“What are these letters on the bottom of the label?” Sara unclipped her reading glasses from her shirt so she could see. “H-C-C. What does that mean?”
“Faith tried to run the initials through the computer, but I’m not sure how effective the search was. The picture I took wasn’t very good and …” He indicated his head as if there was something wrong with it. “Well, you know I wasn’t much help.”
“Have you ever had your vision checked?”
He gave her a puzzled look, as if she should know better. “Needing glasses isn’t my problem. I’ve had this all my life.”
“Do you get headaches when you read? Feel nauseated?”
He gave a half-shrug and a nod. She could tell she wasn’t going to get much more time on the subject.
“You should see an ophthalmologist.”
“It’s not like I can read the chart.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I can shine a light into your eyes and tell if your lens is focused.”
Her endearment hung awkwardly between them. Will stared at her. His hands were on the table. He was nervously twisting his wedding ring.
Sara scrambled to hide her embarrassment. She grabbed the pill bottle and held it up for him. “Look at the small print for me.” Will held her gaze a moment longer before looking at the bottle in her hand. “Now, stay still.” She carefully slid her glasses onto his head, then held up the pill bottle again. “Is that better?”
Will obviously didn’t want to, but he looked at the bottle anyway. He glanced back at Sara, surprised, before he looked at the bottle again. “It’s sharper. It’s still not right, but it’s better.”
“Because you need reading glasses.” She put the bottle back on the table. “Come to the ER when you get back to Atlanta. Or we can go to my old place tomorrow. You’ve probably seen the children’s clinic across from the police station. I used to have special eye charts for—” Sara felt her mouth drop open.
“What is it?”
She took back her glasses and read the fine print on the label again. “H-C-C. Heartsdale Children’s Clinic.” Sara had been considering all the illegal reasons behind the bottle of pills and none of the legal ones. “This is part of a drug trial. Elliot must be running it out of the clinic.”
“A drug what?”
She explained, “Pharmaceutical companies have to do drug trials on medicines they want to bring to market. They pay for volunteers to participate in the studies. Tommy must have volunteered, but I can’t see him meeting the protocols. If there’s one rule that governs these studies, it’s that the participants have to give informed consent. There’s no way Tommy could do that.”
Will sounded skeptical. “Are you sure that’s what this is?”
“The number at the top of the label.” She pointed to the bottle. “It’s a double-blind study. Each enrollee gets assigned a random number by the computer that says whether they get the real drug or the placebo.”
“Have you done a trial before?”
“I’ve done a few at Grady, but they were surgical or trauma related. We used IVs and injections. We didn’t have placebos. We didn’t give out pills.”
“Did it work the same way as a regular drug trial?”
“I suppose the procedures and reporting would be the same, but we were working in trauma situations. The intake protocols were different.”
“How does it work if it’s not in a hospital?”
Sara put the bottle back down on the table. “The pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to run studies so that we can have yet another cholesterol-lowering drug that works about as well as the twenty other cholesterol-lowering drugs that are already on the market.” She realized her voice was raised. “I’m sorry I’m so angry. Elliot knows Tommy. He knows he’s disabled.”
“Who’s Elliot?”
“He’s the man I sold my practice to.” Sara kept shaking her head, disbelieving. She had sold her practice to Elliot so that the children in town would be helped, not experimented on like rats. “This doesn’t make sense. Most studies don’t even involve children. It’s too dangerous. Their hormones aren’t fully developed. They process medications differently than adults. And it’s almost impossible to get parents to consent to their children being tested with experimental drugs unless they’re deathly ill and it’s a last-ditch effort to save them.”
Will asked, “What about your cousin?”
“Hare? What does he have to do with this?”
“He’s an adult doctor, right? I mean, his patients are adults?”
“Yes, but—”
“Lena told me he rents space at the clinic.”
Sara felt sucker-punched. Her first instinct was to defend Hare, but then she remembered that stupid car he’d forced her to look at in the pouring rain. She had seen a BMW 750 in an Atlanta showroom that retailed for over a hundred thousand dollars.
“Sara?”
She pressed her lips tightly together to keep herself from talking. Hare at her clinic pushing pills on her kids. The betrayal cut like glass.
Will asked, “How much money can a doctor make from running a drug trial?”
Sara had trouble forming words. “Hundreds of thousands? Millions if you go around and speak at conferences.”
“What do the patients get?”
“Participants. I don’t know. It depends on what stage the trial is in and how long you have to participate.”
“There are different phases?”
“It’s based on risk. The lower the phase, the higher the safety risk.” She explained, “Phase one is limited to around ten or fifteen people. Participants could make ten to fifteen thousand dollars depending on the trial, whether it’s in-patient or not. Phase two expands to around two or three hundred people who get four or five grand each. Phase three is less dangerous, so the money is lower. They enroll thousands of people for hundreds of dollars.” She shrugged. “The amount of money they make depends on how long the trial lasts, whether they need you for a few days or a few months.”
“How long do the big trials last?”
