Intervention

  Frustrated that they hadn’t gotten more information, Kent bolted back upstairs, Andy behind him. “Andy, check to see if another robbery was reported at baggage claim that night at the airport.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Kent went back up to his desk and called one of the CSIs to see if they’d found anything else in Tredwell’s house. They were still sifting through his junk, but hadn’t made any important discoveries since the sample drugs. They said they’d be coming back soon to go over everything with him.

  Kent’s stomach growled, and he checked his watch. It was seven o’clock, and he hadn’t had time to eat. He dug into his pocket for some coins, and walked down the hall to the vending machine. When he came back, Andy was hanging up the phone. “Did you get anything?”

  Andy reached into Kent’s potato chip bag and took one. “Sure enough, there was a stolen wallet reported at right around the time the murder occurred, just like Tredwell said. Some lady named Mrs. Alvarez, who was on Trish and Emily’s flight, realized her wallet was gone when she tried to pay her way out of the parking garage. So that part of Tredwell’s statement was true. We can’t pinpoint the time since she’s not absolutely certain where her wallet was stolen.”

  “Doesn’t prove anything except that Myra was making use of her time while she waited for him. But the tattoo speaks volumes. That was him in the car.”

  “Definitely the same guy. I think we ought to go pay a visit to the doctor he works for and see what we can find out. Maybe Dr. Greg Leigh can help us establish a connection to Trish Massey, and tell us if Tredwell had access to Tubarine.”

  “Meanwhile, Emily’s still out there.” Kent opened his computer again, fast-forwarded to the footage he had of Emily getting into the black Infiniti. He watched it drive away again, wishing the state lab could have gotten the tag number. “If we could just identify who was in that car. What’s the point of having these cameras if you can’t even read a tag number?”

  Andy took another chip, stuck the whole thing in his mouth. Crunching, he said, “You can read all the others on cars around them. That tag’s got mud all over it.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no mud on the rest of the car.”

  Andy squinted. “Maybe it was by design. The driver didn’t want his tag read.”

  Kent studied it, then glanced up at Andy. “I’ll give the doctor a call, see if he can shed any light. Maybe he can help us get to the bottom of this.”

  thirty-four

  When Kent called, Dr. Leigh wasn’t in. The receptionist told him Leigh had been out all week. When she asked if she could help him, Kent said, “I’m calling about one of your nurses, Gerald Tredwell.”

  “Sure. What about him?” She sounded young — early twenties, maybe.

  “Can you verify that he works there?”

  “Yes, though I don’t know why they haven’t fired him yet. If I pulled some of the stuff he’s pulled, I’d be standing in the unemployment line.”

  He chuckled. “Oh yeah? What kind of stuff?”

  She hesitated. “I shouldn’t say. Are you someone thinking about hiring him? If he has a shot at another job, I don’t want to mess that up.”

  “Anxious to get rid of him, are you?”

  She laughed as if she’d been caught. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, I really just need to talk to Dr. Leigh,” Kent said. “Could you give me his cell phone number or a home number where I can reach him?”

  There was a pause. He wondered if she would clam up now. But he got lucky. He could hear her shuffling papers, then she came back to the phone. “It’s 555 – 6243.”

  He jotted it down. “Is that cell or home?”

  “His home number. In case you don’t get him, I’ll tell him you called.”

  “When do you expect him back in?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably Monday.”

  Kent called the number but only reached voicemail. The voice sounded clear and deep. “Hi, you’ve reached Dr. Greg Leigh. I’m not in right now, but leave a message.”

  He waited for the beep. “Dr. Leigh, this is Detective Harlan with the Atlanta Police Department. I’m calling about someone we have in custody. One of your nurses — Gerald Tredwell. I’d like to ask you a few questions about him. Give me a call back, please.” He left his cell phone number.

  As he hung up, one of the CSIs came in and got a cup of coffee. “Ready to come look at all the evidence we logged?”

  “Was there a lot of it?”

  “Yeah. We grabbed several bags of trash while we were there, so some garbage detail is in order.”

  Kent glanced back at Andy and smiled.

  Andy sneered. “Sometimes I hate this job.”

  “Oh, you’ll grow to love it.” They followed the investigator to the evidence room, and Kent saw the bags of festering trash laid on a table. “Mmmm. Smells good.”

  Andy groaned. “Vintage waste. My favorite thing.”

  Kent pulled on his gloves. A host of things turned up in people’s garbage, from credit card statements to pill bottles and doodles on notepads. If they could find any link to Emily at all, or to Trish Massey, they might be able to make this case stick … and find Emily.

  Kent watched his partner dump the contents. As always, the ooze of banana peels and discarded food stank up the place, but he got to work, looking for anything that would help their case.

  An hour passed, and they hadn’t found anything very helpful, other than more evidence that he and Myra had been hard-core drug users. They found no connection to Emily at all.

  When his cell phone rang, Kent stepped back from the garbage and pulled off his rubber gloves. He got his phone out of his pocket. The number was unfamiliar, but he answered it. “Detective Harlan.”

