THIRTY-SIX

It took Abbie a moment to orient herself when she heard the buzzing. Her hand instinctively reached for the button on the top of her bedside clock, but as her eyes focused in the gray light, she realized it was her phone, not her clock, making the sound. Abbie squinted to read the name: CLARKE.

“Bad news. I got a call from a friend who’s an officer in Midway,” Clarke said as soon as she answered. “President Bragg has a second home up there.”

Abbie’s heart started pounding too hard. Please, please, let it not be Brittany.

The silence before Clarke spoke again lasted only a fraction of a second, but it seemed like an eternity. “Brittany Thompson died last night. Anaphylactic shock.”

Abbie felt dizzy.

“Were there kids at Bragg’s house? Mary, Jacob, Moroni?”

“Who?” Clarke asked.

“A little girl, a boy, and a baby?”

“No. I think my friend would’ve mentioned something like that, but I can double-check. President Bragg said the young woman was a family friend who had been struggling. He was counseling her.”

Abbie couldn’t believe Brittany Thompson was dead.

“Taylor, you okay?”

“Yes.” Abbie said the word deliberately, the lie heavy on her tongue. She wasn’t okay. She was anything but okay. Bryce Strong’s death was already on her watch, and now so was Brittany Thompson’s. It was worse with Brittany. Abbie had delivered Brittany Thompson to the house where she died.

“Do you know where Brittany’s body is?” Abbie asked. If protocol had been followed, Brittany Thompson should be at the Office of the Medical Examiner by now.

“I imagine it’s in Taylorsville.”

Abbie winced. She had said the same thing, hundreds of times, it when referring to the body of a human being. Images flashed in Abbie’s head of Brittany drinking chocolate milk in her dad’s kitchen, of her playing with her kids, of her holding her new baby. Brittany was not an it.

“I’m heading there now.” Abbie showered and dressed. This terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach was what it felt like to know someone had died because of you. If Abbie had only tried a little harder to talk the young mother out of going back, if she had refused to drive her, if she had done one of a thousand things, those three missing kids would still have had a mother. They were alive, Abbie told herself. As she drove to Taylorsville, guilt and regret swirled in her stomach, but there was one little spot of peace. The kids were fine. She was certain. Their existence was the whole reason for this strange experiment.

*   *   *

Abbie knocked on the door of Dr. Eriksen’s office.

“Come in!”

Abbie wasn’t surprised the ME was in already. Between the opioid and suicide crisis, there were too many deaths.

“Good morning. Do you have a few moments?”

“Detective Taylor? Sure.” Dr. Eriksen was wearing thin-framed rectangular glasses that gave him a more intellectual look than the last time Abbie had seen him. He looked more like a ski instructor than one of the top MEs in the state. His tan and lack of a belly hinted that when he wasn’t working, he was outside.

“I’m looking into the Brittany Thompson death.”

“Thompson?” He typed something on his keyboard. “Oh. Here it is. Last night. I wasn’t here when the body came it. Looks straightforward. Woman. Mid to late twenties. Anaphylactic shock.”

Eriksen looked back at his screen. “There’s a note that Dallin Bragg, the man who called the ambulance, told us he had no idea what caused it.”

“Could someone her age not know she was at risk for this kind of reaction?” Abbie asked.

“It’s possible, but unlikely.”

“Is there any way for you to tell if she had a prescription or something to indicate that she knew she had allergies?”

Eriksen typed something on his keyboard and stared at the screen in silence a beat longer than was comfortable. “This isn’t such a straightforward case, is it?”

“I have a sinking feeling it’s not.” Abbie had much more than a feeling that this death wasn’t straightforward.

“These records go back ten years. It looks like Brittany has had an ongoing prescription for an epinephrine auto-injector, an EpiPen, since she was a teenager. She has a severe allergy to fish and seafood.”

He studied the screen again. “She wasn’t wearing a medical alert bracelet when she came in.”

“Would you expect her to be?” Abbie asked.

“Yeah, I would. It’s pretty standard now.” Abbie kicked herself. She couldn’t recall if Brittany had worn a medical bracelet. How could Abbie have completely missed noticing something like that?

Eriksen scrolled through his screen while Abbie waited. When he finally looked up, he asked, “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Detective Taylor, you’ve had three deaths in a span of less than two weeks. Granted, different manners of deaths, different demographic profiles for each victim, but all looked accidental at first blush. Heber Bentsen and Bryce Strong weren’t accidents, though. Now I’m beginning to wonder if Brittany Thompson was either.”

The printer in the corner of Eriksen’s office whirred to life, then started spitting out sheets of paper. When the printer was silent, Eriksen stood and picked up the stack of papers. He handed it to Abbie.