Sara put her hand on Allison’s notebook. No wonder the girl had been obsessed with recording her moods. “Three to six months. And you have to submit journals on your progress. It’s part of the supporting documentation to track side effects. They want to know your moods, your stress level, whether you’re sleeping and how much. You know all those warnings you hear at the end of the drug commercials? That’s straight out of the journals. If one person reports headaches or irritability, it has to be included.”
“So, if Allison and Tommy were both involved in a drug trial, their records would be at the clinic?”
She nodded.
Will took a moment to think it through. He picked up the bottle again. “I don’t think this is going to be enough to get a search warrant.”
“You don’t need one.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LENA HEARD THE STEADY SOUND OF DRIPPING WATER. SHE opened her mouth around the gag as if she could catch the drops. Her tongue was so swollen that she was afraid she’d choke on it. Dehydration kept her body from sweating. The only thing she had to fight the cold were her shivers, and her muscles were so weak they were refusing to comply. When she pressed the button for the light on her watch, the blue glow captured the red streaks in her wrist like a burning brand in her flesh.
She shifted, trying to take some of the weight off her shoulder. Sitting up was not an option. The room spun too much. Either her arms ached or her legs shot through with pain every time she tried. Because her hands and feet were tied together, every movement required a coordination that she no longer possessed. She stared into the darkness, thinking about the last time she had gone for a run outside. It had been unseasonably warm. The sun had been high on the horizon, and when she jogged around the track at the college, she could feel the heat beating down on her face, then her back. Sweat dripped off her. Her skin was hot. Her muscles were primed. If she thought about it long enough, she could almost
hear her shoes on the track.
Not shoes on a rubber track. Shoes on wooden steps.
Lena strained to hear the footsteps making their way down into the basement. There was a sliver of light underneath the door in front of her. Scraping sounds indicated something heavy was being moved—metal across concrete. Probably storage shelves. The sliver of light glowed brighter under the door. Lena closed her eyes as she listened to a key scraping in the deadbolt lock. The door opened, and Lena slowly opened her eyes, letting them adjust to the blinding fluorescents.
At first, there was a halo behind the woman’s head, but then Darla Jackson’s features came into view. Lena saw the streaked hair, the fake fingernails. Oddly, Lena’s first thought was to wonder how the woman had managed to viciously murder two people without breaking her nails. She must redo them every night.
Darla walked down the stacked cinder blocks that served as stairs to the lower part of the basement. She knelt on the floor in front of Lena, checking to make sure the rope was still tightly tied. Incongruously, she put her hand to Lena’s forehead. “Still with us?”
Lena could only stare. Even if her mouth wasn’t gagged, she doubted she could say anything to the nurse. Her throat was too dry. Her brain was having difficulty holding on to one thought at a time. She couldn’t form the words to articulate her questions. Why had Darla done this? Why had she killed Jason? Why had she killed Allison? It didn’t make any sense.
“You’re in the basement of the clinic.” Darla pressed her fingers to Lena’s wrist, for all intents and purposes acting like a caring nurse instead of a savage murderer. Hours ago, Lena had interrupted Darla cleaning blood off the bat that had slammed into the back of Jason Howell’s head. She was bleaching the gloves she had used, trying to hide evidence. And now she was checking Lena’s pulse and trying to see if she had a fever.
Darla told her, “This is some kind of bomb shelter or tornado shelter or something.” She looked at her watch a few seconds longer. “I doubt Sara remembers it’s even down here. I found it a while ago when I was looking for a place to stash some files.”
Lena glanced around the room. With the light on, she could see the concrete walls, the small metal door. Darla was right. They were in a bunker.
“I never liked Tolliver much,” the nurse said. “I know a lot of people blamed you for what happened, but he could be a prick, let me tell you.”
Lena kept staring, wondering why the woman was picking now to open her soul.
“And Sara’s no better. Thinks she walks on water because she got that medical degree. I used to babysit her when she was little. Nothing but a little know-it-all.”
Lena didn’t bother to try to disagree.
“I never wanted to kill you,” Darla said. Lena felt a laughing sound in her throat that came out more like a groan. “I just gotta get out of town, and I know you won’t let me do that if I let you go.”
She had that right.
“Daddy had a heart attack.” She sat back on her heels. “You know Frank’s my daddy, right?”
Lena felt her eyebrows go up. A flood of adrenaline let her brain think for the first time in hours. Frank had mentioned his daughter when they were driving away from Allison Spooner’s homicide scene. Did he know then that Darla had committed the crime? He sure as hell was covering up for her. Lena couldn’t even remember all the things he had hidden from Will. The photograph. Tommy’s phone. The 911 call. Was this what Frank meant when he said that Lena couldn’t see what was right in front of her? Christ, he was right. She didn’t know the truth when it was staring her in the face. How many other clues had she missed? How many other people were going to be hurt because Lena was so blind?
“Do you carry a purse?”
The question was so strange Lena thought she was hearing things.
“A pocketbook?” Darla asked. “Where do you keep your keys?”
Lena didn’t answer.
“I can’t take that piece-of-shit Accord out of town. The engine light’s been on for weeks. I thought I’d get a new one once the checks cleared, but …” She checked Lena’s pockets and found her key ring. Her house key was on there, in addition to the keys for Frank’s Town Car and Lena’s Celica. “You got any money on you?”
