by AR Simmons
She ought to be happy with that, he assured himself as he punched in the familiar number.
A dozen rings later he heard a familiar voice: “Breton County Sheriff’s Department.”
“JR,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.”
“Richard?”
“One and the same. How are things in Michigan?”
“Fair to middling. How are you and that pretty lady getting along down south?”
“Fine. She’s a graduate assistant at the college here and … I’m working steady. Things are good.”
“What kind of work you doing?”
Richard looked at the crusted grease under his fingernails, and then thought about the favor he was getting ready to ask. “A little investigative work actually.”
“You can’t have a P. I. license … yet. You working for an investigator?”
“Something like that.”
He was getting too good at lying.
“Look, JR, I’m actually working in a grease pit, but I’m also looking into something for a friend. I really need a favor. If I give you some raw data from a tox screen, do you think you could find out how … I guess you would say how incapacitated a person would be and for how long?”
“I can’t do anything like get someone to work up an official analysis. You know that.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I just want generic information.”
“What you got?”
“A combination of Valium and alcohol.”
“Whoa. That could get you dead.”
He gave JR the numbers that Adams had told him, and listened to the hanging silence on the other end of the line.
“Richard, tell me what this is about.”
“Truth? The suspect in a crime that took a considerable amount of organization to pull off and cover up had those levels in her blood when picked up by the police. What I need to know is how capable she could have been given the amount of stuff in her system.”
The silence hung again.
“The cop on the case gave me those numbers himself, JR. I’m in regular contact with him.”
“Then why don’t you have him do what you’re asking me to do?”
“Because he doesn’t know me like you do.”
Again the silence hung in the air.
“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch sometime this afternoon or tomorrow.”
Richard hung up with the feeling that more separated him from JR than mere distance. Friends didn’t push friends, and that’s what he was doing, but he was constrained by circumstances to call in all the markers he could. The problem was, when it came to his friend, JR had all the markers. He was the one who had tracked down the evidence that had resulted in Richard’s pardon.
Molly knocked at the back door, peered in, and then entered without waiting for him to let her in. She handed him a slip of paper.
“That’s as much as I can remember,” she said, taking a seat at the table. “I’m a little hazy on parts of it, but I think it’s right. I put parenthesis marks around the part I’m not too sure of. All the times are estimates.”
“This is good,” he said as he quickly scanned the list, his mind more on what he was going to tell her than on her efforts to reconstruct her consumption of food and drink on the day her daughter disappeared.
“Look, Molly. There’s something we need to talk about. You’ve known for some time that Jill isn’t too comfortable with what I’m doing for you.”
“I know she don’t like me, Mr. Carter. But I don’t think I can do anything about that.”
“It’s not you. It’s the situation she doesn’t like. It reminds her of something that happened to us before we came here.”
“What was it?”
“I’d just as soon not talk about it. The point is that she doesn’t like it when she comes home and finds you here or finds out that you’ve been here talking with me.”
Molly reddened. “She thinks we—she’s jealous of me?”
“No. She just doesn’t like the situation.”
“I never meant to be no problem for you,” she said, turning to look out the window. “Does this mean you’re going to quit?”
“No, but we can’t visit here at the house.”
“Then she wouldn’t want you over at my house either. That would be worse, wouldn’t it? What if I only talked to you when she was here? That way, she would see that I ain’t interested in anything but getting my baby back.”
“No, it’s just best if you don’t come over anymore. I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll meet in a public place, let’s say a restaurant. We’ll have coffee or something so that they won’t throw us out, and … we’ll make it a regular thing. You know that little place over on Madison close to The Quick Lube? Let’s meet there whenever either of us has something we want to talk about. It will be like I’m reporting to you.”
Molly nodded self-consciously.
“Okay,” she said, obviously embarrassed. “Then I guess I’d better be going before she comes home and gets upset.”
Richard followed her to the door. “Molly, Jill isn’t usually like this. She’s really very compassionate.”
Molly nodded again. “Don’t keep no secrets from her, Mr. Carter. If we’re going to meet at that café, you need to tell her. Me and Pat got in trouble by doing that—keeping things from each other, I mean. It ain’t a good idea.”
“Of course I’ll tell her, Molly,” he said, dismissing the idea that Jill could be jealous of someone like Molly, or anyone for that matter.
After seeing Molly out, he took the paper she had given him to the kitchen table and read through it. According to her account, she had eaten almost nothing: a sandwich before going to work, and then only peanuts that evening at the bar. At home, she had unsweetened tea from a pitcher kept in the refrigerator (she had made it herself earlier in the day). However, that night she consumed four mixed drinks, one at nine, one at eleven, and the third and fourth in quick succession at Tinsley’s apartment. The drink at eleven was enclosed in parentheses, signifying that she wasn’t sure about the time. She took two Tylenol tablets when she arrived home.
