by Skylar Finn
“Of course, by the time we both ended up across the river from each other—me on the ‘wrong side of the river’ this time, or however you want to put it—she acted like she never saw me before in her life. We were never friends. She always looked down her nose on me cause she acted like she was this genteel housewife. I knew where she came from, and she hated that.
“Until I saw her at the pill mill.”
“Cynthia Hayes went to a pill mill?” I asked. During the worst of the OxyContin epidemic in this region, when all they needed was a lease on an empty building and a doctor qualified to write prescriptions, a large number of quacks operated up and down the river. They systematically destroyed entire towns, creating an entire economy based solely on prescription narcotics. Pill mills left half the citizens of any given town addicted, strung-out, or dead in their wake.
“I used to work in one,” she said. “As a receptionist. I was Homecoming Queen in Portsmouth. I bet you don’t believe me, but I was. I had me a crappy-ass boyfriend, big-time jock football player. He was a damn liar. ‘Baby, I’ll pull out.’” She mimicked him, her voice dripping with disgust. “You trust one lying little piece of shit, one time, for one second, and look what happens.” She paused. She seemed to remember her daughter was missing. “Not that Crystal was a mistake,” she amended. “More of an accident, than a mistake.”
“Of course,” said Harper.
“Please continue,” I said.
“Being eighteen and pregnant doesn’t exactly leave you with a lot of options, incidentally,” she said. “He ran off with some other girl, to Texas I heard, and I never got a dime in child support. I found a job typing stuff up for some quack that just opened an office—except he didn’t actually want me to type up much of anything. He wanted me around to not keep a record of things if you catch my drift.”
“I do,” I said.
“These quack doctors were making money off all the appointments, to be sure—on any given day, there’d be so many people in the parking lot, it looked like a festival. Like the county fair had come to town, but without the rides. Or a drive-in or something. There were people all over the parking lot, waiting to get in. Out-of-state tags. Smoking, drinking, partying. Ordering pizza. Wearing their pajamas. It’s like a big rave. Or a fucked-up version of one of them, what were they called? Lock-ins? Where they put a bunch of religious kids in a gym overnight to make sure they’re not out doing drugs? Or each other? But with drugs.
“That’s where I saw her—Cynthia. Dressed up like she was going to the mall to get her Sears portrait taken. Waiting in her car, peering around the way she does. Doors locked, looking at all the junkies like she wasn’t one.
“It was around this time that I realized I was crazy, taking minimum wage from some crooked doctor when they were making all the money. Some of them would pay in pills, but I could see what it was doing to people, and I wasn’t stupid. I was smart that way. It’s no good selling Oxy if you’re addicted to it. The most you can hope for is to break even, and that’s probably not gonna happen cause you’re using up all your stash.”
“You never used?”
“Not opiates. That’s a death sentence. Mrs. Hayes, the perfect little housewife, got me into speed, but that was just so I could keep up with the demand. There are street rats, and there are distributors. Distributors make a profit cause they don’t use their product. Street rats spend the month stealing and selling—copper wire, stuff they shoplifted, themselves. They spend all thirty days of a prescription hustling till they can get back to the mill and re-up when the distributor takes half of their ’script in exchange for paying for the junkie’s appointment to get it.
“I started taking junkies I met in the parking lot of the mill I was working at to other clinics. I’d drive them there. In exchange—and in exchange for paying cash for their appointments—I’d take half their prescriptions and sell them.
“Cynthia ran into trouble because she was doing so much of the stuff, she’d run out of a ’script halfway through the month. She could have gone to a different clinic—it’s not like they had some elaborate system of cross-referencing folks, they didn’t care as long as they got their money—but her allowance was limited to whatever Daddy Hayes gave her. She didn’t want to have to answer any questions about why she suddenly needed twice the amount for groceries or whatever she bought. I don’t even know how she was still making chicken casserole five nights a week, the amount of drugs she bought. I guess she used the cheap stuff. Food, not drugs. Cynthia doesn’t do generic. She’s a brand name only kind of girl. Which was fine by me, because generic oxycodone was fewer milligrams and not worth as much as the real deal. What was I saying?” She blinked rapidly and shook herself a bit. Her synapses had been misfiring, or overfiring, for a long time.
“How did you meet Daniel?” asked Harper. “And discover he was involved in meth?”
“That woman was so smacked out, she had no idea what her husband was doing,” said April, shaking her head. “I brought her back to her car in the parking lot of Save-A-Lot to drop her off after an appointment, and she was so doped up, she couldn’t drive. She would have just nodded off at the wheel. I drove her all the way home. So I could make sure she didn’t die. She was one of my best clients. He was coming out just as we got to the driveway. She roused herself and got out of the car. Went inside. He came over to thank me for driving her home. He knew what was going on, all right. He just didn’t care.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because he took me straight to a bar and then straight to a hotel room after,” she said matter-of-factly. “That man doesn’t have a loyal bone in his body. I suppose part of me did it out of spite. Showing that bitch her picture-perfect little life didn’t mean shit. But that didn’t mean anything, either. At the end of the day, it was just him getting over on both of us.”
