Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Saturday, 9:15 a.m.

“What do you think?” Riley asked as soon as they were alone, which didn’t occur for a number of hours. There had been much activity in the homicide unit, all of it stilted and awkward and seriously confused.

“I didn’t like the guy.” Jack pulled the car door shut, the silence of the parking garage a sharp contrast after the morning. “He resided miles past the asshole border, but I can’t believe he’d kill some woman he barely knew for no apparent reason. We were there with them—he didn’t know her, had no particular reaction to her at all. He’s not that good of an actor.”

“Agreed.” The vehicle emerged onto the street, the world outside one single shade of light gray.

“As uber-convenient as it may be, Maggie’s explanation might make more sense.”

“He interrupted the murder? Then where is he now? Dead somewhere, or held hostage? I’m . . .” Riley’s voice stalled as he waited for a red light. “I don’t have quite the faith in Rick Gardiner as harmless jerk that you and his ex-wife do. I have nothing to hang it on, but I’ve never trusted the guy. Squirrelly.”

Jack considered this, still dismissed the notion. Of course he didn’t know Rick like Riley and certainly Maggie did, and despite her words, Maggie seemed deeply disturbed. Maybe that was why—because deep down she knew what Rick Gardiner might be capable of. It had kept her up all night, working, doing anything to distract herself. She had even driven to the Medical Examiner’s and taped the dead woman’s clothing, examining hairs and fibers during the wee hours—to no end, she had said. No foreign hairs, no fibers or animal fur of note. No feathers or cigar leaves.

They were on their way to East Fifty-fifth Street. Jennifer Toner had looked up the three addresses on her laptop, and with both Gardiner and Marlon Toner in the wind, retracing her last steps seemed their only avenue of investigation. They had no guarantee that she had gotten any closer to the pharmacies than Googling their locations, but again, Jack didn’t see a lot of choices, and hanging around the police department had given him a tension headache. “I checked out these places on the state pharmacy board website. For what it’s worth, all three have a license in good standing and no disciplinary actions.”

“Well, look at you, being all researchy,” Riley joked without malice. “When did you have time to do that?”

“While you were in the bathroom. I didn’t check with Vice to see if they had any on their radar. I couldn’t find that in RMS.” He meant the Report Management System.

“No, that’s going to require actually talking to someone.”

An activity Jack avoided whenever possible. “But I checked prior reports and there’s been no calls for service, other than a couple robberies.”

“Hardly surprising for a place that sells drugs in a sorta not-so-picturesque part of town.” Riley pulled up to the curb and parked. The small storefront of Herron’s Pharmacy in a beat-up plaza with inadequate parking could use a coat of paint but otherwise seemed respectable enough, tucked in between a laundromat and a convenience store. Under a bright gray sky one customer came out and another went in, cars drove by, and it all seemed as unthreatening as a bingo hall.

They entered. Brick-colored tiles covered the floor of the waiting area and a chest-high counter blocked the back half of the facility. A thick glass partition extended down from the ceiling and ended about five inches above the counter. It reminded Jack of the check-cashing store, except this place had a way to get from the front to the back: one very heavy-looking, stainless-steel door.

Two young men in white lab coats worked behind it; one tended the cash register and the other placed bulky envelopes into colored bins on the shelves. Both looked at the cops, tensed, and looked again. The one at the cash register quickly categorized them as cops, not robbers, and relaxed halfway. The one at the shelves either couldn’t place them or found cops equally problematic, and remained frozen with his hand stretched toward an upper shelf until the bag in it began to slip from his fingers.

Jack and Riley waited until the elderly woman at the counter had been served. She turned around, saw them, worried for an instant but had them made even more quickly than the boy at the counter had. With a curl of her lip she strode past them and out the door without so much as a nod.

They flashed their badges, then asked the cashier if a Jennifer Toner had been in, possibly asking about a prescription for a Marlon Toner.

The cashier shook his head. About thirty, with tight black skin stretching over high cheekbones, he had worked on Friday until they closed at six p.m., didn’t recall the name, and didn’t give a flicker of an eyelash at the woman’s photo when they showed it to him.

“She might have been upset about you filling a prescription for her brother.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s an addict.”

The guy shook his head again, this time for a different reason. “No shortage of those these days. But we ain’t shady here. We check the prescribing doctor, make sure they have a current license and a physical address. If the script’s for a large amount or they want an advance on the next refill, we call and check. You see the sign.” He hooked his thumb toward a posted, professionally made placard that said the management reserved the right to refuse service to anyone, without clarification of “service” or “anyone.” “If someone looks like they’re in a bad way, the script looks fake, they act aggressive or under the influence, we send ’em out of here. Boss don’t put up with no nonsense.” He seemed a bit defensive, and Jack couldn’t blame him. Since the advent of pill mills and the opioid crisis, pharmacies smaller than the average CVS were viewed with suspicion.

“Okay. What about this guy?” He held up a photo of Marlon Toner. No recognition. He tried a mug shot of Raymond Winchester. Nothing.

