Leave Toby be. He’ll do what he needs to do and I’m sure he knows he’ll have to accept the consequences of his actions. Right, Toby?
Liam answers this with an angry plea to Toby:
Please consider the impact your actions will have on others, Toby. You are playing with fire and you’re not the only one who’s going to get burned. Stop being a selfish prick and think about what you’re doing to other people!
Toby’s terse reply:
What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m not the enemy here. Silence is. I can’t change what’s already happened but maybe I can change the future. It has to STOP!
Bob and I both take bites of cheesecake—my last one, his penultimate bite—and savor the flavors while we digest the contents of the emails. I break the silence first.
“What do you suppose they’re talking about?”
Bob licks his lips and then dabs at them with his napkin. “Not sure. Maybe some kind of drug thing? Any idea who these people in the emails are?”
I shake my head. “His mother might know, though.” I take out my phone and dial Sharon Cochran’s number. She answers on the second ring, her voice full of hope. I feel a twinge of guilt, knowing she is expecting answers when all I have for her are more questions. At least for now.
“Did you find something?” she asks, forgoing any type of formal greeting and verifying my suspicion.
“Maybe,” I tell her, “but it isn’t anything concrete, at least not yet. I need your help in identifying some people.”
“Who?”
“Friends, or at least acquaintances, of Toby’s.”
“Oh.” She sounds disappointed. “I’ll try, but I really don’t know many of Toby’s friends, at least not the recent ones.”
“How about the names Mitchell Sawyer, or Liam Michaelson?”
Sharon doesn’t answer right away. “Well, he did mention someone named Mitch at one time, but I don’t know his last name. I’m sure I never heard of anyone named Liam. I’d remember that name.”
“In what context did Toby talk about Mitch?” I ask.
“I think he was in Toby’s fraternity.”
“Okay, how about the name Alex Parnell?”
Sharon hesitates again before answering, and then precedes her answer with a sigh. “No, sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Where are you getting these names?” she asks.
“From emails on his computer.”
“You got in!” she says, now sounding excited.
“Yes, but I’m only just starting to sort through the contents.”
“I hope you can find something that will help convince the police to take another look at his case.”
“I think I already have,” I say, smiling at Bob. “I’m with Detective Bob Richmond right now and he’s looking at the computer with me.”
“Only because you wouldn’t let me have it,” Bob grumbles sotto voce.
I widen my smile at him. “Let me get back to it, Sharon, and if I find anything else, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you, Hildy.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I tell her. “Let’s wait and see what develops.” I disconnect the call and take another look at the contents of Toby’s inbox, focusing on the email headers.
“These are all email addresses with ‘.edu’ at the end, meaning they’re university addresses. Sharon Cochran thinks Mitch is someone from Toby’s frat house. Maybe the others are, too.”
Bob is busy scribbling the names and email addresses in a small notebook he pulled from his jacket pocket. When he’s done, I say, “Now what?”
He frowns, studying my face for a few seconds. I’m not sure what he’s searching for, but apparently, he doesn’t find it, because he lets out a frustrated sigh. But then he surprises me by saying, “I don’t suppose you’d invite me over to your place?”
I give him a sly smile. “Why, Bob, I thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter Thirteen
Bob Richmond follows me to my house, and as we approach the front door I hear barking from inside. Roscoe sounds fierce and ferocious, but as soon as I have the door unlocked he greets me with his usual tail-wagging, butt-wiggling excitement. If only I could get a man to greet me that way.
After devoting a few seconds to me, Roscoe shifts his attention to Bob and sniffs him, planting his nose firmly in Bob’s crotch.
“Roscoe!” I say. “Be good.” I give Bob an apologetic look. “He’s normally very well behaved, but he does get excited when I have visitors.”
I take Bob’s jacket, hang it in the hall closet, and then give him a mini-tour of the ground floor, which consists of the living room, kitchen, a tiny guest bath that I think was once a closet, my master suite, and a dining area that is currently doing double duty as my home office space. I don’t throw dinner parties much—in fact, I’ve never thrown one—so this setup works well for me. Off the dining room/office area, behind a pair of French doors, is a screened porch.
“I have three bedrooms and a full bath upstairs, and a partially finished basement,” I tell him. “It’s a lot of space for just me, but it’s an old house, built in the nineteen twenties, and it needed a lot of work when I bought it. Still does, for that matter. I figured it would make a good investment because I like doing home improvement projects. I’m pretty handy with a tool belt, believe it or not.”
“I believe it,” Bob says, looking around. “Did you redo the kitchen?”
“I did, though not by myself, of course. I also created the master bedroom and bath on this floor. That space was originally a butler pantry, a laundry room, and an enclosed porch. I hired people to do the major stuff, like the electrical, plumbing, framing, and drywall, but I love doing woodwork, and I trimmed out all the windows, doors, and walls. And I installed the hardwood floor in the bedroom and the tile floor in the bathroom.”
“Impressive,” Bob says, eyeing some of my woodwork.
