Chapter Twenty-One

Jessie’s hands trembled as she closed the wrought-iron gate and watched Michael walk away. When he had gone far enough that she could no longer see him, she turned the lock on the foyer door, went back into Sam’s condo, and flipped another lock. The exercise was futile if any more strangers had keys, but it made her feel safer right now. As an extra precaution, she took one of the chairs from the kitchen and wedged it beneath the knob of the condo’s door.

She climbed the stairs, and the gun in her pocket grazed her thigh. The idea that she—a candidate for a Presidential Commission—had held a senator at gunpoint was almost too ridiculous to comprehend. Her life had become surreal. She sat on the bed, wrung out from adrenaline and emotional extremes. A thundering headache was settling in at her temples.

Jessie thought about Michael—the intensity of being with him, their undeniable chemistry, and what he had said. She was relieved to know that someone else was suspicious about Sam’s murder. Someone like Michael with a network of resources, as he had said. She wasn’t alone.

Feeling calmer, she took the gun from her pocket and slipped it beneath her pillow, then looked in her purse for an Advil but found none. She checked the cabinets in the bathroom and came up empty.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She might have a migraine coming on. It had been over a year since she’d had one, so she’d stopped carrying the prescription pills she took to prevent them. Maybe the stress had triggered one.

Her head throbbed as she bowed it over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. She thought about going to a twenty-four-hour drugstore for whatever she could get over the counter. Blotting her face on the hand towel, she caught her reflection in the mirror, and that only made her feel worse. Doubly so, because Sam had two mirrors—one in a large black frame that hung above the vanity, and a smaller, frameless one on the adjacent wall.

As Jessie looked away, the edges of the smaller mirror caught her eye. Almost flush with the wall, it hung like a door, not a picture. She tugged at its bottom edge, but nothing moved. With a harder pull, the mirror swung away from the wall, revealing a metal medicine cabinet with glass shelves. She scanned the prescription and over-the-counter drugs on the shelves, her gaze settling on a bottle of Excedrin.

“Yes.”

She shook two caplets from the bottle with a clatter, popped them in her mouth, and washed them down with water.

The next morning, Jessie slept later than she’d wanted to. She had to hurry to get ready to go to the Rite Aid Pharmacy several blocks up on Constitution Avenue because she was anxious to get there right when it opened. After quickly pulling her hair up, she put on her cloche hat, her scarf, and her coat, and dashed outside into the single-digit cold.

She’d hoped to beat the Saturday morning crowd in the pharmacy, but when she got there, people were already waiting. They coughed, blew their noses, and blotted their eyes. At the end of the line, a young mother held a pink-cheeked, sleeping toddler. Jessie got in line behind them.

The line moved slowly. Fifteen minutes later, the young mother in front of Jessie stepped away from the counter.

“Help you?” the petite clerk asked Jessie. Her Rite Aid smock hung off her shoulders.

“I need a copy of my prescription drug records covering the last two years,” Jessie said.

“You have a photo ID and an insurance card?”

Jessie opened her wallet and handed the woman what she’d asked for.

The clerk glanced at the bandages crisscrossing Jessie’s palm. She checked the insurance card and the driver’s license, squinting at the picture, then looking at Jessie.

“Thank you, Ms. Croft,” she said.

“Could you move it along up there?” called a man from the back of the line.

The clerk shook her head. “I’ll have to ask the manager if we can do this. It usually only takes a few minutes, but we’re already backed up this morning.” She stepped away from the counter and went behind a glass partition to talk to a man with thinning gray hair. As unlikely as it was, Jessie hoped the manager wouldn’t recognize her. That made things uncomfortable at the best of times.

The clerk pointed at Jessie, then showed the manager the license and insurance card. He put on his reading glasses and had a closer look.

Jessie swallowed hard and kept her gaze trained downward.

Accompanied by the clerk, the manager came to the counter and said to Jessie, “We’ve got a full workload trying to fill prescriptions.” He gestured toward the line of people. “But if you’ll wait a few minutes, I’ll run your report for you.” He glanced at the license, his eyes narrowing. “Ms. Croft.”

Jessie gave him a half smile. “Thank you.”

She stepped away from the counter to wait, hoping the manager wouldn’t figure out that he was running a report for a dead girl.

Jessie sat at a table in Starbucks with Sam’s prescription drug records spread on the table in front of her. After she’d opened the medicine cabinet last night, several prescription bottles had caught her attention. Whoever had cleared out Sam’s condo might not have realized that the mirror hid a medicine cabinet—just as she hadn’t—and had left the prescriptions behind.

The first bottle Jessie had picked up rattled with fexofenadine tablets. Allergy medication, filled two weeks ago. The second, dispensed the same day, was a pack of birth control pills with nine missing from the twenty-eight-day dosing cycle. She’d taken the last bottle from the top shelf and flattened its peeling label. Doxycycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

Her curiosity had been piqued when she noticed that the date on the prescription matched the date on one of the pictures she’d received—the last photo of Sam leaving Ian’s practice.

Jessie had focused on the label. Prescribing physician: Ian Alden, MD.

Ian could have prescribed Sam the antibiotic for a variety of conditions. But the coinciding dates of the prescription and the picture had made Jessie wonder why Sam had needed the drug and why Ian had been the one who prescribed it, instead of the doctor who’d prescribed the other medicines.

As Jessie had suspected, she’d found no health insurance claims or medication records in Sam’s files, so she planned to ask Ian about Sam’s prescription and the pictures of her at his office. She wondered if she’d get a straight answer from him.

Fortunately, Jessie had found Sam’s ID and her insurance card, and those had allowed her to get the report she now studied as she drank her tea. She needed more than a theory before she could risk confronting Ian. Now she had the facts.