Star in that analogy.”
Mark’s dimple peeked out seemingly against his will. It vanished equally as fast. “You do need to tell him, though. It’ll be safer for the police to conduct the rest of the investigation.”
I added overprotective to my mental list of Mark’s major flaws, right after jealous.
After I told my mom that Mark and I were dating, the only thing she’d said other than “a doctor is a good choice” was that I should make note of all Mark’s flaws so I’d be going into any commitment with all the facts. Then if we got married, I should only pay attention to his strengths and good qualities from that point on. Essentially, my mom’s recipe for a happy marriage was go in with your eyes open and then close them.
In hindsight, that explained a lot about how my parents, both competitive high-achievers with questionable ideas about morality, had stayed happily married for nearly thirty-five years.
“He’s going to feel like I intentionally found a way to circumvent his orders. He already thinks I’m a menace.”
“Does it matter what he thinks?”
Aside from the fact that I wanted everyone to like me, it shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have being the key part of that phrase. “I guess not, but as a lawyer, having a good working relationship with the police doesn’t hurt.”
My parents’ relationship with police had always been confrontational. Perhaps that was unavoidable as a defense attorney.
Mark’s eyebrow shot up into a facial question mark. “I thought you didn’t want to be a lawyer.”
I didn’t want to be a defense attorney like my parents, and I didn’t want to practice the kind of law Tom McClanahan practiced, spending his days writing wills and contracts and dealing with property sales. And prosecuting attorneys had to make their case in court. My public speaking skills weren’t going to magically improve after all these years.
I jammed an oversized bite of fish into my mouth. Directly across from me, a uniformed officer came through the front door, shaking snow off his jacket. Shortly after I dropped Amy back off at home, winter had decided it wasn’t going to go quietly.