Do No Harm

by Christina McDonald

  I broke eye contact and looked down, righteous anger flaring in me. He’d raised a child in a drug ring, with a mother who was clearly a psychopath. And he hadn’t even bothered to tell me, his own sister, about him.

  “What’d the cops say?” Gabe asked.

  “Her body was found downriver from Skamania Falls,” Ben said. “They think she went over the waterfall.”

  Gabe and I both murmured condolences.

  “How did she end up in the falls?” I asked.

  “Autopsy said she overdosed. They think she shot up and then fell in the water.” Ben inhaled another mouthful of smoke, letting it seep deep into his lungs as his eyes darted around. “I told them Violeta doesn’t do drugs. Not drugs that take needles, anyway.”

  His gaze landed on Gabe, hazy and dull. “Where did you last see her?” he asked.

  “I told you, man—I dropped her off back at her car in the Target parking lot after we met Emma at the mill,” Gabe replied.

  Ben smoked some more while plucking at his eyebrows. My skin prickled with sweat, the lie vibrating in the air. Could he see it written like ink across our faces?

  Ben blinked hard. “That isn’t anywhere near the river.”

  Fear crouched on my chest, like a pillow over my mouth and nose. Gabe’s eyes flicked to mine, waiting for me to answer. When I stayed silent, he spoke up.

  “She’d, uh, done a few lines of coke. She said it was ‘mom’s night out’ so she was celebrating.”

  “That’s true,” I pitched in, finally finding my voice. “Her eyes were dilated. She had a nosebleed.”

  “Violeta was scared of water. She almost drowned when she was a kid. She wouldn’t have gone in voluntarily.” Ben shook his head. “I think something happened to her.”

  “Maybe those guys in the truck that was here?” I suggested. “They looked dangerous. Who were they?”

  Ben shook his head. “Nah. That was just the boyfriend of one of my girls.”

  I started, horrified. “But, Ben, he looked like he was going to beat her!”

  Ben shrugged and flicked a long strand of ash onto the ground. “Bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. It’s not my problem. Or yours.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta go. Thanks for dropping that stuff off.” He clapped Gabe on the back and turned to get in the van. “See ya round, Em.”

  “Wait.” I held out a hand. “I want in. Violeta said we had a deal.”

  Ben side-eyed me.

  “No.”

  He climbed in the van and slammed the door. A second later the engine roared to life.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE FEELING OF REJECTION was instant and intense, an immense wave pummeling between my shoulder blades, grinding me into the pavement.

  I turned to Gabe. “Stop him,” I hissed, “or I’ll tell him where the drugs that got him sent to prison came from.”

  Gabe’s mouth fell open. “Wha—? But…you…”

  He still hadn’t moved, and Ben’s van was rolling forward. I shoved Gabe out of the way and slammed my palm against Ben’s window. The van stopped abruptly, and Ben rolled his window down, his eyebrows folded angrily.

  “What the hell, Emma?”

  “Violeta said we had a deal,” I said, my tone cold.

  “Go home, Emma. You don’t want to be a part of this.”

  I stared at my brother. It hadn’t always been like this between us. I missed the brother who used to carry Band-Aids in his pocket because I was always scraping my knees. The brother who’d taught me how to ride a bike, to swear, to stick up for myself when boys in my class tried to flip my dress up. Where had that brother gone?

  “I have more prescriptions,” I said. “Stacks more.”

  Ben plucked at his eyebrows. It was a nervous habit from when our father would rage at him on the nights he came home drunk.

  Once I’d told Ben how much like Dad he was. He shoved me off my bed. I hit my cheekbone on the windowsill and the skin had split open, like a ripe melon. I still have a little crescent-shaped scar on my cheek from it.

  I guess some people don’t like to hear the truth.

  “It’s for my son,” I said softly. “Your nephew.”

  Ben’s eyes flickered. A beat of silence expanded between us.

  “Violeta said you guys would help.” My heart raced, the lie tingling like mouthwash on my tongue.

  Ben considered this. “Fine. Give me two more prescriptions. We’ll start with that.”