“One of my foster fathers owned a construction company,” I explain. “He would take his two sons with him to his work sites on weekends and through the summer. When I complained that he should take me along, too, he did, and he worked my butt off. I think he figured I’d get tired of it and ask to be left home, but when he saw that I liked the work, he took me under his wing and taught me how to do a lot of stuff.” I pause, smiling with the memories.
Sounding embarrassed, Bob says, “I haven’t done much with my house, and it shows.”
“It’s never too late to start.”
He shrugs and then changes the subject. “It sounds like not all of your foster family situations were horrible.”
“No, just most of them. I had two that were nice. One was with the Davidsons, Kyle and Jenny. Kyle is the one who taught me the construction stuff. I spent three years with them, but when I was a sophomore in high school, they were killed in a car accident.”
“That must have been hard for you.”
“It was,” I admit. “Their sons went to live with an aunt in New York, and I got placed in a group home. I stayed in the group home until I graduated.”
“And the other good home?”
“That was with the Muellers, Olga and Dietrich. They were an older, childless couple I was placed with when I was nine. They had two other foster girls besides me, one who was five and one who was seven. We got along well, and the Muellers were sweet. But six months into my stay there, Dietrich had a stroke and ended up paralyzed on one side. He could barely do anything for himself, and the doctors told Olga she should place him in a nursing home. She wouldn’t hear of it and brought him home. But she couldn’t care for all of us kids and Dietrich, so we all went elsewhere.”
“Did you stay in touch with them?”
I shake my head, feeling a familiar guilt wash over me. “I was too busy feeling sorry for myself and trying to survive to worry about the Muellers. I tried to get in touch with them when I was in college but found out they had both died the year before. Olga had had a heart atta
ck, and without her to care for him, Dietrich went to a nursing home. He died two months later, probably from a broken heart.”
Bob is looking at me with a pitying expression I don’t much care for, so I quickly change the subject. “Why don’t you have a seat in the living room and I’ll get you something to drink. What’s your poison? I have some white wine, some red wine, some vodka, some sodas, some whisky, and coffee. Oh, and a six-pack of beer. I don’t remember the brand because I don’t drink beer. It was a gift from a neighbor.”
“How about some ice water?” Bob says. “I’m on call.”
“Right, I forgot,” I say, and I head into the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of white wine, get Bob a tall glass of ice water, and go back to the living room. I expect to find him seated in one of the chairs, or on the couch, but instead I find him standing in front of my fireplace, looking at the three pictures I have on the mantel.
“Family?” he says, nodding toward the photos, all of which feature me and one other person.
“Sort of. That’s Sarah,” I say, pointing to the first one. “She was a foster sibling of mine. We were in the same group home for two years, and we’ve stayed close. And this is Tamela, also a foster sib from the group home and my very talented seamstress. This one,” I pick up the only picture of a child, “is my neighbor’s daughter, P.J., the one Roscoe is in love with.” Roscoe, who is lying on the floor, pricks his ears and thumps his tail a few times at hearing mention of his name.
Bob looks at the pictures, then at me. “You don’t have any blood relatives?”
“Nah,” I say with a dismissive wave of my hand. “Just my grandparents, assuming they’re still alive.”
Bob gives me another of those pained, sympathetic looks.
“Hey, don’t be feeling sorry for me,” I say, thrusting his glass of water at him, feeling a little irritated. “I managed well enough, and I have foster siblings that I call family. Let’s get back to the laptop, shall we?”
I grab the computer from my briefcase and settle in on the couch with it on my lap. I take a big gulp of wine before setting my glass aside and then opening the computer to wake it up. Bob sits next to me and I turn the computer away from his curious eyes while I type in my password.
“Where should we go next?” I ask him once the desktop is in view.
“Let’s take a look at Toby’s Internet history.”
I tap the appropriate icon and launch the web browser.
Fortunately for us, either Toby wasn’t worried about maintaining a history of his net surfing, or he was neglectful in limiting and erasing it. We follow his trail of web-based breadcrumbs to several sites. Most of them are of little interest, but there is one that gives me pause, and it’s a site he bookmarked. It shows a satellite photo of a section of wooded acreage with a creek running through the middle of it.
“I wonder why he was so interested in this aerial map?” Bob says.
“I’m not sure why, but I bet it has something to do with this,” I say, zooming in on an area. “Does that look familiar?”
We are looking down on a wooden footbridge that crosses the creek. There is a path, though not a well-worn one, leading to the bridge on either side. Following the trail, I see that it leads to a wider, more established trail on one end, and into the woods on the other end. Something about the place looks vaguely familiar to me, but after a moment of trying to figure out what it is I chalk it up to my familiarity with Toby’s renderings of the area.
“That’s the bridge in Toby’s picture,” Bob says.
I dig the drawing out of my briefcase and show it to him. “Looks like it to me. Clearly it meant something to Toby. Otherwise, why did he draw that bridge so many times?”
“His mother doesn’t have any ideas about it?”
I shake my head.
“Maybe the bridge was some kind of rendezvous spot for drug deals,” Bob surmises.
