“Or maybe she was shoplifting.” Lena tossed the jeans back onto the pile. She continued the search, lifting the mattress, sliding her hand between clothes, picking up shoes and putting them back in place. Will stood in the doorway, watching Lena move around the room. She seemed more sure of herself. He wanted to know what had changed. Confession was good for the soul, but her newfound attitude couldn’t be solely traced back to her revelation about Tommy. The Lena he’d left this morning was ready to burst into tears at any moment. The one thing she was sure about was Tommy’s guilt. Something else had been weighing her down, but now it was gone.
Her certainty was making him suspicious.
“What about that?” Will pointed to the bedside table. The drawer was cracked open. Lena used her gloved hand to open it the rest of the way. There was a pad of paper, a pencil, and a flashlight inside.
“You ever read Nancy Drew?” he asked, but she was ahead of him. Lena used the pencil to shade the paper on the pad.
She showed it to Will. “No secret note.”
“It was worth a try.”
“We can toss this place, but nothing’s jumping out at me.”
“No pink book bag.”
She stared at him. “Someone told you Allison had a pink book bag?”
“Someone told me she had a car, too.”
“A rusted red Dodge Daytona?” she guessed. She must have heard about the BOLO Faith put on the car this morning.
“Let’s try the bathroom,” he suggested.
He followed her up the hallway. Again, Will let her conduct the search. Lena opened the medicine cabinet. There was the usual array of lady things: feminine aids, a bottle of perfume, some Tylenol and other pain relievers as well as a brush. Lena opened the packet of birth control pills. Less than a third of the pills remained. “She was current.”
He looked at the prescription label on the birth control. The logo at the top was unfamiliar. “Is this a local pharmacy?”
“School dispensary.”
“How about the prescribing doctor?”
She checked the name and shook her head. “No idea. Probably from her hometown.” Lena opened the cabinet under the sink. “Toilet paper. Tampons. Pads.” She checked inside the boxes. “Nothing that shouldn’t be here.”
Will stared at the open medicine cabinet. Something was off. There were two shelves and space at the bottom of the cabinet that served as a third. The middle shelf seemed devoted to medication. The birth control packet had been wedged in between the Motrin and Advil bottles, which were shoved to the far end of the shelf close to the hinge. The Tylenol was on the opposite side, also shoved to the end. He studied the gap, wondering if there was another bottle that was missing.
“What is it?” Lena asked.
“You should get your hand looked at.”
She flexed her fingers. The Band-Aids were looking ragged. “I’m fine.”
“It looks infected. You don’t want it getting into your bloodstream.”
She stood up from the cabinet. “The only doctor in town rents space at the children’s clinic. Hare Earnshaw.”
“Sara’s cousin.”
“He wouldn’t exactly welcome me as a patient.”
“Who do you normally see?”
“That’s not really any of your business.” She pulled back the cheap mini-blind on the window. “There’s a car parked in Mrs. Barnes’s driveway.”
“Wait for me outside.”
“Why do you—” She stopped herself. “All right.”
Will walked behind her down the hall. When he stopped outside Allison’s room, Lena turned. She didn’t say anything, but continued down the stairs. Will didn’t think there was anything of note in the girl’s room. Lena had done a thorough search. What struck Will the most was what was missing: There was no laptop. No schoolbooks. No notebooks. No pink backpack. No sign that a college student was living here except for the enormous amount of clothing. Had someone taken Allison’s school things? More than likely, they were in her Dodge Daytona, whereabouts unknown.
Will heard the front door open and close. He looked out the window and saw Lena heading down the driveway toward the cruiser. She was on her cell phone. He knew she wasn’t calling Frank. Maybe she was looking for a lawyer.
He had more pressing things to think about right now. Will went to the bathroom and used the camera on his cell phone to take a picture of the medicine cabinet. Next, he went downstairs to Tommy Braham’s bathroom. Will stepped over the towels and underwear to get to the medicine cabinet. He opened the mirrored door. An orange plastic pill bottle was the only thing inside. Will leaned in. The words on the label were small. The light was bad. And he was dyslexic.
He used his phone to take another picture. This time, he sent the image to Faith with three question marks in the message.
Sara had kept his handkerchief again. Will looked around for something to use so his fingerprints wouldn’t get on the bottle. Tommy’s underwear and dirty sock were not an option. Will rolled off some toilet paper from the roll stuck on the back of the toilet and used it to pick up the bottle. The cap wasn’t securely screwed down. He opened the top and saw a handful of clear capsules with white powder inside. Will shook one into his hand. There was no writing on the side, no pharmaceutical logo or maker’s mark.
In movies, cops always tasted the white powders they found. Will wondered why drug dealers didn’t leave piles of rat poison lying around just for this particular reason. He put the bottle on the edge of the sink so he could photograph the capsule in his hand. Then he took a closer shot of the prescription label and sent both images to Faith.
As a rule, Will stayed away from doctors. He couldn’t read them his insurance information when he called to make an appointment. He couldn’t fill out their forms while he was sitting in the waiting room. One time, Angie had been kind enough to give him syphilis and he’d had to take a regimen of pills four times a day for two weeks. Consequently, Will knew what a prescription label looked like. There was always an official logo from the pharmacy at the top. The doctor’s name and date were listed, the Rx number, the patient’s name, the dosage information, the warning stickers.
This label seemed to have none of those things. It wasn’t even the proper size—he’d guess it was half the usual height and shorter in length. There were plenty of numbers typed across the top, but the rest of the information was written in by hand. A cursive hand, which meant Will didn’t know if he was staring at heroin or acetaminophen.
His phone rang. Faith asked, “What the hell is that?”
“I found it in Tommy’s medicine cabinet.”
“‘Seven-nine-nine-three-two-six-five-three,’” she read. “‘Tommy, do not take any of these’ is written across the middle in cursive. Exclamation point at the end. The ‘do not’ is underlined.”
Will said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn’t tasted the white powder. “Is the handwriting feminine?”
“Looks like it. Big and loopy. Slanted to the right, so she’s right-handed.”
“Why would Tommy have a bottle of pills that said don’t take them?”
“What about the three letters at the bottom? Looks like ‘H-O-C’ or ‘H-C-C’ …?”