Do No Harm

by Christina McDonald

  His wife.

  * * *

  NATE DROVE FAST, his lights flashing. He pulled up to Stevie McGraw’s home, a rusting double-wide trailer parked on an end lot in Mill Creek. The trailer had an air of neglect about it. The tiny yard was overgrown, shingles falling from the roof, the yellow siding peeled and cracking.

  The perfect hideout for a teenage scumbag, Nate thought unkindly.

  He hammered on the door. Stevie opened it and scowled at Nate, black hair tangled in a gnarled rat’s nest. He looked weird without his horn-rimmed glasses, younger somehow.

  “I need your help.”

  “Why would I wanna help a cop?”

  “Because I can make those possession charges from a few weeks ago disappear.”

  Stevie smiled widely. “In that case, come on in, man. Mi casa es su casa.”

  The trailer was a mess—stacks of newspapers on the dining table, dishes in the sink, clothes strewn across the furniture. The faint smell of pot permeated everything.

  Stevie crossed to a woman asleep on the couch and pulled a blanket to her chin. He caught Nate watching and shrugged, grabbing his glasses from the coffee table and shoving them on. “My mom has MS. Today’s a bad day. Anyway, what do you want my help with?”

  Nate tried not to look surprised. “I need some video footage enhanced. Do you know anybody who has that sort of technology?”

  “Why don’t you take it to your guys?”

  “Come on, I’m sure you know people who have technology capability five times better than my guys’.”

  “Let me have a look,” Stevie said.

  Nate emailed Stevie the file from his phone and followed him down a narrow hallway. They passed a room with black light bleeding under the door.

  Stevie shook his head. “Don’t look over there.”

  In contrast to the rest of the house, Stevie’s bedroom was surprisingly neat. Pushed against the far wall was a single bed made with military precision. A white bedside table held a couple of cute little cacti and a stack of books by French poet Charles Baudelaire. Nate squinted to read the title of the top one: The Flowers of Evil.

  Stevie’s desk took up most of the rest of the room, with two extra-large monitors, a couple of huge speakers, and a sleek MacBook Pro.

  Yesterday Nate would’ve bet his annual salary that this stuff was stolen. But today? Shit, what did he know?

  Next to the desk Nate spotted a couple of plastic storage containers, each meticulously labeled: EXTENSION CORDS, CABLES, PHONE CHARGERS.

  Pulling the old Nokia phone from his pocket, Nate held it up and pointed at the containers. “Do you have a charger for this?”

  Stevie looked at the phone. “Probably.”

  He popped the lid off one of the storage bins and rifled through, finally tugging out a cord that was precisely wrapped into a neat figure eight. He found an empty socket and plugged the phone in for Nate, then sat in front of his computer.

  Stevie’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he clicked into some fancy-looking video software. He opened the file to the time stamp Nate had given him.

  “There!” Nate pointed at the screen. “Can you see what she’s giving him?”

  Stevie clicked the mouse. The grainy shot gradually cleared. He zoomed in and did the same again. Eventually a pixelated but clear shot emerged. The paper Emma was holding out to Gabe was a signed prescription for OxyContin from Allegiance Health Clinic.

  Tightness banded around Nate’s ribs as all the pieces started clicking neatly into place.

  He thought about Emma meeting Gabe this morning. Her lie about picking Ben up at Target. He thought about the business card from Allegiance Health Clinic that had been found on Violeta Williams’s body and how she’d died of the same drug used on Santiago Martinez. He thought about the prescriptions being signed by Dr. Wallington and Emma’s reaction when he’d found the briefcase.

  And then he thought of Julia.

  Birdhouse pills.

  Tell Emma.

  Nate suddenly felt very, very naïve for thinking it was just an affair that Emma was involved in.

  Someone from the clinic was fraudulently signing prescriptions for opioids.

  Someone who needed money fast.

  Someone connected to Ben, who was connected to Martinez, who was connected to Williams. It was all tied together. The drugs. The murders.