“This is everything we have on Bentsen, Strong, and Thompson. I’ll call if anything strange turns up.” He scrawled a telephone number on the upper corner of the top page in the stack. “This is my personal number. Call me if you need help. I’m serious.”

“Thank you.”

Abbie sat in her car for a few minutes, flipping through the pages. Nothing jumped out except for the fact that the deaths had been meant to look accidental, but they weren’t. It was like someone had thought far enough ahead to come up with a plan, but not far enough ahead to make it a good one.

There was no evidence yet that Brittany’s death wasn’t a tragic accident. Still, Abbie needed to see where it happened. She needed to understand. She pulled out of the parking lot at the ME’s office and headed to Bragg’s house in Midway.

She knocked.

“Come in.” Bragg had seen better days. It was past eleven in the morning when Abbie arrived. He was in pajamas. What was left of his white hair was matted on one side of his head and sticking straight up on the other. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

“Thank you,” Abbie said. “Are you here by yourself?”

“Yes. My wife’s visiting her sister in St. George.” Bragg walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. There was a pillow at one end and a rumpled blanket near the other end, half of it pooled on the floor. Bragg sat down in the middle. Abbie sat across from him in a matching love seat.

“You’re here because you want to talk about Brittany,” Bragg said.

Abbie nodded.

“I don’t have much to say. We were eating dinner. We’d just started with our soup course when she started choking. Or I thought she was choking. It was awful.” The words came out of his mouth like the voice of a virtual assistant. The words were correct, but the intonation was wrong.

“Did you know she had allergies?” Abbie asked.

Bragg stared past her, his gaze unfocused. He didn’t respond for a few moments, and then something jerked him back into the present. “What?”

“Did you know she had allergies?”

“I knew she asked about ingredients sometimes. We really didn’t spend that much time together …”

Abbie waited for him to say something else, explain himself, but he just stared into space. He wasn’t telling her the entire truth, but she wasn’t sure if that was because he felt guilty because he hadn’t known one of his wives had a possibly fatal food allergy or because he felt guilty because he did know.

“What happened then?”

“We ate dinner.” Bragg waved his hand toward the open French doors. The table was set; a bouquet of yellow roses filled a crystal vase. The silver breadbasket still had rolls in it. The water goblets were mostly full.

“We had soup first … and then, then … her face just started swelling up. She started gasping for air. I tried to give her some water, but she couldn’t swallow. I called 911, but by the time they arrived, she had already passed. It happened so quickly.”

Bragg seemed genuinely shaken. He was sad, but that authentic sadness was layered over something else, some other emotion.

“Where are the kids?” Abbie asked.

“Children?”

“Where are they?” Abbie asked again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m talking to you despite my misgivings because I have the greatest admiration for your father. I cannot—will not—say any more than I have. Brittany’s death is a burden I alone must carry. It weighs heavily on my heart, but I assure you that you will find nothing here but a tragic accident. If I were in your position, I would leave this alone.”

Was that a threat?

Yes, it was. Despite his red-rimmed watery eyes, Bragg wasn’t broken. He was not about to slip up. Abbie’s questions wouldn’t be answered. He had told her the story he’d told the police. That story wasn’t going to change. Abbie had very little hope of finding anything useful, but the fact that Bragg hadn’t cleared the table gave Abbie an idea.

“Could you point me to the powder room?” she asked.

“Down the hall. First door on the right.” Bragg stared blankly out the window.

The door across the hallway from the powder room was closed. Abbie opened it. It looked like a guest room with all the charm you’d expect of a midrange hotel. Brittany’s handbag was sitting on the corner of the bed and the suitcases were on the ground. No car seats. No baby bags. Abbie heard footsteps behind her. She grabbed Brittany’s handbag and slung it over her shoulder before stepping back into the hallway and running right into Bragg.

“I thought you said left,” Abbie lied. “You said right, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Bragg’s eyes narrowed. They didn’t look sad anymore.

Abbie opened the door to the powder room. She closed it behind her as quickly as she could. She sat down on the closed toilet seat and opened Brittany’s handbag. A wallet, some mints, lip gloss, keys, and a bright-yellow EpiPen.

*   *   *

“You are not responsible for what happened to Brittany. You know that, right?” The sound of Flynn’s voice made Abbie feel a little better, but not much. Abbie was alone in her office at the station with Brittany’s bag.

“I don’t know that. I could’ve tried to dissuade her, asked her to wait a few more days. I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

“She was an intelligent, adult woman. She was following her own principles and beliefs.”

“Flynn, she didn’t ask to die.”

Flynn’s voice softened. “No, she didn’t, but you couldn’t have stopped her.”

Maybe not, Abbie thought, but she should have been able to stop the killer. If she’d done her job better, the person responsible for the deaths of Heber and Bryce Strong would be in custody, and Abbie had a sick feeling in her stomach that Brittany Thompson would still be alive.