If she was telling the truth (and had remembered correctly), then there were four possibilities: Katie put Valium in the tea, someone at the bar (Bobby McComb?) had slipped it into one of her drinks, Tinsley had slipped it to her at his apartment, or she had mistakenly taken it in place of the Tylenol. He discounted the sandwich or the peanuts, unable to imagine how anyone could spike either of those.
He dismissed Katie as a suspect out of hand because such a thing seemed beyond the capabilities of the slow-witted woman. Likewise, he dismissed a mix up of Valium and Tylenol. That left Tinsley, or an unknown person at the bar, as the perpetrator.
The practicability of drugging Molly in order to take the baby made him uncomfortable. He tried to imagine a plan that would work. A key to the door had to be obtained beforehand, or the door had to be left unlocked by Katie, who was subsequently killed to silence her. The sticking point was Molly, who would have to be drugged enough to knock her out, but not until she got back home. There were too many moving parts, and too much that had to go as planned for it to work.
Then, there was the fact that all the people who could have drugged Molly seemed to be men. He couldn’t imagine a reason for Tinsley or McComb to want a baby. He could imagine Katie wanting the child, but he couldn’t imagine her being cool enough to conceal her connection to the crime.
No wonder Adams doesn’t buy any of this crap, he thought morosely.
A slamming car door told him Jill was home. He got to the door just as she struggled in overloaded with groceries.
“Is there more in the car?” he asked as he took part of the load from her.
“No. I brought it all,” she said, without leaning forward to give him the customary kiss.
“Why didn’t you wait and let me help you with that stuff?” he asked, following her to the kitchen.
“I could manage,” she
said as she bent to open the crisper. “How was your day?”
“Busy. Everyone in town must have seen the ad for our special.”
No reply. She hadn’t inquired about his workday.
“I told Molly that she shouldn’t come over anymore,” he said.
“Did you blame that on me,” said Jill, pretending to rearrange the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.
“Of course not. I mean I told her that you were uncomfortable with it, but I didn’t blame you.”
“How did she respond?”
“I think it embarrassed her.”
“What about me? How do you think I feel when I find another woman with my husband every time I come home?” she said, standing up with her back to him.
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t be jealous of someone like her. What I’m doing with her is strictly business.”
“I never thought you were having an affair, Richard. However, I am jealous of the time you spend with her.”
“The only time I spend with her is when she comes over to ask if I’ve found out anything about her baby,” he said. “We don’t go anywhere together. We don’t do anything. There’s nothing between us that you could possibly object to.”
“There is! The child is what you share. She is obsessed and so are you.”
“And what? You can’t compete with that? That’s silly.”
“You’re missing the point, Richard. She doesn’t think you will get her child back, she knows it. And you know it too. That scares me.”
“No, Jill. I’m not sure of that at all.”
“Yes, you are—but it won’t happen.”
“I know that Mancie is … probably … not alive, Jill, but I hope she is.”
“You can’t afford to hope too much, Richard. Please don’t.”
“I’m not as fragile as you think.”
This time when he tried to embrace her, she came to him.
“And I’m not as strong as you think I am either,” she said, burrowing her face into his shoulder. “I don’t want to lose you.”
He thought she was being melodramatic. “That’s silly,” he soothed. “Molly’s only a friend. That’s all she could ever be.”
“I’m your friend too, Richard.”
“What we have together is the most important thing in my life.”
“When things are important, you must take care of them,” she said earnestly. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“I will. I promise.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to disengage from her. It only made you lie to me.”
He had lied, but it still irked him that she was bringing it up again.
“I’ll keep it separate from us,” he promised.
“Impossible,” she said, putting her hand on his chest as a signal for him to release her. “Do what you have to. I still don’t want her in my house. It doesn’t appear proper.”
“Proper? You’re worried about what people will think?”
“Appearances matter.”
“Well, the truth is good enough for me,” he said.
The phone rang.
“The appearance must be the truth,” she insisted, as she went to answer it.
“JR?” she said, casting him a questioning glance. “No, he didn’t, but I just got home. Here he is.”
As she handed him the phone, she mouthed, “What’s going on?”
He held up his hand, signaling he would explain later.
•••
After the call, he went into the kitchen where Jill was busy with dinner.
“I thought I ought to find out about the Valium in her blood,” he began, trying to draw Jill into a conversation. “Adams let me see the results of the tox screen and that was it, so I called JR.”
“Couldn’t Mr. Adams get in trouble for that? Surely, it’s against procedure.”
“He didn’t give me actual copies of anything, no evidence or anything like that.”
“Why?”
“I have found a few things that he hadn’t. Maybe he’s hoping I can help him figure things out.”
“It doesn’t seem right. In fact, it’s bizarre.”
He shrugged. “He’s odd. He warned me right away not to withhold information, but I think it’s a tacit agreement for us to exchange information.”
“He’s using you, and I don’t trust him.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Are you forgetting the way he acted when he arrested you? You’re going to get in trouble for this. I just know it.”
“For what? Asking questions? I don’t think so,” he mumbled dismissively as he studied the figures that JR had read to him.
