August 2014
Even with the helpful sedation of the rye whiskey, Henry awakened before dawn. The fleeting image of a dream hovered in the half-light—Willard Shoat, barefoot and bloodied, lumbering down the grassy shoulder of Highway 53.
Henry stood and pulled on his trousers as he recalled the forensic report’s map of bloody footprints. He threw on a T-shirt, laced up his shoes. One more try, he decided. One last look.
Pulled along like a sleepwalker, Henry headed out the door. The only thing that slowed him down was the sight of Scooter’s half-filled bowl. He thought of the lonely grave in the back, covered by pine needles, and he scanned the street for any strange cars. Reassured that nothing looked out of the ordinary, he headed down Willow and was soon making his way up the shoulder of Highway 53.
Bugs jumped in the grass. The dewy blades reached the tops of his ankles. It was probably only a matter of days before a state mowing crew would roll through, shredding every remaining scrap of evidence.
Henry watched for litter and debris as he marched forward. Not a single car was in sight, although somewhere in the distance he heard a tractor already at work, a farmer up with the chickens. Then it stopped, and all was quiet. Just as before, the red lights of a radio tower pulled him toward the sign at the edge of town. He stooped to check a wad of paper, but it was a discarded grocery list. He continued, slower now, his ears ringing from the silence. No more bugs and no traffic, as if the world had paused to let him concentrate. In quick succession he passed a crushed can of Bud, a receipt from a convenience store, a fast-food wrapper smeared with ketchup, a Styrofoam hot dog box, a shred of foil. The sign was only fifteen yards away, and he was about to lose hope when he spied something just ahead to his left, peeping from a tangle of clover six feet off the pavement—a small orange cylinder.
He bent down and picked up an empty plastic pill bottle, the lid gone.
WILLARD SHOAT was written on the top, with his address on Willow Street. Dr. Ridgely’s name was off to one side. Just below, in a white rectangle with a red border, it said, ZOLEXA 100 MG TABLETS. TAKE 1 TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY MORNING AND 1 BEFORE BED.
He imagined Willard standing there in the dark, shaking the final tablet into his mouth, swallowing it without water and then tossing aside the cylinder. Had he done it while coming or going? Did it even matter? Henry shivered, and kept reading.
There had once been sixty tablets. The prescription had been issued about a month ago, in July, around the same time that Willard’s “new doctor” had claimed his old files from Dr. Patel’s office. The pills were from a Walgreens in Cambridge. There was a twelve-digit prescription number.
Henry pocketed the bottle and looked around. The road was still empty in both directions. He headed back toward the house at double time, and after fifty yards he broke into a run. Half an hour later, showered and eager to get going, he was knocking at the front door of Anna’s B&B.
Gail Hollis, the innkeeper, was already up, bustling around the kitchen with bread in the oven and coffee brewing. The smells were welcoming and warm. She was familiar with Henry by now, so she waved him upstairs with barely a pause. He wondered fleetingly what she must have thought when Anna hadn’t returned the night before last, and then he knocked at the door.
“Yes?” she called out sleepily.
“It’s me.” His voice was breathless. He tried to calm himself. “I found something important. I’ll be downstairs.”
She groaned, but he heard her feet hit the floor, so he headed downstairs.
“Can I get you something to eat?” Hollis asked. “I’m about to take out a pan of muffins.”
“Thanks. That would be great.”
“Help yourself to coffee. Just filled the carafe.”
Henry poured a mugful and pulled a folding chair over to a table that was set for one, figuring it was Anna’s usual spot. None of the other guests was up, hardly surprising since it wasn’t yet 7 a.m. He was too excited to sit, so he paced as he sipped. Ten minutes later he heard steps on the stairs, and Anna rounded the corner. She stopped short when she saw him.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Sit down.”
She pulled out a chair. He reached into his pocket for the pill bottle and set it on the table.
“Where did you get this?” Her voice a whisper.
“By the side of the road, out near the sign.” He didn’t need to say which sign.
“When were you out there?”
“Just now, less than an hour ago. I dunno, I woke up and just had a feeling. I was thinking of that map, the one the crime scene techs drew, and, well…” He didn’t feel like explaining that it was the second time he’d made the walk.
“We should go to the Walgreens,” she said.
“They open at eight. It’s fifteen miles.”
“Then I guess we’ve got time for breakfast.” She managed a weak smile. He pocketed the pill bottle and turned toward the coffee.
“I’ll get you a cup.”
When he returned to the table she was frowning at her phone.
“News?”
“A voicemail. Must’ve come in last night, after I was already dead to the world.”
She put it up to her ear to listen. He waited until she was finished.
“Who was it?”
“Cilla Miley, the one who Stu Wilgus called about.”
“Because she’d seen your brother hunting with somebody, right?”
“Yeah. I’d tried her the other day and left my number.”
