A Faint Cold Fear (29 page)

'His name's on them.'

'Antidepressants,' Sara said, lining up the bottles one by one across her desk.

'He was shooting Ice.'

'Handsome and smart,' Sara noted wryly, still lining up the bottles, trying to classify them into sections.

'Valium, which is contraindicated with antidepressants'

She studied the labels, all of which had the same prescribing doctor. The name didn't ring any bells, but the scripts were setting off all kinds of alarms in Sara's head.

She started to read off the prescriptions. 'Prozac, about two years old. Paxil, Elavil.' She paused, noting the dates. 'Looks like he tried them all and settled on the Zoloft, which is-' She paused, then let out a 'Wow.'

'What?'

'Three hundred fifty milligrams of Zoloft a day.

That's high.'

'What's the average?'

Sara shrugged. 'I don't give this to my kids,' she told him. 'Educated guess for an adult would be fifty to one hundred milligrams tops.' She continued with the bottles. 'Ritalin, of course. His generation grew up on that crap. More Valium, lithium, amantadine, Paxil, Xanax, cyproheptadine, busiprone, Wellbutrin, Buspar, Elavil. Another of Zoloft. Another.' She grouped the three bottles of Zoloft together, noting that they had each been filled at different pharmacies on different dates.

'What are these for?'

'Specifically? Depression, sleeplessness, anxiety.

They're all for the same thing, but they work in different ways.' She rolled her chair back to the shelf by the filing cabinet and found her pharmacological guide. "I'll have to look these up,' she said, rolling back to the desk. 'Some of them I know, but I have no idea about the others. One of my Parkinson's kids is on busiprone for anxiety. Sometimes you can take these together, but not all of them. That would end up being toxic.'

'Could he be selling them?' Jeffrey asked. 'He had the needles. We found a stash of pot and ten tabs of acid in his closet.'

'There's not really a market for antidepressants,'

Sara told him. 'Anybody can get a prescription for them nowadays. It's just a matter of finding the right or in this case the wrong doctor.'

She indicated a couple of the bottles she had set aside. 'Ritalin and Xanax have street value.'

'I can go to the elementary school and score ten pills of each for around a hundred dollars,' Jeffrey pointed out. He held up a large plastic bottle. 'At least he's taking his vitamins.'

'Yocon,' she said, reading the ingredients. 'Might as well start with this one.' Sara thumbed through the book, finding the appropriate entry. She scanned the description, summarizing, 'It's a trade name for yohimbine, which is an herb. It's supposed to help the libido.'

Jeffrey took back the bottle. 'It's an aphrodisiac?'

'Not technically,' Sara answered, reading further.

'Supposedly it helps with everything from premature ejaculation to maintaining a harder erection.'

'How come I've never heard of it?'

Sara gave him a knowing look. 'You never needed to.'

Jeffrey smiled, setting the Yocon back on her desk.

'He's a twenty-year-old kid. Why would he need something like this?'

'The Zoloft could cause him to be anorgasmic.'

Jeffrey narrowed his eyes. 'He couldn't come?'

'Well, that's another way of putting it,' Sara allowed. 'He could achieve and maintain an erection but have a problem ejaculating.'

'Jesus Christ, no wonder he was choking himself.'

Sara ignored his comment, double-checking the drug in her guide just to be sure. ' "Side effects: anorasmia, anxiety, increased appetite, decreased appetite, insomnia… "'

'That might explain the Xanax.'

Sara looked up from the book. 'No doctor in his right mind would prescribe all of these pills together.'

Jeffrey compared some of the labels. 'He used about four different pharmacies.'

'I don't imagine one pharmacist would fill all of these. It's too reckless.'

'We'll need something solid to get a warrant for pharmacy records,' he said. 'Do you recognize the doctor?'

'No,' she said, sliding open the bottom drawer of her desk. She pulled out the phone book for Grant County and surrounding areas. A quick search revealed that the man was not listed. 'He's not affiliated with the health clinic or the school?'

'No,' Jeffrey told her. 'He could be in Savannah.

One of the pharmacies is listed there.'

'I don't have a Savannah phone book.'

'They've got this new thing,' Jeffrey said, teasing her. 'It's called the Internet.'

