And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(49)

“Combination worked,” Thielen said. “It’s open.”

“Bag the contents and show me when I get there. I’m on my way.”

The fire department crew was loading their gear when he pulled up twenty minutes later. He stopped to talk to the shift captain, Chuck Otts, about how they’d jacked up the car and got the body on a board so EMS could transport it to the county hospital. EMS had taken Sam’s unconscious sister separately while waiting for the fire department to arrive and do its thing.

Thielen had dismissed Deputy Shepard after reviewing his photos on the digital camera and supervising while he dusted for prints. The front of the red Mustang and its door handles, Sam’s iPod, and some of the tools on the workbench were all covered in black medium. Thielen had grabbed a set of prints from the body before it left the scene.

She led Packard through the kitchen and the living room (the video game was still paused, the soldiers still unsure what to do) back to Sam’s bedroom. One by one she held up the evidence bags spread out on his bed. “Five hundred fifty-seven dollars in cash. Sixty-two individual pills in small bags, sorted by kind. I don’t know all the markings and colors. If we take them back to the station and show Blake, he’ll know what we’re looking at. A small amount of weed. There’s a .22 handgun. I called in the serial number and am waiting for a call back.”

She held up the last bag. “This is what’s most interesting. There are five different prescription bottles all with different names on them. All dated within the last two years. No pills inside any of them. None with the last name Gherlick. No bottle with the name Shaw on it either. Four are for painkillers. One is anti-anxiety.”

“So he’s stealing the drugs he’s selling.”

“Or he’s buying from kids in these families who are stealing on his behalf,” Thielen suggested.

“Maybe. The more people involved in the operation, the harder it is to keep a secret. Maybe it was well known in the school that Sam was a dealer, but that’s not the impression I got. It seemed like he was being more careful than that. More careful than Jesse.”

Packard hunched over and looked inside the open safe. “What else is in there?”

“That thing still in there is some kind of silicone masturbation device. I made an executive decision that it didn’t need to be bagged.”

“Christ. Okay. Let’s see what else we can find.”

They spent the next hour pulling apart the bedroom. On the nightstand was an iPad with a pass code that they gave up trying to break after half a dozen tries. The closet was full of tennis shoes, jeans, sports jerseys, and hooded sweatshirts. In a dresser drawer they found four disposable cell phones with the batteries removed.

Packard gave Thielen a knowing look. “Let’s bag those. We’ll be able to get the numbers off them if we need to.”

“Keeping old burners lying around kind of defeats the purpose of having a disposable phone. Not very smart,” she said.

“Same with the prescription bottles. This is a kid who’s not worried about getting caught. He thinks he’s invincible because of who he is. Who his family is.”

Packard brought in a step ladder from the garage and Thielen climbed up, removed one of the tiles from the dropped ceiling, and stuck her head above the suspended frame. “There’s something on the tile right over the bed,” she said, reaching for her flashlight. She looked again. “I can’t tell which tile for sure. I think it’s a gun.”

Packard pushed up a couple until he found the right one. He spread apart the metal channels and lowered a tile with a gun on it down to the bed. The barrel was etched with OFFICERS’ MODEL TARGET .38. A round Colt emblem was carved into its checkered walnut grips.

“A cop’s gun?” Thielen asked.

“Not necessarily. Anyone can buy one of these. Looks pretty vintage. From the forties or fifties maybe.” Packard rotated the ceiling tile, keeping the barrel pointed away, so they could see the gun from all angles without touching it. “It’s loaded. Looks like a name scratched in the bottom of the stock.”

Thielen used her flashlight to bring out the shadows. “It says D. Chambers.”

“Ring any bells for you?”

Thielen shook her head. “None.”

“Curious that this one is up in the ceiling while the other one was locked up,” Packard said.

“It wasn’t up there for easy access. Probably hiding it,” Thielen said.

Packard spent the next few minutes photographing both guns and the pill bottles with his cell phone. When he was done, they went from Sam’s room to the guest bedroom where he’d found Shannon Gherlick completely unconscious. There was nothing of Sam’s sister’s left except the smell of her in the sheets. “She had a purse, right?” Packard asked.

“She did. I put it on the gurney with her.”

“Anything interesting in it?”

“I had a quick look when I took her ID out,” Thielen said. “Nothing stood out. No drugs, no paraphernalia, no weapons. She had a cell phone, tampons, wallet. That’s about it.”

They went through boxes and closets and cabinets but turned up little else. Back in the living room, Packard found the remote for the TV and killed the power to the confused game soldiers. “I could be wrong but this feels really small time to me. We could take this house down to the studs and I bet we wouldn’t find another pill. There’s no big stash here. Sam Gherlick didn’t even have a connect.”