He picked up a bread plate. “I think you’ve done me enough favors to last a good long while.”
Sara watched his reflection in the window over the sink. His head was down as he concentrated on the task at hand. She reached back and loosened her ponytail. Her hair fell to her shoulders.
She said, “Go sit down. I can finish the washing.”
Will glanced up at her, then did a double take. She thought he was going to say something, but he picked up another plate and dunked it into the soapy water instead. Sara opened the drawer to put away the silverware. Her hair hung down in her face. She was glad for the cover.
He said, “I hate leaving dishes lying around.”
She tried for levity. “Don’t let my mother hear that. She’ll never let you leave.”
“I had this foster mother named Lou once.” Will waited for her to look up in the window. “She worked all day at the supermarket, but she came home at noon to fix me lunch no matter what.” He rinsed the plate and handed it to Sara. “She always got home after I’d gone to bed, but one night I heard her come in. I went into the kitchen and there she was in her uniform—it was brown, too tight for her—and she was standing in front of the sink. It was piled with all the plates and dishes and leftover food from lunch. I hadn’t done anything while she was gone. I just watched TV all day.” He glanced up again at Sara’s reflection. “Lou was standing there looking at the mess in the sink and just bawling. Like, the kind of crying you do with your whole body.” He took the next dish off the pile. “I went into that kitchen and cleaned every single dish I could find, and for the rest of the time I was there, I never made her have to clean up after me again.”
“Did she try to adopt you?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? She left me alone all day except for lunch. I was eight years old. They took me away when the school counselor noticed I hadn’t been to class in two months.” He pulled the drain on the sink. “She was a nice lady, though. I think they let her have an older kid.”
Sara asked the question before she could stop herself. “Why weren’t you ever adopted? You were an infant when you entered the system.”
Will kept his hand under the stream of water as he adjusted the temperature. She thought he was going to ignore her question, but he finally said, “My father had custody of me at first. The state took me away after a few months. They had good reasons.” He plugged the drain so the sink could fill. “I was in the system for a while, then an uncle showed up and tried to make a go of it. He meant well. I hope he meant well. But he wasn’t really equipped to take care of a child at that point in his life. I was in and out of his house, in and out of foster homes and the children’s home. Eventually, he gave up. By that time I was six years old and it was too late.”
Sara looked up. Will was staring at her reflection again.
He said, “You’ve heard about the six-year rule, right? You and your husband were trying to adopt. You must’ve heard it.”
“Yes.” Sara felt a lump in her throat. She couldn’t look at him. She dried the saucer again, though not a drop of water was left on the surface. The six-year rule. She’d heard the phrase in her pediatric practice, long before Jeffrey had ever suggested they adopt. A child who had been in the system more than six years was considered tainted. Too many bad things had happened to him by then. His memories were too fixed, his behaviors too ingrained.
Years ago, someone in Atlanta had heard this warning, too. Probably from a friend or maybe even a trusted family doctor. They had gone to the children’s home, seen six-year-old Will Trent, and decided he was too broken.
He asked, “Does that journal sound like a twenty-one-year-old girl’s journal to you?”
Sara had to clear her throat so she could speak. “I’m not sure. I didn’t know Allison.” She forced herself to think about his question. “It seems off to me.”
“It doesn’t sound like a ‘Dear Diary’ sort of thing.” He started on the last stack of dishes. “It’s more like a long list of complaints about people, professors, her job, lack of money, her boyfriend.”
Sara admitted, “She sounds kind of whiny.”
“The point of whining is so other people hear you and feel sorry for you.” He asked, “Does she sound depressed?”
“There’s no doubt about that. The journal makes it clear that she was having a very rough time of it. She tried to kill herself once before, which points to at least one depressive episode in her past.”
“Maybe she was in a suicide pact with Jason and a third person.”
“That’s a pretty awful way to die if you want to kill yourself. Pills would be much easier. Hanging. Jumping off a building. Also, I think if there was a pact, they’d do it together.”
“Did you find any signs of drug use on Tommy, Allison, or Jason?”
“No outward signs. They were all healthy, of average or above average weight. The blood samples and tissues are on their way to Central. We’ll get something back in a week to ten days.”
“Charlie and I were kicking around this theory that Jason could have been involved in Allison’s murder. We’re pretty sure the killer used him to lure Allison to the lake. Or at least his handwriting.” He turned off the water and wiped his hands on his jeans as he walked to his briefcase. “This was tucked inside the journal.”
Sara took the plastic evidence bag he gave her. There was a note inside. “That paper looks familiar.” She read the words. “ ‘I need to talk to you. We’ll meet at the usual place.’ ”
Will added the phrase from the suicide note. “ ‘I want it over.’ ”
Sara sat down at the table. “Jason wrote Allison’s fake suicide note.”
“Or, he wrote the entire note to somebody else, and that somebody tore off the bottom half and left it in Allison’s shoe as a warning to him.” He saw the flaw. “But then why did Allison have it in her notebook?”
“No wonder your brain is tired.” Sara’s head was starting to ache just thinking about it.
Will took another plastic bag out of his briefcase. “I found this in Tommy’s medicine cabinet. Charlie field-tested it, but he’s not sure what’s inside.”
Sara rolled the pill bottle around to read the label through the plastic. “That’s strange.”
“I was hoping you’d know what it is.”
“ ‘Tommy, do not take these,’ ” she read. “I’m not a handwriting expert, but it seems to me that Allison wrote this. Why would she tell Tommy not to take them? Why not just throw them away?”
Will didn’t offer her a quick answer. He sat back in his chair, staring at her. “They could be poison, but if you had poison, why would you stab somebody in the neck?”
“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. “No
w, 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?
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 161