Anna started punching in a number.
“You’re calling now?”
“They’re farmers, they’ll be up. Besides, she sounded pretty upset.”
Anna turned away for privacy, nodding her head a few times and saying little. When she turned back around her brow was creased with worry.
“She said she found something, out where she saw Willard with his friend.”
“Found what?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said I had to see it for myself, but you could tell it shook her up. She said she barely slept a wink.”
“Where’s their farm?”
“Toward Cambridge. We could stop on the way.”
The innkeeper brought out a basket of muffins and a platter of eggs and bacon, but they ate little and hardly spoke. Anna looked troubled, and Henry was still haunted by the vision of Willard, out there on the shoulder as he swallowed the last of his pills.
The Miley farmhouse was up a long gravel drive, with soybeans to the right and corn to the left. After a curve there was a small green lawn to the left that sloped down to a new-looking cottage along a tidal creek, with a picturesque view and its own dock.
“Is that theirs?”
“Used to be. They sold it a while back to help make ends meet. Two acres on the water, probably worth more than all fifty acres of their beans and corn.”
“What kind of name is Cilla?”
“Short for Priscilla. There she is.”
A thin woman with a gray bun crossed the broad front porch of a two-story frame house and came down to the lawn. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt. The house was white clapboard with green shutters, with big oaks to either side. Cilla, moving with urgency, was ready with a hug the moment Anna stepped out of the car. Anna introduced Henry as a friend, but Cilla barely nodded in acknowledgment.
“I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral, sweetheart. I was just so, well…”
“No need to explain. It was a circus.”
“It’s just a shame what you’ve had to go through. Your poor, poor mom and dad. Your poor brother. And now after what I’ve seen.” She shook her like she was trying to make it disappear.
“Stu said you saw him hunting with a friend, out on the edge of your property?”
“Some friend.” She shook her head again. “You’ll see. It’s out in those woods.” She pointed toward the soybeans, over their shoulders, and then set out across the field. She didn’t seem to notice she was treading on the beans as she went.
“Willard was the only one of ’em with a gun. That’s why this shook me up so much, because it must have been him doing this.”
When they came closer to the woods, Cilla stopped and pointed.
“See that path, running into the trees?”
“Yes.”
“Take that. You’ll find it. I’m not going back in there. Not ever.” She had crossed her arms, like she was trying to stay warm, even though it was sunny and pleasant. “I’m going back in, so I’ll say goodbye now.” Then, to Henry, “You take care of her, now.”
She turned to go, this time picking her way carefully across the rows of beans.
“Goodness,” Anna said.
The path entered the trees between thickets of briar and poison ivy, so they proceeded in single file, stepping carefully. Beneath the canopy of oak, maple, and cedar was a tangle of underbrush, although the path had clearly gotten some recent use. A wren called out in alarm at their approach and flitted toward the clearing. They walked twenty yards, then thirty.
They broke free of the trees. Anna, leading the way, nearly fell back into Henry. She wobbled and then steadied herself, but would go no farther. Now he could see what had upset her. He eased alongside her, and they stared in silence.
Just ahead in the clearing, fifteen or twenty feet away, was a large sheet of plywood propped upright against an oak. Drawn across it in black ink, probably by a felt-tip marker, was a crude silhouette of two human torsos, at about the same level as a couple sitting up in bed. The plywood was shredded by bullet holes. Ten feet away from the target, the muddy ground was pounded flat by boot prints.
Anna sank to one knee and put her hands to her face. She cried out, either in anguish or rage, and he knelt beside her and put an arm around her shoulder.
“Target practice,” she said, voice shaking. “We have to get this bastard. Whatever it takes.”
“We will,” he said. “We will.”
The Walgreens was a brick building surrounded by asphalt, with a green metal awning over the front entrance and the name splashed across the top in red script. Over to the right was a drive-through window for the pharmacy. Henry looked at Anna.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I’ve decided to just stay angry. That’s the only way forward. What’s our plan?”
“We’ll ask if their records show what time of day the prescription was issued. Because it had to be Merle who picked it up. Once we nail down the time, we’ll ask to see their security footage. All these pharmacies have cameras trained on the registers. It’s one of the highest-risk spots for a robbery.”
“You think they’ll let us see it?”
“I’ve got a plan for that. It involves some deception, but…”
“Fine. You’re good at that.”
He winced. They sat in silence for another few seconds. Then Anna unlatched her door.
“Hold on,” Henry said. “I was just thinking about the way someone like Merle would handle this.”
“And?”
“Well, he’s already sticking his neck out with a forged prescription and a fake ID, so the last thing he’d want to do is put his face in front of a checkout camera.”
“You’re thinking he’d use the drive-through?”