  “Five,” I said. “And I can sign more. We can scale up.”

  “Are you insane? I’m not scaling up anything!”

  That was surprising. Ben had always been an enterprising sort.

  “I’m not going back to prison,” he replied, seeing my look. His eyes darted. Left, right, left, right. He coughed and blinked hard. “I have a kid now. I have to stay off the cops’ radar.”

  “What’s my nephew’s name?”

  Pain flared in Ben’s eyes, and he looked down. “Lucas.”

  “Lucas,” I repeated. My family. I wanted to meet him, but now wasn’t the time to ask. “I bet you’d do anything for him.”

  “Isn’t your husband a cop? I’m not risking it.”

  “Don’t you see, Ben?” I smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “It’s exactly because my husband’s a cop that we’re safe. I can read his reports, check his notes, lead him away from us. Besides, no one would ever expect a doctor to be involved in an opioid prescription ring, let alone a cop’s wife.”

  “What about the PDMP?”

  The Prescription Drug Monitoring Program tracked controlled-substance prescriptions to make sure patients weren’t getting numerous scripts from different doctors. But a lot of practices hadn’t started using it yet, mostly because it was cumbersome and nobody had been trained to use it.

  “It’s informational, not regulatory,” I said. “Besides, the prescriptions I’m giving you are from other doctors. Nobody will trace any of this back to us. If anybody gets in trouble, it’ll be them.”

  Ben looked at Gabe. He smiled slowly, looking like a fox that had caught a hen. My brother was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew when opportunity was knocking.

  “Fine. Let’s meet at that old warehouse next Tuesday night. Midnight. You in, Gabe?”

  Gabe flashed his dimples and shrugged, looking for all the world like we were talking about what flavor of syrup to have on our pancakes. “Sure. Why not?” he drawled.

  I handed Ben a stack of signed prescriptions, but he would only take a dozen. I pulled a scrap of paper from my back pocket and gave him that too.

  “What’s this?”

  “A friend of mine. She needs oxy. I need you to deliver it.”

  Ben’s lips curled. “I’m not your fucking delivery boy.”

  I leaned in closer.

  “No, you’re a distributor,” I hissed. “So distribute. Besides, I bet you already have her details in that notebook there.” I nodded at a red notebook I’d spotted in the console.

  Ben scowled, and I knew I’d guessed correctly.

  “Leave them in the birdhouse on the front porch,” I told him. “She said she had a weekly supply being left there, but none turned up this week.”

  Ben snatched the scrap of paper from me. “I can’t do it this week.”

  “Then give me some. I’ll take them to her.”

  Ben turned and murmured something to somebody in the back. A few moments later, he handed me a small baggie of white pills.

  A car pulled into the parking stall in front of us. A man and woman got out with a little girl. The man said something that made the woman laugh as she lifted the little girl onto her hip. They looked like a billboard for the traditional, perfect family. Happy. Normal.

  But I knew how easy it was to hide the darker side of yourself from others, even those you loved. To hide fear and sadness, anger and hostility. The mask was easy. It was honesty, openness, and trust that were truly difficult to manage.

  I tu
rned my body to hide palming the baggie of pills. “Thanks for these.”

  A little thrill moved through me as I looked at them. These tiny discs of white represented hope for Julia, and for me. I smiled.

  Ben watched me. “Let me tell you something, Emma. Dealing isn’t a game. Nobody wins. It’s just survival. Do you understand that?”

  “I think I understand that better than anybody right about now.”

  Ben shook his head and shoved his door open, forcing me to step back. “I don’t think you do. You want to be included? Part of the plan? Then you need to know what’s really going on.”

  He yanked the back door open. Five pairs of eyes blinked at the sudden light.

  The girls were all young, in their late teens or early twenties, with hunched backs and terrified eyes that suggested they were used to hiding. The girl nearest the door was the youngest, maybe seventeen or eighteen. She had vitiligo, a condition in which the melanin in skin cells stops working, leaving the patient with patches of lighter skin. These stood out most prominently on her face and hands.

  I wondered how they’d gotten here, to this van, in a Costco parking lot. What sort of pain and trauma had they faced?