  “Yes, Dr. Greg Leigh here. I just got your message. I was surprised to hear that Gerald Tredwell is in custody. What did he do?”

  “I can’t go into all that just yet, but right now I’d like to verify that he’s your employee and see what you can tell me about him.”

  “Yes, he’s worked for me for four or five months.”

  “Good employee?”

  “At times.”

  “And other times?”

  “Other times, he comes in late or calls in sick. He can be unreliable.”

  He saw Andy wince as he peeled some receipts from a slimy brown banana peel. “Are you aware he has a drug problem?” Kent asked.

  “I’ve suspected. I’ve been meaning to spring a drug test on him, but wanted to give him a chance to clean up his act.”

  “Really? Seems pretty risky having an addict working in a medical office.”

  “He’d had a lot of problems, gotten fired from other jobs. I don’t use him in surgery, just in the office. This is probably his last chance to stay in this field. I have a soft spot for addicts.” His pitch dropped. “I hoped he’d pull himself together. When I hired him he’d been sober for over a year.”

  “Has he ever been to treatment?”

  “Not as far as I know. Is that what he was arrested for? A drug charge?”

  “Among other things.” Kent paused. “Would you happen to know if he had any connection to Road Back Recovery Center in Emerson?”

  Leigh hesitated. “The place where that woman worked? The one killed at the airport?”

  “Yes. Did he ever mention her or that rehab?”

  “No. Do you think he was involved with that?”

  “He may be.”

  “Wow. That’s disturbing.”

  “We found a bunch of packs of sample medications in his home. Could he have gotten them from your office?”

  “I don’t know. We get tons of samples from pharmaceutical reps. But the samples are logged. I can get someone to do an inventory and get back to you.”

  “If you find he took them from your office, I’ll need you to sign an affidavit. Also, could you tell me if he had access to a drug called Tubarine?”

  There was a long pause. “Tubarine? I use that
in surgery sometimes. I do keep some of it in the office.”

  “Check and see if he took any. We’ll need an affidavit about that too.”

  “Will do.”

  When Kent hung up, he turned back to the trash heap.

  Andy grabbed a syringe and put it on the edge of the table to log. “Anything?” he asked.

  Kent looked down at the caller ID. “I don’t know. Something’s not adding up. Why would a doctor hire a guy like Tredwell and keep him around, even though he suspects he’s using? He’s checking to see if the pills or Tubarine were stolen from his office.”

  Kent added the number to his address book, and it prompted him for the name. He typed in “Dr. Greg Leigh.” There was something familiar about the phone number. He’d seen it before. “Hey, does this number mean anything to you?” he asked Andy.

  Andy glanced at the readout on the phone. “I don’t think so.”

  Kent shrugged it off and went back to sorting through the waste.

  The garbage search did give them some information about the two people they had in custody, but nothing regarding Emily. Kent washed up and went back to his desk. That phone number kept playing through his mind, so he opened his notes and searched for it.

  Finally, he found it, written in the top margin of a page devoted to all the paths they’d followed after Emily’s text. He had seen that phone number before …

  It was the phone Emily had used to text her mother.

  thirty-five

  The walls were concrete, cold and damp, and Emily had a cough that ripped at her lungs almost every time she exhaled. The withdrawals were catching up with her — the mucus in her lungs thickening, diarrhea and nausea taking hold. Though she was cold from the damp, dark basement, she sweated as if it were a hundred degrees.

  He could have at least left her a mattress to lie on.

  There was a bath mat on the floor in front of the toilet, so she curled up on it in a fetal position, hugging herself.

  She thought of praying, but what good would it do? You didn’t live your life like Lucifer until you drove your car into a ditch, then expect a holy God to pull you out. In fact, this was all probably God’s doing. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, God had zapped her into the hands of a killer.

  She got to her knees and threw up again, then backed against the wall and set her elbows on her knees. Her hair was filthy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d washed it. Even before her mother’s sneaky intervention, she’d let it go for days. Now that she hadn’t had a cigarette in days, she could smell the scent of her dirty clothes and her dirty skin.

  She supposed this dirty basement was just where she belonged.

  She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and hugged herself against the shivering. As aware as she was of the consequences she was paying for her drug use, if someone came in right now and offered her a hit, she would throw herself at it. She would do almost anything to get it.

  Just one hit.

  Her mother was probably sitting in her pristine office, shaking her head and asking some pious friend for prayer for her wayward daughter who’d run away. She was probably using all those Al-Anon techniques and forcing herself to detach.

  Lance was surely going through her journals and posting her deepest thoughts on MySpace.

  They may never know that she wasn’t here by her own choice. That, for once, things had spewed out of her control, and she’d been swept into something so big she couldn’t sort it out to make sense of it.

  If only they knew how it had all started. But the truth was, it was all such a blur that she wasn’t sure herself. She remembered the day of the intervention clearly, and in the last forty-eight hours, had wished a million times that she had done things differently. If she could only go back and start over …

  Emily had already felt a rising sense of panic when she got off the plane with Trish in Atlanta. Her life was about to change, and nothing familiar was going with her. She hated treatment centers, where people were irritable and angry, and the counselors and directors treated you like you couldn’t be trusted, and didn’t believe you no matter how sick you told them you were.