“You had an affair with Daniel Hayes?”
“Affair is a pretty grand way of putting it. It happened a few times, but he was mostly interested in smashing that partner of his. He started giving me drugs as payment for dealing with his wife, and crystal’s a lot more effective than gas station bathtub speed. We had an arrangement, Cynthia and me. Then I met her husband, and my future arrangements were with him. I’d get his wife home safely from the pill mill, and he’d pay me in crystal.
“It’s easier to manage a speed habit, in my opinion. Speed’s addictive, but it’s not what you’d call pleasant. You get to a point where you know if you do any more, you’re gonna drop dead on the spot. The heart can’t take it. With opiates, you just kinda nod off real slow. Like going to sleep, but sometimes, you never wake up. Or maybe you get careless, shoot up with a friend’s stash and it’s laced with fentanyl. Or you get desperate and go to smack, start smoking black tar to keep from going into withdrawal.”
“You were never involved in his business?”
“No. Why would I sell meth when I was making such a tidy profit on pills? Eventually, they started cracking down. You guys came around and started cracking down. The clinics started closing. The income dried up. I realized I had to do other things to support my daughter.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Porn,” she said with a shrug, the way another woman might say “Etsy.” “It’s all on the Internet, now. You don’t even have to be in the room with whatever pervert’s jacking off to you. I work from home now.” She laughed.
“You never sold for Daniel Hayes?”
“I don’t deal meth,” she said. “Pills were easy. They were legal. Pills are currency. Drugs are currency. Think about it: it will always retain its value to the user, regardless of inflation. You think I’m dumb? Think I’m some kinda hillbilly? Well, I ain’t. I understand the economy. You can pay somebody’s ransom in drugs.”
You can pay somebody’s ransom in drugs. A clearer picture was starting to emerge, like a photograph emerging from a sheet of paper soaked in a chemical bath.
“Do you know where the
ir lab is?” I asked.
“Back in the hills,” she said. “I can’t tell you where because I don’t go back there. I don’t cook. Randall does the cooking.”
“And where is Randall?”
“He’s dead,” she said.
20
Up In Smoke
Randall, as it transpired, had died the day before of an overdose. April found him passed out face down in a bowl of Cheerios.
“What a way to go,” she sighed, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know if he died from the drugs or passed out and drowned in his cereal.”
It was a harsh blow for April Deakins and a harsh blow for us. Randall could have led us straight to the lab. I had no doubt in my mind that he’d already done time and would have been more than willing to cut a deal. Anyone in his state, given the option between having to procure drugs in prison just to keep from going into withdrawal and having the freedom to continue doing drugs on the outside, would have chosen the latter.
While I wouldn’t normally frame someone’s life down into such reductive terms, Randall’s life had ended long ago when he had crushed his first prescription painkiller and snorted it, shot it up, or however he’d introduced it to his once functioning body and mind. If he’d died over breakfast, he’d probably been close to death for years.
That left Cynthia Hayes. She was the next closest person to their whole operation besides Katy Lipman and Daniel Hayes themselves. She might have turned a blind eye to it for years—easily abetted by her own illegal habits—but she was married to the man. She had to know something. I asked Harper how he was feeling. He was better with Mrs. Hayes than I was.
“I’m fine,” he said, his tone reserved.
“Was that the first time you’ve been shot at?” I asked. I figured he dealt mostly in pedophiles and cyber predators.
“No,” he said. He chose not to elaborate, and I left it at that.
Aside from the series of scorch marks on the lawn, the Hayes house was its usual pleasant suburban façade. She’d taken down her heart flag and put up a shamrock for St. Patrick’s Day. It was a little premature, but I guess she needed something to do.
We could be certain that Daniel Hayes wasn’t home, seeing as how he was still back in his office, weeping. I went out on a limb and further assumed that Mrs. Hayes was nearing her breaking point. She wanted her daughter back. Her husband was having an affair and planned to leave her. He was dealing on a large scale. She was completely strung out and had been for years. Something had to give.
Even having assumed this, the sight of Mrs. Hayes left me taken aback. Far from her normally polished and austere appearance in spite of the darkness of her circumstances, she looked like she had been left out to thaw for too long and then quickly reheated.
Her hair was askew, her face bare of any makeup. She wore a simple wrap dress that I realized upon second glance was actually a linen bathrobe. Her feet were bare. If she was bothered by the chill in the air when she opened the door, she didn’t show it.
“Come in,” she said mechanically, both her voice and her gaze distant, leveled somewhere over our heads as if looking out at the river several streets away.
Harper and I entered the Hayes home. I glanced around. It was in uncustomary disarray, magazines scattered over every surface. There were half-drunk mugs of tea lined up on the table as if she’d forgotten she was drinking one halfway through and gotten up to make another. Plates with stale toast crusts and wadded-up napkins sat alongside the forgotten mugs.
For someone who was normally as poised as Mrs. Hayes, it was an alarming deterioration to have occurred in a relatively short amount of time. I couldn’t tell if she’d simply run out of drugs or if the stress of her life and her family disintegrating around her had all become too much. Maybe it was both.