  A woman holding a baby looked up at me, the only one to hold my gaze. Her eyes glittered, chin jutting defiantly, like she was challenging me to ask why she was there. But I didn’t need to. I knew the lengths to which a mother would go.

  “These girls are undocumented,” Ben said. “They have a fake ID to see the doctor. We give them fifty dollars for the prescription once it’s filled. They can’t complain because they know we can turn them in to ICE anytime. We exploit them and send them on their way. You okay with that?”

  I thought about Josh sick at home. I thought about Julia writhing in pain as she waited for relief the medical system had denied her, and this woman in front of me just trying to earn enough money to provide for her baby.

  My dad had once told me that the most dramatic moment of a game of Texas Hold’em is when the player pushes all their chips to the center of the table. That’s when they go all in, when they realize there’s no going back. That’s when they commit to either raking in the pot or losing everything.

  “More harm is done by a timid doctor than a bold one,” he used to say. “Inaction is what kills people. Be bold and decisive, and never quit as long as you have a chip and a chair.”

  I was all in. Josh’s life was worth just as much as each of theirs, every girl in that van and every person in this parking lot.

  I had two weeks. Two weeks to get the money that would pay for Josh’s lifesaving treatment.

  I’d lost enough in my life. I couldn’t lose my son too.

  I swallowed hard, dousing emotion with cold, hard practicality. I grasped the sliding door handle and slammed it shut, closing the girls inside. I faced my brother, jaw set.

  “The end justifies the means.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE ALARM CLOCK BLARED into the dark bedroom, waking Nate abruptly. He rolled over to Emma, who was just stirring.

  Nate propped himself on his elbow and brushed a tendril of dark hair from his wife’s forehead. The strands were silk in his hands. He dropped a kiss onto each of her eyelids. Her body was lush and he yearned for her in a way they hadn’t had time for lately.

  “Morning, you,” he said, his voice husky.

  Emma opened her eyes, blinking sleepily. “Josh didn’t come in last night?”

  “Guess not.”

  Emma stretched and yawned. “I hope he’s okay. I should check.” She threw the covers back. “Brrr! It’s cold!”

  She slid a thick wool cardigan on, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, a glossy sheet stark against her pale skin.

  Nate tugged her back down, pressed his mouth to hers. “It’s cold. Josh is still asleep. What do you say?”

  Emma wiggled away. “Babe, seriously. I need to check on Josh. He’s been so sick… and we both need to get ready for work.”

  He watched her walk away, feeling like he was drowning in the ocean expanding between them. Nate wanted to shout at her, Stop shutting me out! But Emma was doing that thing she did, turning inward.

  It was normal for couples to grow apart when dealing with a child’s cancer diagnosis. He and Emma were both riddled with anxiety, guilt, and fear over Josh’s illness. But he worried there was something else going on.

  Or someone.

  “Sure,” he called after her, trying to save a shred of his dignity. “I have that meeting with Chief O’Neill and Mayor Walker this morning anyway.”

  He didn’t relish the idea of standing up in front of the chief or the mayor and admitting he didn’t have a solid lead in one of the town’s biggest cases in years, a case that was directly linked to the flow of oxy to his community. He could feel his hopes of a promotion to lieutenant slipping away, and with them any chance of providing for Josh.

  Black thoughts whirled through his head like crows: horror stories of medical bills making people go bankrupt; Josh dying because he couldn’t get the right help; Emma leaving him for another man, a better man.

  I can handle this, he told himself. That’s what cops do, we fix things. I will fix this.

  Nate peered out the slatted blinds. The sun was just rising across the valley, mist glittering in strips in the distance. The rooftops of the surrounding houses were sheeted in white. Frost coated the patchwork lawns and shrubs, turning the tree-lined street an ethereal silver hue. It looked cold out.

  Nate went to the tiny walk-in closet and rummaged around for the box of winter things Emma kept there. When he didn’t find it, he shuffled through Emma’s hanging shirts and dresses.

  “Hey, Em, where’s the box of winter stuff?” he called.