  And he knew. Maybe on some level he’d known all along.

  Emma was involved in all of it.

  CHAPTER 37

  MY CELL PHONE VIBRATED.

  Not my usual phone. My secret one.

  Moira glanced up from her book, sending me a questioning look over Josh’s sleeping form. She’d heard it.

  I made a phone-call motion with my thumb and pinkie and stepped into the hall. In the accessible bathroom, I locked the door and pulled my secret phone from my back pocket, quickly returning Gabe’s call.

  He was speaking so fast I could barely understand what he was saying.

  “Gabe, slow down!” I hissed.

  “Your husband was here, at my gas station! He looked through the video surveillance recording!”

  “Shit.” I sat on the toilet, my legs weak.

  I’d planned to tell Nate I’d paid for Josh’s treatment with money I’d saved from my parents’ life insurance. He would be mad, but not you’ve-been-illegally-selling-oxy mad.

  But if Nate had seen the video footage of me giving Gabe the signed prescriptions, there was no way he’d believe that.

  I felt the silken threads of the web I’d created tightening around me.

  “That briefcase of Violeta’s,” I said. “He got it open.”

  A moan, sharp and barbed, came from Gabe. “What was inside?”

  “Drugs and cash. And an old Nokia phone. What was on that phone? Did you text her on it?”

  “No. But Ben did.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but they definitely arranged for Vi and me to meet at Target and then meet you at the warehouse.” A strangled moan rose from Gabe’s throat. “This is a fucking nightmare, Emma! I can’t go to jail.”

  “Shut up, let me think,” I snapped.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t regret it. Not a thing. The prescriptions I’d written, the drugs I’d helped sell, every single lie I’d told—they had all made it possible to pay the $98,000 I needed for Josh’s treatment today.

  But now Nate knew.

  And he would be coming here looking for more answers.

  * * *

  I WAITED outside the hospital entrance until Nate’s cruiser pulled up. The sky was now a muted shade of pewter. The air was sharp with cold and frost, smelling of woodsmoke and the copper-kettle scent of impending snow.

  My fingers tingled with nervous energy as Nate strode toward me. All that was left to do was tell him the truth. Josh was his son, and he was a good father.

  Nate stopped in front of me, his eyes hard and closed off.

  “It was you all along,” he finally said.

  I neither confirmed nor denied it. I simply turned and strode inside, tossing over my shoulder, “Let’s find a private room.”

  I passed the towering Christmas tree in reception and headed toward the emergency room. I pushed open the door to an empty family room, the same room where Dr. Palmer had told us about Josh’s diagnosis just a month ago.

  I sat on the couch, but Nate remained standing.

  “Tell me.”

  It was too late to hide anything, and to be honest I was tired of all the lies. So I told him the truth.

  “I set up a drug ring selling oxycodone to make enough money to pay for Josh’s immunotherapy treatment.”

  “Is that how you got the ninety-eight thousand?”

  “Yes. When I tried to start the insurance claim for Josh’s treatment, they told me they would only pay for his T-cells to be harvested, not reprogrammed. They said I had to pay the ninety-eight thousand dollars directly to the hospital for him to b
e able to get the infusion.”

  Nate blinked, his mouth pressed into a grim line. “So you stole prescription pads from your clinic and forged your colleagues’ signatures.”

  His words struck me, staccato bursts that smacked me hard across each cheek.

  “Yes. There was no other way to get that much money that fast.”

  “It wasn’t Julia.”

  “Julia did steal oxy samples. She’s addicted to it for her chronic pain. But, no, she didn’t take the prescription pads.”

  “And Ben?”

  “He’s helping me.”

  A muscle in Nate’s cheek flexed as he put together the pieces he knew. “At the warehouse, right? That’s where you’re making pills.”

  I hesitated.

  “Someone I know saw you with Ben there. I figure that’s where you’re doing it. All these autopsy reports on overdoses I’ve seen lately, the one thing they have in common is oxy with elevated levels of fentanyl. Where’d you get the fentanyl?”