“Did you want some water?” she asked vaguely.
“That’s all right,” said Harper gently. He had pulled a total one-eighty since we had talked to her husband. “Why don’t you sit down?”
He helped her into a seat in her living room. She sighed, leaned back, and closed her eyes. I eyed her impatiently and tried to remain detached. On the one hand, I felt compassion for this woman who had tried so desperately to hold her family—and herself—together even as it all ran through her fingers like sand. On the other hand, she was the missing link standing between getting her daughter back and whether or not anyone ever saw Brittany and Crystal again. I was losing patience with the cover-up. Their mistakes had become their children’s burden.
“Cynthia,” said Harper, still in the same gentle, leading tone. “Can you tell us anything about your husband’s narcotics-related activities?”
I expected her to feign ignorance, or engage in a bald face, outright denial. Instead, her shoulders slumped, defeated. It was as if after years of trying to keep it together, it was all finally coming apart.
“He asks me to buy cold medicine for him,” she said simply, slouching in her seat.
“Cold medicine?” I glanced at Harper. “What kind of cold medicine?”
“Pseudoephedrine,” she said. “Sudafed. That kind of thing. He’s very…specific.”
“Where do you keep this cold medicine, Cynthia?” Harper asked.
She pointed limply toward the closet in the corner. It was quaintly decorated, painted a pristine white with heart and rose stenciled up and down the door. Harper slid it opened on its little rolling track.
The entire closet was full. From the carpeted bottom to the very top, perfectly organized in methodical, neat rows—or compulsively organized by a habitual speed freak—were boxes and boxes of cold medicine. She could have gotten the entire state through cold and flu season—or kept her husband in enough over-the-counter ingredients to cook meth for the next several years.
“He didn’t tell me why he needed it,” she said plaintively as if this was a perfectly ordinary request for your husband to make of you.
“Mrs. Hayes, are you aware of any romantic relationship between your husband and Katy Lipman?” Harper said briskly, all business now. Trying to get her to turn on Daniel Hayes.
Her face puckered like she’d been sucking on a lemon. “That bastard,” she said. “I gave him the best years of my life. After my first divorce, I swore I would never get another one. He’s ruining the promise I made to myself. He’s destroying our family. He’s destroying Brittany’s life!” Her voice rose in a plaintive crescendo.
“Did you do something with Brittany?” asked Harper. “To teach him a lesson?”
“No! I would never harm my daughter.” Her voice turned hard and bitter. “It was probably one of his drug people. I bet he owes the whole state. Daniel always was a gambler.”
“Do you know any of those contacts?”
“Of course I don’t,” she said, insulted. “I would never involve myself in such a thing.”
I thought of what April Deakins had told us about her pill mill days before she went from downers to uppers but elected not to mention it. We could get into that later.
“Do you know where they keep their drugs?” Harper asked.
“I told you, I don’t know anything about it!” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know where he hides things. Not at the house.”
“Do you think maybe he hides it at their construction sites?” I asked.
“Probably,” she said. “They certainly move around often enough. You know, he’s never taken me to see a single one of his projects once they’re finished? Who knows if he even finishes them?”
Harper nodded at me. “Cynthia, will you be okay here on your own?” I asked her. “Would you like us to call someone to come stay with you?”
“No, I’m fine.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll just go upstairs and rest for a while. My neighbor Tamara comes to check in on me every evening. Thank you for asking.”
We got up and let ourselves out. I pulled the door shut gently behind me. I didn’t think she had it in her to get up and lock it behind us, but I wasn’t tremendously
worried. Aside from her daughter’s disappearance and her husband’s meth-related activity, it was the kind of neighborhood where you didn’t need to lock your doors.
We drove to Sistersville in silence. It was the kind of charged atmosphere where you knew a confrontation was imminent. We hadn’t discussed what we would do if we caught them red-handed at the site, but it was important to have some kind of a plan in place.
“If they’re using, they’ll be volatile,” I said. “If they’re there.”
“If they’re not at Lipman’s, packing up to leave town,” he said. “Did they seem like they were using to you?”
“No,” I admitted. “They don’t seem like people who would generally get tangled up in meth in the first place, but that’s probably been their greatest advantage so far.”
“If they’re not there, do you think we’ll be able to find it? The lab?”
“I doubt it’s on the site itself. It might be farther up the hill, in the woods. It might be a shack or a trailer. Which wouldn’t appear out-of-place at a construction site.”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Ideally, we won’t have to confront them at all,” I said. “The issue is going to be linking all of this up with the disappearance of Brittany Hayes and Crystal Deakins. If we don’t find evidence of either the girls or whatever ransom they’re trying to pay, we’re going to be in a bad way. This will be considered a dangerous digression from our actual work, and it’s not going to go over well with the higher-ups. Brown alone will probably flay us alive.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure there’s a connection,” he said.
Harper drove to the top of the hill this time and parked directly in front of the skeletal construction of the boarding-house-in-progress. Both the Sahara and the Wrangler were parked out front, but neither Lipman nor Hayes were anywhere to be seen. We got out of the car.