The door gave a bing and a customer entered, a young woman with a baby on her hip, both bundled up with puffy coats and hats and mittens. Only the baby’s eyes were visible above the zipped-up collar, liquid pools of deep brown.

“We need to know if this guy ever filled a prescription here—” Riley began, but the cashier suggested they step into the office and asked the other worker to take over the counter.

They moved to the door and listened to at least three bolts slide before it opened. The cashier ushered them into a very cramped storage room and quickly locked the door behind them. “Sorry, but we can’t be too careful. We’ve been robbed three times in the past two years, and that’s not even bad for a little place like this. The bulletproof glass and the steel door talk most guys out of it, but some be desperate enough to shove a gun under that partition. ’Course that doesn’t give them a lot of room to maneuver. I was here one time, a guy tried that on me, and I grabbed it away from him. You can’t get no leverage when you stick your hand through a hole.”

As he chatted, he squeezed between them and shelves of boxes and flexible envelopes bulging with small bottles and led the way to an even more cramped office of sorts. Three of the walls had shelving utilized to the last inch and the desk held a computer and piles of paperwork and two energy drink cans and exactly one square foot of available workspace. A place for guests to sit was out of the question, so the cashier politely stood as well. “The smarter ones wait out the back for the last guy to leave, but we’re careful about that, too. We don’t open that door unless we got a clear view of the back parking, and if the camera’s dark then we call the . . . you guys.”

“Smart,” Riley said. “Can you tell us if Marlon Toner filled his scripts here?”

The guy wore a sympathetic expression. “Can’t tell you that, man. HIPAA laws. I wish I could—we’re here to serve this neighborhood, take care of the folk who can’t go far for what they need. I got no reason to protect the junkies, they’re the ones who rob us. But you know . . .”

“HIPAA.” The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

“Yep.”

“But it all goes into a database, right?”

“Yeah, so the state can monitor frequent fliers who are getting way more scripts than they should need, or doctors who write too many. But that searches automatically when I put a new script in. I can’t just go in there and browse around whenever I feel like it. I mean, can’t you guys get a warrant or something and get the info from the state board? Something like that?”

“We probably could,” Jack said. “But it would take time, and we’ve got a murdered woman right now.”

“What about a doctor?” Riley asked.

“I can’t tell you what scripts they write without accessing patient info, and that can’t be done, like I said.”

“But you said you verify the doctor’s address, make sure he’s legit. Can you give us the address of a particular doctor?”

The man seemed perplexed. “Can’t you, like, Google it or something?”

“Tried that.”

“Huh.”

“All we need is an address. A legitimate doctor shouldn’t have a problem with that.”

“Huh. Yeah, I guess so.” He reached over to the other side of the desk and retrieved a clipboard.

“Do you have a database or something—”

“Nah, we go old school with this. We get a list from the state, keep it updated.” He showed it to them, a thick sheaf of paper precariously pinned to the board, with names and locations in alphabetical order. Many had been crossed out and corrections written in with different inks and hands. “Reason they’re so big on addresses is all those pill mills and the docs who file fake Medicare claims were using PO boxes. So now they require a street address, and now the docs use empty storefronts—big help. Who you looking for?”

“Phillip Castleman.”

The man flipped to the C’s, perused, then said, “Yeah, right here. 1500 East 14^th, Suite 214. Need the zip code?”

“No, thanks,” Riley said with a satisfied grunt. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Who’s dead?”

“What?”

“You said there was a dead woman. Who’s dead?”

“Sorry.” Riley flipped his notebook shut, stowed it in a pocket, and didn’t look too terribly sorry. “We can’t comment on an open investigation.”

They were guided back through the tight squeeze of the storage room and, after a careful check of the outer lobby using a monitor screen held to the wall with duct tape, released back into the wild. The young mother had been replaced by an older man who sniffled and coughed while the other staff member typed at a keyboard, speaking into the phone tucked under one ear.

The outdoors hadn’t warmed up any and they hustled into the car.

Riley said, “Well, we found the mysterious Dr. Castleman. He does exist. Now, provided he’s actually at his last known address, we can find out if he knew Jennifer Toner, check his shoes for drops of blood, and have this wrapped up before lunch.”

Jack didn’t bother to answer to this wildly optimistic scenario. He felt certain they would find only more questions.

* * *

The cashier at Herron’s watched the cops leave, and then, while his coworker gave the sniffling man his antibiotics, retreated back to the tiny office, and shut the door. He called his boss.

“Yeah, wanted to let you know, there were cops here. Asking about that same doctor, Castleman . . . told them I couldn’t tell them anything, rules wouldn’t let me . . . then they wanted his address . . . it’s just an address! . . . I had to, they know that ain’t covered under the rules . . . but I had to! They was cops, not some crazy bitch yellin’ about her brother! . . . yeah, they wrote it down and everything . . . I don’t know . . . they said some woman’s dead, what—well, I’m sorry . . . yeah, okay . . . I will.”

He hung up, shaking his head. He had no idea who this doctor was, who the brother was, if the woman yesterday might or might not be the now-dead woman, or why his boss cared about any of it.

But he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.