  He pushed aside a cluster of hangers. Underneath, perched in the corner, was a black briefcase he’d never seen before.

  Emma came in then, catching him kneeling in front of the briefcase. “What are you doing?” she snapped, looking annoyed.

  “What’s this?” Nate lifted the briefcase, turning it over in his hands. It looked expensive. Soft Italian leather. Gold metal feet on the base. Twin combination locks.

  “I borrowed it from the clinic to carry patient files. That’s why it has the locks. Josh was trying to play with it the other day so I stuck it in here.”

  “Ahh.” Nate set the briefcase back under the clothes. “Where are the winter clothes?”

  “I’ll get them.” Emma disappeared, then returned a moment later with a large box.

  Nate rummaged through and found his favorite fleece-lined hat, scarf, and gloves, a gift from Emma for his birthday last year. The doorbell rang and he heard Charlie bark, then his mom’s voice as Emma let her in.

  Nate finished tying his tie and rushed downstairs, despair and desperation making him hurry out the door, the draw of the toothpicks in his pocket a call he couldn’t refuse.

  * * *

  NATE HUNG up after updating Agent Hamilton on what he knew about the case so far, which was damn near nothing. Hamilton and Greene weren’t happy, Chief O’Neill and Dyson weren’t happy, and Mayor Walker sure as hell wasn’t going to be happy when she heard that he had basically zilch on this case.

  He leaned back in his chair and stared at the computer on his desk. The clock said 8:45 a.m. Fifteen minutes until his meeting with the mayor. Dread lodged firmly in his throat.

  Muriel Walker was a former district attorney who’d won that office on the strength of a campaign to reduce homelessness back in 2012. She’d ridden the success of that campaign up the chain to become mayor last year, promising to fix the oxycodone problem in the region.

  Now that there’d been four more oxy overdoses in the last two days, it had become a priority to find out why there’d been such an increase on the streets, who was distributing it, and how fentanyl had gotten introduced into the mix. Nate had to deliver an update on Santiago Martinez’s murder and how it fit into the wider drug distribution in the area. If only he had
something new to tell her.

  Nate unwrapped his eighth Bit-O-Honey. He savored the honey-flavored taffy, enjoying the tug and pull on his teeth. He let it dissolve in his mouth before slugging it down with a mouthful of lukewarm coffee. Ahhh, sugar and coffee. The breakfast of champions.

  When Nate was a kid, his dad used to keep a bag of Bit-O-Honey in his police car, sneaking them to Nate whenever he’d come on a ride-along. He felt horrible that he hadn’t kept his recent promise to his mom to visit. He didn’t want to tell her how difficult he found it.

  His dad had been a good man, a larger-than-life father and husband, an honorable and noble cop. Once Nate remembered seeing Matt coming out of a motel parking lot in Seattle. Matt had told him he was checking on a woman and a little girl after a domestic. Nate had felt proud that his dad went the extra mile for victims. That he cared.

  Seeing him the way he was now, a shriveled ghost of his former self, sickened Nate. Self-loathing howled inside his head.

  You’re a bad person.

  You’re cowardly. Weak.

  Nobody can trust you.

  Nate looked at his bloodied fingernails and longed for the familiar sharp thorn of the toothpick. The phone on his desk rang.

  “Detective Sweeney, this is Dr. Kathi Morris at Cascade Regional.”

  The pathologist. “Yes, hi, Dr. Morris.”

  “I received the tox screen back from Violeta Williams. I’ve emailed you the results, but thought I’d give you a call as well. The cause of death was ruled combined toxic effects of fentanyl and cocaine. The chemical structure of this particular type of fentanyl is quite unique, however. The precursor chemical is something called NPP, N-phenethyl-4-piperidinone, but there’s also a small amount of MDMA mixed in.”

  Nate flipped through the files on his desk and pulled out the autopsy report he’d received on Santiago Martinez a few days back. He shuffled to the tox screen page, and there it was.

  Martinez’s cause of death: toxic effects of fentanyl. The chemical structure included N-phenethyl-4-piperidinone and MDMA.

  Santiago Martinez and Violeta Williams had been killed by the same chemical structure.