Robert B. Parker's the Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Paradise General. How may I help you?”

  “I need to know Petra North’s condition.”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” she said. “I don’t have that information.”

  “Then please transfer me to someone who does.”

  “Are you an immediate relative?”

  “I am her sister.”

  “Well, then I suggest you call your parents for an update. It’s hospital policy not to give information regarding a patient’s condition over the phone.”

  “Can you connect me to her room, then?”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can connect you with the nurses’ station on that floor. Please hold.”

  She waited, pacing, listening to a distorted elevator-music version of “Norwegian Wood.”

  A woman answered the phone in a hushed voice. “ICU.”

  “Can you give me an update on Petra North’s condition?”

  “One moment, please.”

  More “Norwegian Wood.”

  “Hello, this is Officer Weathers of the Paradise Police Department. Who is—”

  She clicked off and dropped the phone to the floor as if it were a piece of white-hot metal.

  Now she was faced with that same dilemma she had been faced with before: to run or not to run. Those threats of violence against her now seemed less frightening than the prospect of a life in prison. The police were close, knew a teacher was involved, and if the girl recovered there would be no counting on her to keep her secret. There was only one other option, but she had to be smart about it and careful.

  * * *

  —

  JESSE STOPPED BY Cole’s room, but he was asleep. The nurse at the station reassured him that his son was doing well. Still, he asked to speak to the doctor.

  “He’s been called to the ER. Come back in a little while, or I can have him call you.”

  Jesse said he’d be back up. That he had to stop by the ICU.

  Annette and Ambrose North were seated in the visitors’ lounge down the hall from the ICU. Both looked exhausted and lost. It was amazing, Jesse thought, how violence and tragedy can strip away the veneer and masks people show to the world. He suspected that the Norths had been showing them to the world for so long that they had come to believe their façades were actually who they were.

  Annette looked up. “Jesse.”

  “Any change?”

  “None,” Ambrose said. “You saved her life. Thank you.”

  “If you really want to thank me, a little truth would be nice.”

  “Anything,” Annette said, glaring at her husband. “Anything.”

  “Yes, Chief Stone. As my wife says, anything. Ask your questions.”

  He asked and they answered. They had known about Petra’s drug use. They had made the same mistakes that Patti Mackey and Etta Carpenter had made by trying to wean their kid off the drugs and then by being willingly fooled by Petra’s lies. They had figured out it was Petra who had stolen the watch, but by then it was too late to take things back. They had gotten Petra counseling. She had detoxed. But it was no good.

  “The drugs she snorted to put her in here,” Jesse said. “I think someone was trying to kill her.”

  Annette gasped and Ambrose North’s face twisted in fury.

  Jesse continued, “I’ve got her under police guard and I don’t think the person who did this is stupid enough to try something in the hospital. It was an act of desperation.”

  Ambrose said, “You think it was the teacher.”

  “I do.”

  “After the interview at the station,” Ambrose said, “we pleaded with her to give us the name. We explained that it might be used as leverage if you pursued criminal charges against her. But she denied knowing. She is definitely protecting someone.”

  “Do you think she wouldn’t tell you because she was afraid?”

  Annette spoke up. “No . . . Well, maybe a little. But it wasn’t that. I’m sure of it. It was as if she was protecting a loved one.”

  Ambrose started to speak and then decided the time for pretense had ended several hours ago.

  Before heading back to Cole’s room to speak with his doctor, Jesse checked in with Gabe Weathers.

  “Boss, good thing you’re here. Saves me the trouble of calling you.”

  Jesse was curious. “Call me about what?”

  “A little while ago, a woman called up to ICU to check on the girl’s condition. But when the nurse put me on the phone, the phone went dead. I called the front desk. The woman didn’t leave a name but claimed to be the North girl’s sister.”

  “How old did this ‘sister’ sound to you, Gabe?”

  “In the thirty-to-forty range, but it’s hard to tell with voices over the phone.”

  Jesse told Gabe he’d have some food and coffee sent up for him and that he would send someone up to relieve him as soon as he could.

  “Was it a sister, Jesse?”

  “The teacher,” he said. “She’s scared.”

  “Is that good, her being scared?”

  “Good, but dangerous.”

  “You think she’ll try for the girl again?”

  “No, Gabe. She tried to kill the girl and failed. Now she’ll have to try something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said. “That’s what makes her dangerous.”

  Seventy

  Millie Lutz was exhausted. Taking care of Wexler was a lot of work, and it wasn’t the kind of work she liked. She had been trained as a surgical nurse and had worked with some of the top surgeons at the best hospitals in Boston. She’d seen hearts, kidneys, and lungs transplanted. She’d seen twins conjoined skull-to-skull separated and made healthy. And she had been reduced to changing the diapers of an old man who was lost inside his own head. Worse, she was risking a lifetime in jail for forging scripts.

  She gave the relief nurse instructions about Wexler, who had finally gone to bed after hours of unintelligible babbling and roaming about the house. As she looked in the hallway mirror, she thought about the young doctor who had first turned her on to Oxy. How stupid she had been to believe the bastard was going to leave his wife for her. She hoped he was dead but could not deny the rush of excitement she got thinking about him inside her. The hollow-cheeked zombie who looked back at her from the mirror knew that she would never feel that type of excitement again. That she would have but one love for the rest of her miserable life.

  She stepped out into the purplish dawn light, a chill in the air that was a welcome change from the stale air and stink of the old doctor’s house. She noticed the birds singing to one another and realized she hadn’t been conscious of them for many months. She took the paper at the end of the driveway and tossed it toward the front door, then got in her Corolla, backed out of the driveway, and headed past the little guardhouse at the entrance to Brookline Country Club.

  About a half-mile from there, a motorcycle rode up behind her, the glare of its headlight in her rearview, blinding her. She slowed, pulled to the side of the road, stopped, and waved for him to pass. But he did not pass. He drove up next to her window. The motorcyclist stared at her through an opaque visor. He raised his right hand. In it was a pistol with a thick metal sound suppressor on its muzzle. There were five flashes, a cloud of gray smoke, and five muted barks. Millie’s brake foot, now lax, fell away from the pedal, and her Corolla rolled into a thicket of trees along the road.

  * * *

  —

  THAT MORNING, Molly greeted Jesse by tilting her head at his office door.

  “Brian Lundquist is in there waiting for you.”

  “He’s up bright and early.”

  “How’s Cole?”

  “Banged up. Concussion, but they’re probably releasing him from the hospital later. Any change with Petra North?”


  “She stirred a little. Not conscious, but the doctors are encouraged.”

  “Who’s got ICU duty?”

  “Peter.”

  “Your girls know about Petra?”

  Molly laughed a sad laugh. “I think it was on Twitter before you left the house. There are no secrets anymore, Jesse. No privacy. I’m glad I wasn’t raised in the world my girls have grown up in. A girl needs a safe place for herself where she can live with the little embarrassments and mistakes she makes and grow from them. I would hate to think of the world as a stage I would be forced to live on for everyone to see. It was one thing when I was a girl and came out of the bathroom trailing some toilet paper and having the other girls laugh at me. Now someone would take a photo of it or video with their phone and post it.”

  That gave Jesse an idea, but one he wasn’t yet willing to share.

  “Your girls will be fine, Molly. Their dad is a good man and they have you for a mom.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS STRANGE to see Lundquist standing where Jesse often stood, staring out the window behind his desk and gazing out at Stiles Island or the ocean beyond. It was stranger still when the state Homicide captain spoke without turning to face Jesse.

  “There is a Joint Narcotics Task Force,” Lundquist said. “DEA, Boston PD, and my team. They’re working specifically on opioids. Last time we spoke, you mentioned you had something bigger than just the drug ring at the high school. You want to explain that to me now?”

  Jesse sat in the seat Cole had sat in the day before, one of the two that faced his desk. “Sit in my seat,” he said. “We need to look each other in the eye for this conversation.”

  Lundquist sat behind Jesse’s desk. “Okay, I’m sitting and facing you.”

  “One more thing. Drs. Laghari and Wexler. What about their prescription writing?”

  The corners of Lundquist’s lips turned down. “They’ve been busy little beavers, those two. I imagine they must have writer’s cramp from all the Vicodin and Oxycontin scripts they’ve been writing.”

  “Fascinating. Dr. Wexler is suffering from severe Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know where he is or who he was. Laghari, he’s something else.”

  “What’s the bigger thing, Jesse?”

  “The other day, I parked across the street from a storefront in Roxbury. Nominally, it is Dr. Laghari’s office or clinic. What it really is is a script mill. People, probably opioid addicts themselves, are getting paid to get the scripts written by Laghari filled at ‘friendly’ pharmacies. A bus drops them off at the clinic, then drives them to various pharmacies they know will fill the scripts. Those pills wind up in towns like Paradise, Salem, and Swan Harbor, where the dealers know they will get top dollar for each pill. And when the addicts can’t afford the pills anymore, they turn them on to heroin. Helluva business model.”

  “But what’s this got to do with the task force?”

  “I was approached by a Detective Hector of the BPD. Told me to scoot.”

  “So?”

  “Truth?”

  “I asked, didn’t I, Jesse?”

  “Hector was protecting the clinic.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Know it?” Jesse said. “I can’t know it, but I do. The guy guarding the door at the clinic made my Explorer. Probably knows every car on the block. He called his man on the task force and his man came and chased me.”

  “Maybe it was legit and the task force spotted you.”

  “I don’t like the idea of dirty cops any more than you do, Brian. What you do with this info is up to you. But I can tell you this, put someone on a registered nurse named Millie Lutz. She’s the one writing Wexler’s scripts. She’s part of a rotating crew of caretakers for Wexler. Also put one on Laghari. If they’re not already dead, they will be soon.”

  * * *

  —

  DR. RAJIV LAGHARI did not like or trust the crude men who had coerced him into being their boy. He had himself to blame for that, but he had taken responsibility for very little in his life except the successful parts. That morning he was very pleased that his escort to the new location would not be that animal Stojan or his silent sidekick, Georgi. Detective Hector was a reasonable fellow who enjoyed talking about the things that interested Laghari: women and other women. So when the bell rang, he answered it without question. Detective Hector was there, but behind him was another man, an addict he recognized as a patient from the clinic.

  “What is he doing here?” Laghari asked, as if the other man wasn’t there.

  Detective Hector didn’t answer. Instead he stuck a six-inch blade into Laghari’s liver, pulled it out, and sliced through the doctor’s left femoral artery. Then he stepped back, shoved the junkie in front of him, drew his weapon, and screamed loudly enough to be heard on the street and in the condo next door, “Drop the knife now!”

  Hector emptied half his clip into the clinic patient’s back. He died of his gunshot wounds even before Dr. Laghari bled out. Hector gloved up, wiped the hilt of the knife, and wrapped the dead man’s hand around it. He then removed several scripts written by Laghari out of his own pocket and carefully placed them in the patient’s front pocket. When he was sure the scene was believable, he called it in.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN JERRY OPENED Precious Pawn and Loan, he held the door for Jolene and hurried to shut the alarm. The second the alarm was disarmed, a man in a Patriots ski mask grabbed Jolene around her throat and pressed a Glock to her temple.

  “Do what I tell you and she doesn’t die.”

  Jerry held his hands up and promised to do as he was told.

  “The cash. Now!”

  Jerry hurried to the back room.

  “Faster! Faster!”

  But he wasn’t fast enough. As Jerry ran toward the back room door, the masked man shot him twice, once through his left shoulder blade and then the back of his head. Jolene screamed as Jerry went down face-first. The gunman released Jolene, who knelt by Jerry. When she turned to look back, a bullet ripped through the top of her left breast. She was already dead when the second bullet made certain she wouldn’t be nearly as pretty in death as she had been in life.

  On the way out, the gunman smashed one of the display cases with the butt of his gun and grabbed a fistful of jewelry with a gloved hand. It would all look good for the cameras, like a robbery gone wrong at the hands of a nervous junkie. A nervous junkie who was an expert shot and who would eventually throw the stolen jewelry into the Charles River.

  Seventy-one

  After Lundquist left, Jesse headed to the high school in a cruiser. What he had to tell Virginia Wester was not the type of thing you did over the phone if it could be avoided. Although telling Wester he had to investigate every female teacher in her school was tough, it was nowhere near as difficult to do as a next-of-kin notification. That was the worst thing to do over the phone, and he had been forced to do it more than once, both in L.A. and in Paradise. The hardest call he had ever had to make was several years back, when a college freshman from California had been murdered in the Salter mansion up on the Bluffs. That call to the girl’s parents would haunt Jesse.

  When Jesse entered the high school, he drew stares and sideways glances. Heather Mackey’s death was one thing, but the drug locker display, and now Petra North’s OD . . . There was a cloud that had settled over the school, a veil of guilt and suspicion. It hung in the air in the hallways and classrooms so that even the innocent and naïve were touched by it.

  As he climbed the stairs, Brandy Lawton came down.

  “Hi, Jesse.”

  “Brandy.”

  “On the way to see Virginia?”

  He nodded.

  “How is Petra North?”

  “You’ve heard?”

  “Everybody’s heard. How is she?”

&nbs
p; “Alive,” Jesse said, being purposely vague. If he was going to interview these people, he wanted them as uninformed and on edge as possible.

  “That’s something, at least. Was it like Heather? I mean . . . you know.”

  “I’ve got to go, Brandy. Excuse me.”

  But as he tried to move past her, she asked if he would be willing to do his talk to the softball team again this spring. He agreed more out of expediency than a desire to give a motivational talk. He had never found those talks very helpful during his baseball career. Then again, Jesse was old-school and thought a kick in the ass often worked better than talk.

  * * *

  —

  JUST AS BRANDY LAWTON had asked about Petra, so, too, did Freda and Principal Wester. He was a little less vague with these two women than he had been with Lawton.

  “She’s in a coma,” he said. “There is brain activity and there’s a chance she will recover, but I’d prefer it if you would not share that information with the faculty.”

  Principal Wester didn’t like that. “And why wouldn’t I share that with my people? They are all concerned about Petra’s recovery.”

  “Most, not all.”

  “What?”

  “Virginia, it’s my belief that one of your teachers tried to kill Petra. That’s why I’m here.”

  “To make an arrest?”

  “No, to tell you that I need to set up interviews with all your female faculty members and employees. We’ll talk to everyone, from the teachers to the lunch ladies and the bus drivers.”

  “Jesse, I’ve bent over backward for you, but you’re going to have to give me something more than your word on this, and I will have to alert the school board.”

  Before Jesse could answer, his cell vibrated. The screen said the call was from Lundquist, but he declined the call and let it go to voicemail.

  “What I tell you, I say in the strictest confidence. Do you agree not to share this and to keep the students’ names out of your discussion with the faculty and the school board?”