Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(52)
“It’s been in the papers for several days, for heaven’s sake!”
“Thanks for the information. I’ll show myself out. And even though Dane phoned you, I’d advise you not to report this interview to him or take more of his calls, or it will look like current collusion, as well as twenty years ago. I’d advise you to steer clear of him.”
He walked away and opened the door, then turned back. She looked as if she was going to cry. He’d probably overstepped, but learning Dane was a drug supplier was important. And that search warrant he was going to apply for would give him the power to comb the man’s house and clinic for any trace of amnestic drugs.
17
“You won’t like this,” Tess told Gabe as he picked her up down the block from the vet clinic. “Despite that train going by—much closer than my memory of it—I looked in the windows of that wing she has built out the back.”
“Tess, I told you—”
“I know, I know, but I want to help, and we’ve got to find those girls. I think it’s meant to be a kennel for boarding dogs, but it’s empty. Maybe she built it, then decided not to expand that way. Did she say anything to help?”
“She gave me a lead on some drugs Dane might have access to.”
Tess rubbed her arms through her jacket until she realized she was trying to soothe the memory of injections she’d once had there. Gabe went on, “It will help me get a search warrant if there’s any problem with that. Since the guy’s supposedly such an upstanding member of society, the judge may balk. Would you do me a favor while I drive, partner, and look up a drug called Versed or midazolam on your phone, then read me the specs on it?” He spelled it out for her.
“She told you Dane uses that drug?” Tess asked as she leaned down to fish her phone out of her purse.
“Not exactly. It’s another of my wild-goose chases, I suppose.”
She selected Wikipedia, since it always covered the basics, while they drove through downtown Chillicothe, a city large enough to swallow twenty Cold Creeks. As she read aloud to him, she began to shiver.
“Midazolam is not a pain medication. The main effects are amnesia and patient compliance. Patients lose touch with reality, not knowing where they are or what is really occurring. Patients do not recall pain or a bad experience. Under the drug’s influence they can carry on a conversation but will remember nothing once it wears off. It can open the door to abuse!” she went on, her voice getting louder. “Some patients, during a procedure or later, experience a distorted, nightmarish version of actual events and later feel abandonment and panic. Gabe, that’s it! That’s how I felt! Abandoned. I’ve felt panic, deep inside for years, especially when I hear or see certain things.”
“Calm down. You’re okay now, safe with me,” he said, gripping her knee with his hand. “It’s still a stab in the dark, but maybe one that will find its mark. Dr. Stevens said Dane had easy access to and sold vet drugs, which do not need the property of amnesia, but who knows what else he had access to?”
He put his hand back on the steering wheel, then thumped it with one fist while he spoke. “Tess, as long as I’m here in Chillicothe, I still need to check into something else.”
“And this is about someone other than Dane, right?”
“When Mayor Owens talked to you at the police station, how did he seem to you? Glad to see you? Upset?”
“In a hurry to get me out of town. At first he acted kind of creepy, almost like he wanted to scare me away. Is this something about Reese Owens?”
“He is alleged to have molested a young girl years ago when he was a teenager and the girl was five.”
Tess gasped. “And when he started walking toward me in your conference room, I felt so...so oppressed. In danger. But how could he run for public office, even in such a small town?”
“Well, here’s the strange part. As far as Vic Reingold can tell, the records for the crime have disappeared, except for one he found that someone had missed expunging. But I need to get corroborating evidence of what happened years ago before I question him on this. I’m heading to the neighborhood where he grew up. I’m going to ask around, see what people recall.”
“Well, he did marry the former governor’s granddaughter, so that might be why it was erased, not just so he could run for mayor. Friends in high places—at least as high as that hill near Lake Azure with the mayor’s beautiful house on it,” she said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
He pulled onto a side street in an area that had seen better times, where the houses were night and day from the Owens mansion outside Cold Creek. In the distance the big paper mill loomed with its smokestacks stabbing the sky. The yards were small, the buildings close together. No garages, cars parked on the street. A couple of places had Halloween decorations, ghosts or a black cat cutout. A few garbage cans sat on the curb. Near dinnertime, it was almost deserted except for a couple of boys shooting baskets at a bare metal hoop attached to a pole. The moment the boys spotted the police cruiser, they disappeared.
“You weren’t going to bring me with you here at first, or even tell me you were checking into Mayor Owens, were you?” she asked.
He was leaning forward over the steering wheel, reading house numbers as he slowed even more, then parallel parked under a ghost tied to an old tree. It was made of a dirty sheet with a noose around his neck to make its head.