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’…?”
Will stared at the fine print in the corner of the label. The words were so blurry that his head started to ache. “I have no idea. The last photo is as tight as I can get. I’m going to get Nick to take it to the lab with the other stuff. Anything on Jason Howell?”
“He’s worse than Allison, if that’s possible. No phone. No street address, just a PO box at the school. He’s got four thousand dollars in a savings account out of a bank in West Virginia.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Not as much as you’d think. The amount’s been going down slowly over the last four years. I’d guess it’s some kind of college fund.” She told him, “He also has a car registered in his name. Ninety-nine Saturn SW. Green. I already put out a BOLO.”
That was at least something. “I’ll check at the school to see if it’s there. How are the background checks going on all the students who lived in Jason’s dorm?”
“Slow and boring. None of these kids even have parking tickets. My mother had gotten me out of a DUI and a shoplifting charge by the time I was that age.” She laughed. “Please promise me you won’t remind me of that when my children get into trouble.”
Will was too shocked to promise anything. “Did you track down the 911 audio?”
“They said they’d email it to me but it hasn’t shown up yet.” Her breath was short, and he guessed she was walking through the house. “Let me do a computer search for those initials on the pill bottle.”
“I’ll ask Gordon if his son was taking any medication.”
“Are you sure you should do that?”
“Meaning?”
“What if Tommy was selling illegal drugs?”
Will had a hard time imagining Tommy Braham as a drug kingpin. Still, he admitted, “Tommy knew everybody in town. He was always walking the streets. It’d be a perfect cover.”
“What does the dad do for a living?”
“I think he’s a lineman for Georgia Power.”
“How are they living?”
Will glanced around the crappy kitchen. “Not very well. Gordon’s truck is about ten years old. Tommy was living in a garage without a toilet. They were renting out a room to help make ends meet. The house must have been really nice thirty years ago, but they haven’t done much to keep it that way.”
“When I did the sweep on Tommy, I found a checking account at the local bank. His balance was thirty-one dollars and sixty-eight cents. Did you say the dad was in Florida?”
He saw where she was going with this. Florida was the beginning of a major drug corridor that went from the Keys up into Georgia and on to New England and Canada. “This doesn’t strike me as a drug thing.”
“That knife wound to the neck sounds gang to me.”
Will couldn’t deny she was right.
Faith asked, “What else do you have?”
“Detective Adams has seen fit to accept her part in Tommy Braham’s suicide.”
For once, Faith didn’t have a quick comeback.
“She said that Tommy didn’t kill Allison, and it’s her fault he managed to kill himself in custody, and that she’ll take all the blame.”
Faith made a thinking noise. “What’s she hiding?”
“What isn’t she hiding?” Will countered. “She’s lied and covered up so much that it’d be like pulling a piece of string on a ball of yarn.” He went into the kitchen, hoping to find a plastic bag. “Allison had a lot of nice clothes.”
“What was she studying in college?”
“Chemistry.”
“How do you manage to dress yourself in the morning?” Faith sounded frustrated by his slowness. “Chemistry? Synthesizing chemicals to produce more complex products, like turning pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine?”
Will found a box of Ziplocs in the last drawer he checked. “If Allison was cooking meth, or shooting it, she was being careful about it. She didn’t have any needle marks. There aren’t any pipes or drug paraphernalia around the house or in the garage. Sara will do a tox screen as part of the autopsy, but I’m not buying it.”
“And Tommy?”
“I’ll have to call Sara.” He waited for her to say something snarky about his using Sara’s name too many times.
Miraculously, Faith let the opportunity pass. “There’s no H-O-C or H-C-C in Grant County. I’ll try the number at the top of the label. Eight digits. Too long for a zip code, too short for zip-plus-four. One digit too many for a phone number. One too little for Social Security. Let me plug it in and see if I get anything.” Will sealed the pill bottle in the plastic bag as he waited for the results.
Faith groaned. “My God, does every single search have to turn up porn?”
“It’s God’s gift to us.”
“I’d rather have a live-in nanny,” she countered. “I’m not finding anything. I can make some phone calls around the state. You know how some of the yokels are slow to enter their case files into the network. I’m just waiting around for Mama to come pick me up and take me to the hospital.”
“I’d appreciate anything you feel like doing.”
“If I watch one more home-remodeling show, I’m going to come down there and hope someone puts a knife in the back of my neck. And I’ve got the worst gas. I feel like-”
“Well, I should go now. Thanks again for your help.” Will closed his phone to end the call. He locked up the house and put the pill bottle in his Porsche.
Lena was still on the phone, but she got off when she saw Will. “Honda belongs to a Darla Jackson. She’s on parole for kiting some checks two years ago. She’s already paid it off. The charge will roll off her sheet in January.”