  “I didn’t get any fentanyl,” I objected.

  Nate pulled out a phone—the old Nokia from the briefcase—and read a text out: “Meet Gabe at Target in Skamania. He’ll take you to warehouse to talk to Emma. I’ll get fentanyl from the doc.”

  I frowned. Had he meant for the doc, not from the doc?

  And then I remembered: Ben had said I wasn’t the only medical professional he’d worked with.

  “That doc isn’t me,” I said. “I didn’t give them the fentanyl. Ben already had it. I just did the OxyContin prescriptions.”

  Nate’s gaze was skeptical.

  Despair, black and sticky, clawed at me.

  “I’m telling you the truth!” I insisted. “I stole the prescription pads from the clinic. I took them to Gabe and asked for help selling the scripts because he used to deal. He put me in contact with a woman named Violeta Williams, Ben’s girlfriend. But I never got any fentanyl.”

  “What happened to her?”

  I chewed my lip, thinking about the red scarf I’d hidden under the spare tire in my car. It was nearly time to use it.

  “After I left, she snorted some fentanyl thinking it was cocaine. Gabe called me in a panic saying she was overdosing. I told him to take her to the hospital. I thought that was the end of it until I saw on the news she’d been found in the river.”

  Nate looked horrified, his face the gray of the very ill. “How could you keep that from me? You knew I was investigating her death. Hers and Santiago Martinez’s. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “I swear on my life, Nate, I have no idea. I never met the guy.”

  Nate rubbed his hands over his face. When he dropped them and his eyes landed on mine they were dark, repulsed. He shook his head. “I thought I knew you.”

  I stiffened. “You do know me. I’m your wife, the mother of your son, and I will do anything to make sure he lives. Don’t act like this hasn’t changed everything. It has. Because of me, Josh will live. Me! I saved him.”

  “You need to stop this.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Emma, people are dying!”

  “Regrettable collateral damage. Ben messed up the dosage, but it won’t happen again. We are helping more people than we’re hurting.”

  “What, it’s okay if a few people die, as long as you’re helping some others?”

  “Not just others, I’m helping Josh. Our son. He’s my priority.”

  I moved to stand directly in front of Nate, taking his hands in mine. “If I hadn’t done this, Josh would’ve died.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. I’ve read the literature on children with his type of leukemia. I’ve read the statistics on recovery. This treatment is the only one on the market that holds any hope. He would have died, Nate.”

  Nate shook his hands free and stepped away from me. “You know this isn’t right.”

  “It isn’t ideal. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t right,” I corrected him. “Sometimes we have to do the wrong thing for the right reason. Maybe it was wrong to sign those prescriptions, but Josh will live because I did. The ends justify the means. Everything I’ve done is for the right reason. You know that.”

  Nate pressed his lips tight together. “No. How we get to our goal is just as important as achieving it.”

  “Then call me as a bad person, I don’t care. I don’t regret anything I had to do to save Josh’s life. At least I did something. I’m not sitting here helpless, watching him die.”

  Nate pinched the skin between his eyebrows.

  “The overdose rate would’ve increased with or without me,” I said. “I’m helping people who have genuine pain. Sometimes they’ve been cut off by doctors, or their insurance doesn’t cover it, or they can’t afford it. These people aren’t overdosing—”

  “Except the people who took the pills with too much fentanyl in them,” Nate cut me off viciously.

  “I’m helping people,” I repeated.

  “You’re a drug dealer hiding behind a white coat.”

  I bristled at that. Ben was a drug dealer. Gabe was a drug dealer. I wasn’t dealing anything. I was helping people, and in the process saving my son.

  “Josh is all that matters.”

  “You think our son’s life is more important than somebody else’s?”

  I couldn’t believe he was even asking me that.

  “Yes,” I exclaimed. “Josh is the most important thing. He’s why I did this. For him, for us. For my family.”

  Nate’s hands clenched at his sides. “Saving Josh won’t bring your parents back.”