“Jill, all JR gave me was the normal dosage and the half-life of Diazepam. That’s the generic term for Valium. You’re good with math. Do you think you could you help me make sense of it?”
“No,” she said. “I have to fix dinner.”
Irritated that she thought her domestic chore was more important than what he was doing, Richard nonetheless decided not to say anything that might disturb the equilibrium they had regained. It never occurred to him that his condescending termination of their conversation had hurt her feelings.
He went to the computer optimistically thinking that he would soon have a bead on just when Molly had taken the Valium. The concept of chemical half-life was simple, but counterintuitive: the rate of drug metabolism is a geometrical progression rather than arithmetical one. If the body can rid itself of half a drug in an hour, that doesn’t mean that it can rid itself of all of it in two hours. Drugs wash away in diminishing amounts but at a constant rate percentage wise. If after an hour, half remains, then after two hours, one quarter is left, after three hours, an eighth, and so forth until the amount remaining becomes negligible. Everything being equal, that should make it easy to determine time of dosage.
At first, he thought he could simply use JR’s numbers to work backwards from the tox screen levels to pinpoint the time Molly had ingested the drug. Then he remembered her alcohol consumption and wondered how that had altered the metabolic rate? He guessed it would have impeded it, but wasn’t sure, and had no idea how much. Then he noticed a footnote describing the variations in individual metabolic rates. Although Valium’s average half-life was twenty-four hours, it could vary from twenty hours to sixty hours depending on the person. Then, there was the dosage uncertainty. Had she ingested a normal dose? A higher one? A lower? Was there more than a single instance of ingestion?
He thought he could at least reject out of hand the possibility of a lower dose, until he thought about it being slipped into a drink. Who was to say that Molly would drink all of it? Maybe the Valium would make the drink taste odd. Then again, according to Katie Nash, she had vomited. Perhaps she had vomited part of it up before her body had absorbed it..
It was now obvious to him that he could not account for all the possible variables, so he decided to see what he could come up with if he kept it simple. He worked backward from the time her blood sample was taken using a normal dosage and assuming Molly’s metabolic rate was normal. His calculations gave him a time of six twenty in the morning, by which time she was in police custody. He decided to do the calculations for a double dose, expecting to get a time near when she came home from Tinsley’s apartment sometime around two. Now he reconsidered the possibility that she had taken the Valium by mistake. Perhaps she was so drunk that she had taken way more than two of the “Tylenol” tablets. His math, however, gave him one fifteen, around the time she left the bar for Tinsley’s. None of the figures were making sense. They didn’t match any of the times that she said she’d had a drink either at the bar or at Tinsley’s apartment.
Richard stared at Molly’s note and tried vainly to make sense of his calculations. The only thing of which he was relatively certain was that Molly had not taken two Valiums in place of two Tylenols when she got home. Realizing he lacked the expertise to interpret his data correctly, he wondered if he could catch Adams in a good mo
od and prod him into getting an expert to suggest a probable time for the ingestion of the drug.
“Math never was my strong suit,” he grumbled, turning once again to the contemplation of motive.
Let’s do a little triage here, he told himself. Lay aside the pedophile thing. If that’s what happened, it’s too late to do anything. Toss out accidental ingestion too because it’s too coincidental to be believable. So go with: somebody drugged her. Who are the possible candidates? Katie Nash, Tinsley, and maybe McComb.
He could imagine Katie wanting a child badly enough to abduct one, but she seemed incapable of the guile necessary to conceal such a crime. Someone had killed her, however, and the time frame made him suspect that it was done to silence her. Of course, it could have been the sex crime that Adams thought it was. If not, she had either known something about the abduction or was in on it. An unlocked front door indicated that she might have been the proverbial “inside man.” Richard didn’t think Katie’s murder was the sex crime.
Who could have involved the feeble-minded woman in a plot to take the baby? It would probably be a “benign” abductor—benign in that he would want to keep the child alive and well. Grandma Allsop came immediately to mind, but grandmothers didn’t usually stage sex crimes to silence co-conspirators.
“So not Granny Allsop,” he muttered.
Something tickled at his memory, something Molly said concerning Katie Nash. Then he had it. It might mean nothing, but he picked up the phone.
“Molly, this is Richard. Remember when we went to see Katie Nash?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You said you thought she might have a boyfriend. Did you ever get to talk to her about that?”
“No. I’m pretty sure there was a guy she liked, but I never talked to her about him.”
“If there was a guy, do you have any idea who it could be?”
“Probably some married guy with no intention of doing anything but using her.” Molly paused for a moment. “It’s just a feeling I got. She didn’t say anything.”
“Did you say anything to Adams about that?”
“No.”
Molly wouldn’t talk to him unless forced to. Richard thought someone should bring the possibility to Adams’s attention, but he was loath to do so. Worse than hearsay, it was speculation based on vague “feelings,” feelings from someone Adams considered a definite doper and a probable killer.