Lena nodded because there was no use lying.
Darla checked Lena’s back pocket and pulled out two twenties. “Well, I guess that’ll pay for gas.” She tucked the cash into the front pocket of her uniform. “I’m gonna have to ask Daddy for some money. I really hate that.” She smoothed down the pink material of her uniform. “I guess I should feel some remorse about what’s happened, but the truth is that I just don’t want to get caught. I can’t go to prison. I can’t be trapped like that.”
Lena kept staring at her.
“If they’d’a just left me alone and kept quiet, none of this would’ve happened.”
Lena tried to swallow. She could hear her heart doing that weird, flopping beat in her chest. She must be more dehydrated than she thought. Her hands and feet were numb. Her legs tingled. Her body was shutting down blood flow to the extremities in order to keep the core functioning.
“Daddy and me don’t get along too good.” Darla tucked her hand into the front pocket of her smock. “I get the feeling most days he’d prefer you was his daughter, but we don’t get to choose our family, do we?” She pulled out a syringe. “This is Versed. It’ll take some of the anxiety off and put you to sleep. I’m sorry I don’t have enough to put you to sleep for good, but this should make it easier. You’re not gonna live much longer—maybe five or six hours. That infection in your hand’s spreading pretty quick. You’re probably already feeling your heart slowing down.”
Lena felt her throat try to swallow.
“What happens is, your body starts to shut down. Your nerves go crazy. Usually there’s a lot of pain. Sometimes you’re awake for it, sometimes you’re not. Do you want the shot?”
Lena looked at the capped syringe. What kind of choice was that?
“Nobody’s gonna come save you. The clinic’s not gonna open again until next Monday, and by then the smell’s the only thing that’s gonna let them know you’re here.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I guess I should leave the door exposed so they don’t have to look much. Some of the people here ain’t been too bad.”
Lena tried to speak, to form the only word that mattered in all of this: why?
“What’s that?”
Lena groaned the word again. Her lips couldn’t meet because of the gag, but the question was clear enough to her ears. “Why?”
Darla smiled. She understood what Lena was asking, but she wasn’t about to give an answer. Instead, she repeated her offer, waving the syringe in the air. “You want it or not?”
Lena shook her head, vehement. She couldn’t black out. She couldn’t let go. Her consciousness was the only thing she had any power over.
Darla took the cap off the syringe and jabbed the needle into Lena’s arm anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SARA WAITED IN HER CAR FOR WILL TO COME DOWN FROM THE apartment over the garage. He had asked for a few minutes to change into clothes that were less dirty than the ones he’d worn all day. Sara had welcomed the time to regain her composure. Her anger had settled to a low simmer, but she would’ve thrown the car in gear and driven to Hare’s house right now if not for Will. Why was she surprised that her cousin was mixed up in something so seedy? Hare had never hidden the fact that he liked having money. Sara liked it, too, but she wasn’t willing to sell her soul in the process.
The car door opened. Will climbed behind the wheel. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and a fresh pair of jeans. He gave her an odd look. “Did you wash my clothes?”
Sara laughed at the suggestion. “No.”
“All my clothes are washed. And ironed.” He picked at the crease on his jeans. “And starched.”
She knew only one person who ironed jeans. “I’m sorry. My mother enjoys doing laundry. I can’t
explain it.”
“It’s fine,” he said, but she could tell by his strained tone that he was slightly put out.
“Did she mess anything up?”
“No.” He adjusted the seat so his head wasn’t pressed into the ceiling. “I’ve just never had anybody wash my clothes for me before.” The gearshift had a learning curve, but he figured it out quickly, putting the engine into drive. He turned off the windshield wipers as he pulled into the street. The rain had slacked off. Sara could actually see the moon peeking out between the clouds.
He said, “I was thinking about the suicide note.”
“What about it?”
“How about if Jason wrote it, and Allison was supposed to deliver it to a drop?”
“You think they were blackmailing somebody?”
“It’s possible,” Will said. “Allison may have changed her mind about the blackmail without telling Jason.”
“So, she tears off the bottom part of the note, the bit that says, ‘I want it over,’ to leave at the drop for the killer?”
“But the killer has already made up his mind to kill her. He’s followed her into the woods. We know he’s opportunistic. He used the blanket when he killed Jason. Maybe he saw the note as another opportunity.” Will glanced at Sara. “The fake suicide note was in Jason’s handwriting at the scene of Allison’s death. Except for Tommy getting mixed up in all of this, the first person who would’ve been interviewed is the boyfriend.”
She finally put it together. “The killer wanted to frame Jason for Allison’s murder. If they were trying to blackmail him, that certainly would’ve gotten Jason off his back.”
“Tell me about these drug trials. How do they work?”
“They’re complicated, and they’re not all bad.” She felt the need to tell him, “We need drug trials. We need new medicine and new breakthroughs, but pharmaceutical companies are corporations with shareholders and CEOs who like to get paid. There’s more money in finding the next Viagra than curing cancer.” She added ruefully, “And it’s a hell of a lot more profitable to treat diseases like breast cancer rather than prevent them from happening in the first place.”
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