  Silence cracked through the room, and sharp nerves needled my stomach.

  “Are you done?” he asked after a minute. “Is it over?”

  I didn’t answer right away. “Josh could still die. We have to make sure he gets every treatment he needs.”

  Nate stared at me like he didn’t recognize me. “So that’s a no?”

  “It’s an ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  He shook his head again. “Everyone always thinks their thing is the right thing, but we can’t all be doing the right thing. That’s why we have laws.”

  “Are you going to turn me in?”

  Nate’s mouth flopped open, then closed. “I… I don’t know. I don’t know what the right thing to do is here.”

  I crossed the room, ran the leaves of the wilted spider plant through my fingertips. When I spoke, my voice was cold and harsh. “How would turning me in be the right thing? My career would be over, we’d lose my health insurance, I’d go to jail. You think they’ll promote you to lieutenant after finding out your wife was running an opioid drug ring? And, what, you conveniently never knew? Some detective.” I snorted derisively. “We’d never be able to pay for any of Josh’s treatments. He could die and it would be your fault. That wouldn’t be the right thing!”

  Nate’s face had gone an even starker shade of gray. He searched my face, his eyes tortured.

  “Emma. Shit!” He collapsed into the couch. “What have you gotten us into?”

  Nate’s phone beeped, and he glanced at it. “I don’t suppose you know anything about a girl named Beatrice Flores?”

  I tried to place the name.

  He held his phone out to me. On the screen was a mug shot of a girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with dark hair and patches of lighter skin on her face and hands.

  Dread bloomed black and bilious in my stomach.

  Beatrice Flores. The girl with vitiligo who’d seen me at the clinic.

  “Her body was found this morning in the forest over by the old mill warehouse,” he said.

  I could no longer get enough oxygen into my lungs. Pain circled my chest, swirling and unbearable.

  I’d told Ben she’d seen me.

  I slumped onto the couch next to Nate. A misty veil of tears covered my eyes, turning the fronds of the plant beside me to bony, accusatory fingers. Everything was falling apart. I was losing control of all of it.

  How
do you defuse a bomb of your own making?

  Nate knelt in front of me. “Tell me, Em,” he said urgently. “Tell me what you know. We can get through this. We can still do the right thing.”

  I looked into Nate’s eyes and realized what he was offering me. An olive branch. A slim, tenuous branch to grasp onto. One he would use to pull me out of this.

  He needed a fall guy. Someone to blame for everything. And I would give it to him.

  I leaned forward, my breath hot against his cheek, and whispered one word.

  “Ben.”

  CHAPTER 38

  NATE BACKED AWAY FROM EMMA, his fingers already on his phone.

  “What are you going to do?” Emma asked. Her voice was shrill, the sharp pitch of an out-of-tune violin.

  The truth was, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He shook his head, twisted the doorknob, but just as he was about to leave she called him back.

  “You need to trust me, Nate.”

  He looked at his wife, understanding that her words were a warning. Emma’s face betrayed no emotion. She was cool and calm, retreating behind the cold mask he’d been seeing more and more. No softness, no vulnerability.

  He wanted to trust her. He always had. He’d trusted her empathy and her compassion, her desire to help others. He’d trusted what a wonderful, devoted mother and wife she was. He just couldn’t reconcile those parts of her with what she’d done.

  The ends justify the means.

  But what if they never reached the end?

  Emma had done something wrong. But could he really turn her in to Hamilton and Greene when she’d done it for the right reason? Could he risk Josh getting even sicker because they couldn’t pay for his treatments, watch her get arrested, ruin her career, his career, their marriage, their family?

  He backed away from her.

  “Nate?” Emma drew an X across her chest and pointed at him. We’re in this together, she was saying. Tell me you still love me.

  She needed reassurance. She needed him on her side.

  Nate opened his mouth to reply, to say something, but he realized he couldn’t. There were no words left to say.

  * * *

  NATE DROVE too fast away from the hospital, the familiar mantra ricocheting like golf balls through his head: