Before I Wake

by Dee Henderson

  She pondered the events of the last week as the road raced by, sorting out what felt like fact and what felt like theory.

  Three deaths, all in their sleep. Peggy died in a hotel room. Karen died in a hotel room. Nella died in her home. Peggy and Karen the coroner said were natural causes. Nella—he thought it was cancer.

  Had Karen died one town over, they would not be trying to connect hers to the other deaths. Had Peggy gone home and died, it would not be connected to this town at all.

  Coincidence.

  Three coincidences.

  That conclusion, supported by all the facts now in evidence, weighed itself against a theory that had been in front of them since this started—the deaths were caused by a new designer drug and Peggy had been researching a story on it, maybe triggering the deaths to begin by the questions she was asking.

  That idea of a trigger for the deaths to start resonated, and Rae realized she’d never asked that question before. Peggy came to town on a Thursday, and Nella died Friday evening. Saturday night Peggy died.

  Nathan was right—in all the years around Justice there had never been unexplained deaths like this. They suddenly started. That suggested a trigger. Peggy’s arrival in town, a reporter digging and asking questions—that could be a trigger for murder. Karen was then killed to create a diversion? to test the drug?

  None of the victims was into taking recreational drugs. That meant they were taking it without being aware of it. Something they drank? ate? breathed? absorbed through their skin?

  Rae could feel herself going in circles, talking herself into a source for the murders and a motive. Pushing suspicions together into something that could sound logical. Was it really there?

  Finding something that wasn’t there to find—she’d proved it was entirely possible to do that when she had falsely accused Mark Rivers. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up pushing this case so hard she did the same thing. They could be looking at two natural-caused deaths and one case of advanced cancer—and that was it. But the idea of a trigger starting this—that resonated as very interesting.

  Where was that orange notebook Peggy had with her Saturday night at Andy’s? That was the last truly open clue as to what had happened here. If Peggy had learned something, she had written it down. Rae needed to find that notebook. She needed to explain why it hadn’t been in that hotel room the night Peggy died.

  Bruce flashed his lights, and Rae touched her brakes to acknowledge him. He turned off the highway to go meet with Stephen Foster. Rae hoped there was enough information to say who had initially stolen the handguns by the time Bruce was done tonight. It would be good to completely wrap up that problem for Nathan. The man had so many worries on his shoulders right now; she wanted to know they had been able to remove at least this troubling one for him.

  * * *

  Bruce opened the gate to Joe Prescott’s land and waved Rae through. They had driven separately so Bruce could go from here to the police department and turn the guns in. Rae parked where the path widened, partway down to the river. Bruce drove in and parked beside her.

  Bruce got out of his car. “What are we looking for again?”

  “That orange-colored notebook of Peggy’s and her BlackBerry. Andy said Peggy drew a map to Joe Prescott’s place. Peggy is out here at night; she’s probably got a flashlight, but who knows how good it is. She has a rough idea of where Joe’s house is located on the property. She may or may not know the river bridge is out. She’s carrying her notebook with her, and she trips or gets spooked—she drops it somewhere and doesn’t feel like sticking around to recover it, or maybe it fell down the riverbank far enough she doesn’t want to retrieve it in the dark. Only she doesn’t get a tomorrow to come back out here and retrieve it in the daylight; she dies that night.”

  “Okay. It’s a long shot but possible.”

  “If Peggy didn’t lose that notebook, it means someone most likely took it from her hotel room and that says foul play. I need to find and explain the notebook’s location if only to prove there wasn’t foul play involved.”

  Bruce looked from the gate to where they had parked to where the path such as it was went to the river. “Why don’t you head toward the riverbank, and I’ll walk back toward the gate. Just stay in sight—no wandering down into the trees on a hunch.”

  “Not a problem.” Rae tugged her gloves on tighter and set off to walk toward the river.

  * * *

  The water rushed by even in the winter, icy edges along the flow. Rae looked down at the water but made no attempt to get closer. She wished she had thought to check out here days ago when it might have been possible to see any lingering footprints in the snow. Peggy would have been walking toward the water and heard it long before she came to the steep drop-off of the riverbank. The notebook was not going to be down there.

  Rae looked carefully through the brush around where the path ended. The only man-made items she found were a couple smashed soda cans littering the side of the riverbank. Nothing orange.

  She clapped her hands together to warm them and started back up toward the gate. Cars had dug into the mud as they turned around and the ground had become rough and torn up and frozen into odd angles. Rae felt her ankle turn for the second time. Next time she got a hunch, she hoped it was about a building so she could at least search in warmth.

  She nearly stepped on the notebook. The orange was nearly brown with the mud on it, but the spiral caught her eye. She dug it out of the depression it was in. “Bruce!”

  Rae waved her hand and held up what she had found. Melting snow and a week outside in the weather had done the notebook’s condition no good, but it was still intact. “As orange as an orange can be,” she called, getting down to what was visible after she wiped it off on her jeans.

  Bruce walked down to meet her. “How’s the writing?”

  Rae took off her gloves and then carefully opened the notebook. “Ink is running, but it is still basically legible. We need a heater to set this on; the pages are going to tear just being touched they are so soggy.”

  “We’ll go back to the hotel—your room heater will do the job.”

  “It will bake us out at the same time,” Rae guessed, remembering the fight to find a comfortable temperature for her hotel room. “Peggy was also carrying a BlackBerry organizer.”

  Bruce started circling out from where she stood, brushing over shrubs with his boots to see what might be hidden. “Finding one of the two items is better than nothing. It’s not in shorthand is it, like the other notebook?”

  “A mixture. This one looks pretty readable.”

  Bruce stopped his walk around. “Let’s see what the notebook can tell us, then have Nathan come out tomorrow with some guys and we’ll look for the BlackBerry. Enough bodies, it’s an hour to do the job right. We stay out here, and we’re just going to freeze in this wind and still probably not find it.”

  Rae agreed with him. “Care to order a pizza that you can pick up after you drop off those guns at the police department?”

  “I’ll feed you,” Bruce replied with a smile. “Want everything on it?”

  “Definitely.”

  They walked back to the cars. Rae opened the trunk of her car and set the wet notebook into the pail of cleaning rags she had brought with her to finish polishing the car. “You want to be the one to call Nathan?”

  “And spoil your treasure-hunt news?” Bruce asked. “Call him. Make nice. Tell him I’m bringing in the guns and that you found the notebook. Ask him to meet us at the hotel and join us for pizza while we decipher it.”

  Rae laughed. “Make nice?”

  “The man needs cheering up. He’s had a killer week, no pun intended.”

  “I get your point. I’ll call and invite him to join us. Recovered handguns and a found notebook—at least it’s a good-news call for a change.”

  “Let’s just hope that notebook is the gold mine of information we’ve been hoping to find.”

  28

/>   Nathan turned over notebook pages on top of the heater, the paper curling as it dried. The blue ink was running and faded out in many places, but he could piece together enough to read it. “The list of names she was asking about is interesting.”

  Rae wiped pizza sauce off her fingers and turned her focus back to carefully separating more pages of the notebook to dry; the pages clung together and the job took tweezers at times to coax the pages apart without tearing. “How so?”

  Nathan looked over at her from his seat on the floor and thought she looked cute as she bit the tip of her tongue as she did the fine-level work. “Someone told Peggy a bit about this town to put together this list,” he explained. “It’s mostly the high school crowd that would have hung around with Joe Prescott’s grandson. Vernon Hill is on the list; the chocolate maker’s son, Isaac Keif; Walter’s boy, Scott. Most of these guys would be in their early twenties now, and only a few still live here. Some are away at college; others have already left to pursue job opportunities away from Justice.”

  She paused to consider that. “Drug involvement, maybe?”

  “Maybe Isaac with a little marijuana, but this isn’t the drug crowd as I would know to list it. Just friends of Prescott’s grandson.”

  “Maybe Peggy thought a friend of Joe’s grandson knew who made the designer drug?”

  He thought that might be closer to what this list represented. “Maybe. But the dealer who sold the drug at the party was among the dead, and the dealer who supplied him went to jail on an unrelated drug charge—neither was from around here.”

  He leaned over to the table and picked up another piece of the pizza. The room was crowded for this work, but the wall heater was getting the job done as Bruce had hoped.

  With his free hand Nathan moved pages on the heater to fit one more in and turned over two of the drier pages. He picked up one of them and studied another smaller list of names he didn’t recognize. “I admit I can read these notes, but I don’t understand yet what they mean. Who’s the reporter friend of Peggy’s who got mailed the first notebook?”

  “Gage Collier,” Rae replied. “I gave him a call and told him what we had found. He was very interested. He’s coming down Monday morning to see if he can help us put together the pieces that are here.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve got something that may be part of the initial tip that brought Peggy to Justice,” Bruce offered.

  Nathan turned to look at his friend. Bruce was stretched out on the second bed, using the bedspread as a place to lay the dried pages Nathan was moving off the heater, as well as serve as a table for his piled plate of food.

  “This page is dated the Wednesday before Peggy checked into the hotel here. As best I can read it, ‘Message from H.S.R./Justice. He’ll confirm notebook found. Unique delivery system rumor is true? Pulitzer???’ The rest of the page is a list of phone numbers for Justice hotels, like she switched over to planning her trip here.”

  “H.S.R.? Who has initials H.S.R.?” Rae reached over for what she had of Peggy’s address book.

  “Henry Raines? He’s a dentist,” Nathan offered. “Hank Rolmer? He’s a car salesman.”

  “Neither of which sound like candidates for Peggy to call.”

  “The message itself doesn’t make much sense,” Bruce added. “He’ll confirm notebook found. Was the notebook some kind of evidence? The people that reporters tend to call to confirm things are law-enforcement types or courthouse clerks.”

  “There’s nothing that I know of related to the Prescott kid’s death that went through the police department here or the county courthouse,” Nathan said, equally puzzled. “Is there anything in Peggy’s address book that fits H.S.R.?”

  Rae shook her head as she turned pages, looking. “Not that I see. You know, H.S.R./Justice could mean someone who works with the department of justice, not this town,” she pointed out.

  “Justice as it’s written here could mean the justice department,” Bruce agreed. “Maybe DEA would make sense.”

  “Okay. Forget the caller for a moment,” Nathan said. “Peggy heard a rumor about a notebook that had been found and she called someone, probably an investigator who was involved with the case, to confirm that notebook existed. He said it did. That same day she’s making plans to come to Justice. We know she’s looking for Joe Prescott.”

  “After hearing a notebook exists, the next step is clear: she’s going to want to know what it says,” Bruce offered. “She’s got confirmation a notebook exists that could be important to her story, but that’s all she knows about it.”

  Rae set aside her drink. “So Peggy thought Joe could tell her what the notebook said? Or maybe Joe was the one who found the notebook and turned it in? Or Joe was the one who still had the notebook? Maybe it was the notebook found among his grandson’s things?”

  “I think you’re in the right ballpark,” Nathan agreed. “Maybe Joe’s grandson wrote down who he was meeting at the party, or maybe he had written down a phone number of someone he was to meet at the party? That would be a reasonable fit. Investigators would check out that kind of thing if it were found in one of the victim’s possessions.”

  “Joe could have gotten the notebook back as part of his grandson’s personal effects, which was why Peggy came looking for Joe,” Bruce offered.

  “I like this general idea,” Nathan said. “But still—it looks to me like Peggy heard the rumor about the notebook, confirmed it existed, came to Justice looking for more information—and that’s as far as she got. She never talked to Joe, who she thought could tell her something about it. It’s still a dead end.”

  Nathan thought about what he had just said and sighed. “We now know what brought Peggy to Justice, we have a timeline resolving the last night of her life, and nothing in this suggests something which contributed to her death. It’s still natural causes.” Nathan rubbed at his headache. “Rae, you just found one of the very last missing pieces to Peggy’s time here and it confirms what we already have.”

  “Basically,” Rae replied, disappointed too.

  “This is really giving me a headache.”

  “Chocolate. It always works for me.” She dug her hand into the sack of chocolates from the Fine Chocolates Shop for a couple more pieces, then passed the sack over to him.

  “Death by chocolate—I picked up a pound and a half this morning to have in the car with me. This stuff is simply too good, and the strike has unfortunately been driving Keif’s business into the ground. Okay. Does all this tell us anything else useful?”

  “We know this H.S.R. called her back, so she must have called him originally. I’ll check her home-phone record again. There has to be a way to put a name to that note. We did get a lead to a living person at least.”

  * * *

  The last of the garlic-butter sauce disappeared with Bruce’s pizza crust. Nathan collapsed the empty pizza box and slid it into the trash. “A very nice dinner. I may not move again for hours.”

  “I’ll agree with that.”

  Nathan looked over at Rae. “I saw your new car in the lot; it’s hard to miss. Interesting choice. I think you’ll have the only one like it in the county.”

  She beamed and sat up straighter in the chair. “It drives like a dream.”

  “Smells bad, though,” Bruce pointed out. “Like crossing a skunk and old trash.”

  “Only for a while,” Rae replied. “I can’t wait for warmer weather and a chance to really test it out on a long drive.” She paused to squint at the last notebook page she was trying to tease apart with tweezers. The final pages in the notebook were in particularly bad shape. “Here’s another note that is interesting. ‘Unique-delivery-system rumor strong on street. EE?’ At least that’s what I think it says.”

  “EE?” Nathan asked

  Rae studied the page again and nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Maybe a homemade brand stamped on the drugs if they’re being put into pill form,” Bruce guessed.


  “That’s the third or fourth time she’s used the phrase unique delivery system,” Rae noted. “You’re the drug expert, Bruce. What’s it mean?”

  Bruce shrugged. “It could be anything from how the drug appears to how it is shipped to the customer. Black tar started showing up in small red balloons, which I would consider a unique delivery system. Any more names appearing that we can at least reinterview?”

  “No. But these pages need to dry some more before I can decipher the fainter stuff. We may end up needing a document expert to get some of the most washed-out text recovered.”

  Rae stretched sore shoulder muscles from having hunched over so long working on the wet pages. “You know, this notebook, coupled with the file of articles Peggy had on her desk, suggests this is a story she would hear rumors about, work on for a while, and then set aside again when it went cold.

  “I don’t think this notebook is a coherent set of research with one interview leading to another one, as much as it is a set of rumors and phone-call notes and what-ifs. This wasn’t a story coming together, it was a collecting pot of ideas that might one day relate together. She was in town not working on a particular story, she was just poking around to see what she could find.”

  “Good point. If she was writing a story, it doesn’t look like she was very far along,” Nathan agreed. “Keep deciphering, Rae. Once pages dry out we’ll photograph every page and take another look. Maybe a good filter light on the camera can bring out the contrast for us and raise a few more words.”

  Nathan began to repack his briefcase, pleased with the course of the evening. “Handguns found, notebook found, I don’t suppose you two want to go out with me to see the negotiators and nudge the strike along to a settlement would you?” He’d pushed off his visit out that direction to see Adam and Zachary when he heard the news of what Rae and Bruce had found, but it was time to get out there and see for himself how the discussions were going.

  Rae smiled. “Only a few supersized things can get done in one day. Maybe tomorrow.” She glanced at the clock. “Or rather maybe in an hour from now when it is tomorrow.”