“Yep. Better for him, but maybe better for us, too. Maybe the outdoor camera wouldn’t pick up his face, but it would definitely get his tags. Meaning all we have to do is look for a 2010 silver Camaro with a Virginia registration. Let’s go.”
A yawning pharmacist in a white smock frowned when Henry explained what he wanted.
“You’ll have to see the manager.”
The manager, no older than twenty-five, hustled over to the counter after they paged him. He was shaking his head before Henry could even finish.
“Okay,” Henry said. “Then we’ll get a warrant. But if you really want to make nice with the feds, you’ll spare us the trouble and show us the footage. In exchange, I won’t ask for a copy and I can promise you won’t have to testify.”
“Testify? Now wait a minute, what’s this all about?”
“Department of Justice,” Henry said, flashing the ID he still had from his stint in Baltimore. “But I’m not at liberty to say anything more about the nature of our investigation.”
The manager frowned and put his hands on his hips.
“Then I guess you better get that warrant.”
“Fine.” Henry got out his notebook. “What’s the best day of the week for you to give a deposition? Are Wednesdays okay?”
“Deposition?”
“In Washington. No more than a few hours of your time. Although we’ll probably need to get your pharmacist under oath, too. To nail down the chain of evidence.”
“Whoa, now. Didn’t you say earlier you wouldn’t need a copy?”
“Not if you let me see it now. But if we have to take this to a judge, well, like I said…”
“Hang on a sec.”
With a defeated sigh, he set off toward the back, disappearing into an office by the pharmacy.
“Is that ID even valid?” Anna whispered.
“No. But he’d have to phone Baltimore to find out.”
She smiled and shook her head. A moment later the manager poked his head out the door.
“Will there be any official record of this transaction?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then come on back. But first have Irene scan that prescription label, to get the time of day.”
The pharmacist, who by now seemed somewhat excited about the idea of helping a federal investigation, happily obliged. The scanner beeped as she watched her computer screen.
“Nineteen hundred hours, forty minutes, and he used the drive-through.”
“Thank you kindly, Irene.”
The manager ushered them into the office, where eight video screens displayed images from around the store. He started typing on a keyboard.
“Number five up there is trained on the drive-through,” he said. “You’re lucky. We used to toss this stuff every month, but the DEA wanted us to beef up our capacity, so now everything’s archived for a year.”
“How long will it take to find it?”
“No time at all. We’ll go to ten minutes before the prescription was filled and roll it from there.”
The first image they saw was of a pickup truck pulling away from the drive-through. They fast-forwarded from there, and a few seconds later a car flickered into the frame.
“That’s it,” Anna said. It was a Camaro.
“Sweet ride,” the manager said, just like Derrick at the motor court.
They stopped the image when they had the best possible view, and then zoomed it. Virginia tag. Three letters, four numbers. Henry wrote them down.
“Need to log this in,” he said.
Henry stepped out of the office and walked up the empty aisle for cold remedies, to make sure he had privacy. He punched in a number that he used only sparingly, lest he wear out his welcome.
A familiar raspy voice answered.
“Bales.”
“It’s Mattick.”
“Still on that job?”
“More or less. I need you to run a tag for me.”
“Can’t your employer do that?”
“It will be cleaner this way.”
“Now, what could that mean?”
“Will you do it or not?”
“Give me the number.”
Henry said it twice, and then listened to the clatter of keys on a laptop. Rodney Bales gave him a name, a DOB, and an address. He thanked him and was about to hang up before deciding that he might as well make one more request while he had the chance.
“Got a minute for some advice?”
“About?”
“My employer.”
“Stop right there. I don’t even know who that is, nor do I want to know.”
“Weren’t you the one who gave them my name?”
“I gave your name to a third party, who was probably just a cutout. All he told me was the sort of talent they wanted, and at the moment you fit the bill. But I will say this: Whatever you’re doing is making some interesting ripples, some of which have even reached my little Island of Misfit Spooks. A distant acquaintance I haven’t spoken to in ages contacted me during the past week to ask what I knew about you, and not in a way that was encouraging.”
“Name?”
“I shouldn’t even have told you that. Let’s just say his interests are private.”
“Meaning corporate?”
“Meaning not government. You want advice? Here you go. Whatever you’re doing, wrap it up. Soon, and without contacting me again.”
He hung up and turned around, and saw Anna eyeing him skeptically through the window of the office. He flashed her a smile that he hoped was convincing and gave her a thumbs-up. But he had to steel himself on his way up the aisle. Who were these people, and what were they after? Equally important, what did they not want him to find out?
He put on a game face and reentered the office.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to the manager. “Exactly what we needed.”
“And, um, you’re sure I won’t have to testify?”
“Absolutely. We’ll keep your name out of this completely.”
“And the Walgreens name? I mean, in case corporate asks?”
“Only to note your helpful cooperation in my report to the U.S. Attorney.”
They shook hands and were on their way.