I don’t really think this, nor am I convinced Toby was doing any drug deals. But I want to ease Bob into my line of thinking rather than get into an argument this early, so I shift the topic slightly. “I read in the paper a while back that labs can trace the source for a lot of these drugs by analyzing the contents and their specific ratios. Sometimes they can determine who provided it and where it came from. Did you guys try to trace the heroin that killed Toby?”
Bob frowns. “Not yet, but we did turn the syringe in to the crime lab here. I don’t know if Arnie—he’s the local lab rat in the ME’s office—has done any in-depth analysis on the trace we found. He might have sent it on to Madison.”
“You haven’t been putting much effort into figuring out anything about this boy’s death, have you?” No sooner do the words leave my mouth than I want to take them back.
Bob leans away from me, looking irritated. “There hasn’t been a reason to,” he says defensively. “The kid’s cause of death was obvious. He was found in an area known to be a hangout for druggies. And he had some recent changes in his life that pointed toward him being depressed.”
I’m in it now, so I go ahead full steam. “Even though he had no tracks, no evidence of prior IV drug use, no evidence of any drug use, for that matter, you didn’t think it was suspicious that the kid OD’d that way?”
“He’s not the only person to overdose on the first time shooting up,” Bob says, clearly riled. “You’d be surprised how many people die after their first shoot-up. Sometimes it’s because they OD, but sometimes it’s because the crap they’ve cooked is so toxic and mixed with so much other junk that it basically poisons them. Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of fentanyl mixed in with the heroin, and it’s fifty times more potent. Is it common to have something like this happen on the first use? Not common, perhaps, but not rare or unusual, either. And there were no signs of a struggle at the scene. If the kid was injected by someone else against his will, don’t you think there’d be evidence of a scuffle?” Apparently, this is a rhetorical question, because he doesn’t give me so much as a second to answer. “Before you go judging me or anyone else on this case, keep that in mind, okay?”
“Okay,” I say with an apologetic smile, hoping to damper the flames a bit. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to rile you. I just want to get to the truth.”
Bob studies my face, scowling at me as I struggle to keep my expression appropriately and believably contrite. An awkward silence builds between us, and as I’m scrambling to come up with a way to break it and regain some of the camaraderie we had earlier, my front door opens and P.J. walks in. Roscoe hops up and hurries over to greet her, tail wagging.
P.J. stops short when she sees Bob seated on the couch. She buries her hands in the fur around Roscoe’s neck and stares at Bob as if he’s some alien creature she’s never seen before.
I hand the laptop to Bob—a conciliatory gesture I hope will restore the peace—and make the introductions.
“P.J., this is Bob Richmond. He’s a friend of mine. Bob, this is my neighbor P.J., the one I told you about.”
P.J. glances at me for the briefest of seconds, then she releases her grip on Roscoe’s ruff and closes the distance between herself and Bob. Stopping a foot or so in front of him, she extends her right hand. “Hi, I’m P.J., which stands for Priscilla Jean, but I hate that name, so please don’t use it.” She rolls her eyes dramatically with the word hate.
Bob smiles and shakes her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, P.J.”
P.J. withdraws her hand and asks Bob, “How was your dinner?”
“Very nice, thank you.”
P.J. turns to look at me. “How fun.”
“Roscoe is more than ready for a walk,” I say pointedly.
P.J. walks back to the door, grabbing Roscoe’s leash and hooking it up. Seconds later, they’re both gone.
“Cute kid,” Richmond says.
“Sometimes I think she’s only pretending to be a kid. She’s very intelligent, very perceptive, and full of energy. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends her own age, which is worr
isome, but she also doesn’t seem depressed or lonely. I think she’s just an old soul in a young body.”
Richmond sets the laptop on the coffee table and leans back into the couch. “You’re an interesting woman, Hildy Schneider.”
“I hope you mean that in a good way,” I say, biting my lower lip.
“Mostly,” Bob says with a wink, one corner of his mouth twitching into a half smile. “I’ll tell you what. Seeing as how you aren’t going to let this case go, and you might be right that we dismissed it a bit too soon, I’m willing to make a deal with you.”
“I like deals,” I say. “What have you got to offer?”
“You turn this laptop over to me so I can get some professionals to look it over.”
I give him a skeptical look. “Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do, for one thing.”
Playing to my sense of wrong and right is a smart move on his part, and I wonder if it’s intentional. “And what do I get out of this so-called deal?”
“You can come with me to the police station and I will show you everything we have in the file on this case.”
“Really?” I say, both suspicious and excited. “Isn’t that against some rule you cops have?”
“It’s a bit of a gray area,” he admits. “But it’s considered a closed case and there’s no arrest record, so technically it’s a public record, including the coroner’s report. Of course, you’d have to fill out a bunch of forms and wait an eternity to get those reports, but I think there’s a way around that. Have you ever done a police ride-along?”
“You mean when a civilian rides in a squad car with a cop to see what they do, that sort of thing?” Bob nods. “I’ve heard of it but haven’t done it. I thought it was usually done with a beat cop, someone on the street.”
“It can be, but detectives do them, too. You’ll have to sign a release and submit to a background check.”
Needled to Death Page 10