'All right,' Sara said, forgoing the lecture on how wonderful technology was. She could see its application for someone like Jeffrey, but as far as Sara was concerned, she saw too many pasty, overweight kids in her practice to appreciate the benefits of staring at a computer all day.

Jeffrey suggested, 'Maybe it's not a doctor?'

'Unless the pharmacist knows you, you have to have a DEA number when you call in a script. It's on a database.'

'So maybe someone stole a number from a retired doctor?'

'He's not prescribing narcotics or OxyContin. I imagine these wouldn't throw up any red flags with government regulators.' Sara frowned. 'Still, I'm not sure what the purpose is. These aren't stimulants. You can't really get high off any of' them. The Xanax can be addictive, but he's got the methamphetamine and pot, which do a hell of a lot better jobs.'

Carlos would count and classify the pills later, but on impulse Sara opened one of the Zoloft bottles.

Without taking them out, she compared the yellow tablets to the drawing in the book. 'They match.'

Jeffrey opened the next bottle while Sara took the third. He said, 'Mine don't.'

Sara peered into the bottle. 'No,' she agreed, opening the top drawer of her desk. She found a pair of tweezers and used them to remove one of the clear capsules. A fine white powder was packed inside. 'We can send it off and find out what's in it.'

Jeffrey was checking each bottle in turn. 'Is there money in the budget for a rush?'

'I don't think we have a choice,' Sara told him, slipping the capsule into a small evidence bag. She helped him check the contents of the other bottles, but all of them had some sort of imprint identifying the maker or drug name.

Jeffrey said, 'He could be using the capsule shells for other drugs.'

'Let's test the unknown ones first,' Sara suggested, knowing how expensive a wild-goose chase would be.

If they were in Atlanta, she would certainly have the resources, but the budget in Grant County was so tight that some months Sara had to borrow latex gloves from the clinic.

She asked, 'Where is Dickson from?'

'Right here,' Jeffrey said.

Sara tried her earlier question, thinking Jeffrey was in a better place to talk about it now.

'How did his parents take the news?'

'Better than I thought,' Jeffrey said. 'I gathered he was a handful.'

'Like Andy Rosen,' Sara pointed out. She had filled him in on Hare's impression of the Rosen family during the drive back from Atlanta.

'If our only connection here is that we've got two spoiled twenty-something boys, that means half the kids at the school are in danger.'

'Rosen was manic-depressive,' Sara reminded him.

'Dickson's parents said he wasn't. He never mentioned anything about therapy. As far as they knew, their son was as healthy as a horse.'

'Would they have known?'

'They don't seem very involved, but the father made it clear he was paying all the bills. Something like that would have come up.'

'He could see someone at the health center on campus for free.'

'It might be tricky getting access to clinic documents.'

Sara suggested, 'You could ask Rosen again.'

'I think she's tapped out,' Jeffrey told her, a dark expression on his face. 'We interviewed the entire dorm, and nobody knew a damn thing about the kid.'

'From the smell in his room, I'd guess he spent most of his time there.'

'If Dickson was dealing, nobody's going to admit to knowing him anyway. Every toilet in the dorm started to flush when it got around that we were asking questions.'

Sara mulled over what they had. 'So both he and Rosen were isolated loner types. Both were into drugs.'

'Rosen's tox screen was clear.'

'That's hit or miss,' Sara reminded him. 'The lab only tests for the substances I specify. There are thousands of other drugs he could have used that I just didn't know to screen for.'

'I think somebody wiped down Dickson's room.'

She waited for him to continue.

'There was a bottle of vodka in the fridge, half full, but no prints. Some beer cans and other stuff had prints from the victim and a couple of latents probably from the store clerk or whoever sold them to him.'

He paused. 'We're gonna try to run the syringe to see what was in it. The one on the floor is pretty trashed.

They scraped the wood, but I don't know if they'll be able to get a good sample.' He paused again, as if there was something else he did not want to say. 'Lena found the syringe.'

'How'd that happen?'

'She saw it under the bed.'

'Did she touch it?'

'All over.'

'Does she have an alibi?'

'I was with Lena all morning,' Jeffrey said. 'She was with White all night. They alibi each other.'