  Yes, there were ways to work around the system. There were always doctors you could manipulate, who were more concerned with covering their tails than with getting someone sober. But would that work at this place? So far, Trish seemed cool. She was probably aware that Emily had used on the plane, but since they hadn’t been sitting together, she’d gotten away with it. Then she’d let her use her cell phone as they walked through the airport.

  Her mother had sounded relieved on the phone. She was probably throwing a party. Ding dong, the junkie’s gone …

  Emily’s panic rose as they headed to baggage claim, but she tried not to show it. It didn’t pay to be vulnerable when you went into rehab. Instead, you went in looking tough, trying to one-up the others. Her first time in rehab, she’d been strictly a marijuana user. She’d learned quickly not to tell the hard-core users that. They would think she was a lightweight. By the time she’d been there a week, she’d convinced them all she was a cocaine addict. When she came out, she became one, just to make her story true. The doctor gave her Xanax to help with her fake withdrawals, so she added that to her arsenal of favorites.

  If her mother only knew.

  As she followed Trish through the airport, Emily’s mind raced with schemes. Even though she knew her way around rehabs, she couldn’t stand the thought of going through it again. Her friend Paige was having a party tonight, and Caleb was getting a disability check that he was going to spend on everybody there. They were all going to score big. When would she get a chance like that again?

  Emily waited at baggage claim, craving a cigarette, as Trish got her bag. Emily had to be reminded to get hers, but she dragged it off the conveyor belt, stacked her carry-on on it, then let Trish pull it behind her.

  They both stopped and lit cigarettes as they left the airport. As they walked through the parking garage, Emily looked from side to side for an escape. If only she could have gotten the phone long enough to call one of her friends. There might be someone here who would come get her, someone she talked to in passing on MySpace. But since she didn’t usually notice their home cities, she didn’t know who it might be.

  She wanted to cry, but she didn’t dare. She had to work up her toughness. She followed Trish through the garage as the woman chattered about how they would stop at the store and buy her a twelve-pack of soda before they headed north.

  Like soda would calm her nerves and make this ninety-day detour in her life all right.

  It was only an hour to the center, Trish said. They’d be there before she knew it.

  Emily had little to say to Trish on the way to her car. A Lexus. Business must be good. The interventionist clicked open the trunk, and Emily didn’t even help her put her suitcase in. Trish deserved to do the heavy lifting, after all. She was getting paid for it.

  Trish closed the trunk and walked to the driver’s side. “Come on, time to go. Put your cigarette out.”

  “Can’t I smoke in the car?”

  “No, it’s brand new. I’m trying to protect it. It won’t be a long ride.”

  “Then can I at least finish it?”

  “All right. But hurry.”

  Trish got into the car, and Emily turned around and looked across the garage. There really wasn’t a way out of this. She would have to go, bide her time, just to please her mother.

  She took her last drag of the cigarette. Tears filled her eyes, and she swabbed at the corners of them with her knuckles. But they were coming too hard; there was no hiding. She wiped them and turned back to the car, dropped her cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. Then she opened the passenger door and slipped inside.

  At first, she didn’t realize that Trish was slumped over the steering wheel. Then a hand touched Emily’s shoulder, and she swung around.

  A man sat in the backseat, holding a syringe. Trish’s state clicked in her
mind then, like the chamber of a gun. She was unconscious … and this man …

  Emily pushed out a scream and stumbled out of the car. He muttered curses behind her.

  She sliced between parked cars, running for help, her screams echoing over the garage. She saw a car coming and ran out in front of it, making its driver slam on the brakes. “Please, help!” she cried. “Call the police!”

  But the driver only laid on her horn, blaring the shrill chord like a train. Emily moved to the side as the driver sped past her.

  Emily turned and ran back the way they had come, toward the street between the garage and airport. Surely there were security guards, police … anyone … She saw cabs lined up, cars moving by.

  Then suddenly, a black car pulled up beside her. “Do you need help, honey?”

  She spun toward it, saw a man talking to her through his passenger window. “Yes,” she cried. “My friend, she’s back there in the car, and this man … ”

  “Get in.” He leaned across the seat and threw open his door.

  Grateful, she jumped inside and slammed the door. “Please, you’ve got to help me! I need to call the police. Do you have a phone?”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call,” he said. “You’re too upset.” He punched 911, waited as he drove to the garage exit.

  As he headed down the spiral ramp, she turned in her seat and looked through the back window.

  “Yes,” he said into the phone. “I’m just leaving the airport, and there was a girl screaming, and she says there was a guy in her car … ”

  Emily listened as he relayed what she’d told him. “Tell them it’s a gold Lexus,” she added. “It’s in the second row of cars, whatever floor we were on. Tell them there’s a man who injected her with something. Tell them to hurry.”

  His voice sounded way too calm as he spoke into the phone. Maybe he didn’t understand Trish was hurt.