'You don't sound convinced.'

'I don't trust either of them right now, especially considering Ethan White's criminal background. You don't wake up one day and stop being a racist. The only thing that ties all of them together, including Tess, is something to do with race.'

Sara knew where he was going with this. 'We've talked this through already. How would anyone know I was going to bring Tessa to the scene? It's too improbable.'

'Lena just keeps popping up too much in this for her to not be a part of it.'

Sara knew what he meant. They were having the same problem with Andy Rosen's alleged suicide.

Coincidences were seldom really that.

'This White,' Jeffrey began, 'he's a nasty piece of shit, Sara. I hope you never meet him.' His tone turned harsh. 'What the hell is she doing with somebody like that?'

Sara sat back in her chair, and she waited for his attention. 'Considering what Lena's been through, it's no wonder she's mixed up with someone like Ethan White. He's a dangerous man. I know you keep calling him a kid, but from what you've told me, he doesn't act like a kid. Lena could be attracted to that danger.

She's going with the known quantity.'

He shook his head, like that was something he could not accept. Sometimes Sara wondered if he knew Lena at all. Jeffrey tended to see people the way he wanted to see them rather than the way they really were. This had actually been a running problem in Sara's marriage, and she did not like being reminded of it now.

Sara said, 'Except for Ellen Schaffer, this could be a series of coincidences, compounded by you and Lena being in the pissing contest to end all pissing contests.' She put her finger to his mouth to shush him. 'I know what you're going to say, but you can't deny that there's hostility between you and Lena. As a matter of fact, she could be protecting White just to piss you off.'

'It's possible,' he agreed, much to her surprise.

Sara sat back in her chair. 'Do you really think she's been drinking?' she asked. 'Drinking enough to have a problem?'

He shrugged, and Sara was reminded again of how much Jeffrey hated alcoholics. His father had been a violent drunk, and though Jeffrey claimed to have transcended his abusive childhood, Sara knew that an alcoholic could set Jeffrey off more, quickly than a murderer could.

Sara said, 'Being hung over doesn't mean she has a problem it just means she had too much to drink one night.' Sara let that sink in before continuing.

'And what about this?' she asked, paging through the pictures. She showed him the photo of the stomped syringe on the floor.

'I'm pretty sure she didn't do that,' he admitted.

'Eyeballing the tread with White's shoe, it's almost identical.'

'No,' Sara said. 'You're missing the bigger question.

Dickson had two syringes of the purest meth you can buy. If he wanted to kill himself - or if someone wanted to make it look like he killed himself why not use the second syringe? The meth was so strong that the second dose would have killed him almost instantly.'

'Scarfing is a pretty embarrassing way to go,' Jeffrey pointed out, using the slang for autoerotic asphyxiation.

'Could be somebody who hated him.'

'That hook was in the wall a long time,' Sara told him, finding the photograph. 'The belts show wear patterns to indicate they've been used like this before.

The foam would keep the leather from marking his neck. He had it all set up, including the porn on the television.' She fanned through the pictures as she talked. 'He probably thought he was safe sitting down. Most of these cases are closet rods and chairs that slip out from under their feet.' She indicated the prescription bottles. 'If he was anorgasmic, he would certainly be looking for a better way to build a mousetrap.'

Jeffrey could not let Lena go. 'Why would Lena contaminate the scene if she didn't have anything to hide? She never did anything like that before.'

Sara could not answer his question. 'If White is the perpetrator, what's his motivation for killing Scooter?'

Jeffrey shook his head. 'No reason that I can see.'

'Drugs?' Sara asked.

'White checks out clean every week as part of his parole, but Lena had some Vicodin in her apartment.'

'Did you ask her about it?'

'She said it's for the pain from what happened to her last year.'

Unbidden, an image of Lena during the rape exam came to Sara's mind.

Jeffrey said, 'She had a valid prescription.'

Sara realized she had lost track of the conversation for a moment. She asked, 'Schaffer didn't use drugs?'

'No.'

'Dickson doesn't sound like an ethnic name.'

'Southern Baptist, born and bred.'

'He wasn't seeing anyone?'

'Smelling like that?' Jeffrey reminded her.