And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(71)

“If that’s what you want. You’re not going to arrest her, are you? Has she done anything that she can get arrested for?”

The doors opened. Packard exited without answering.

***

Shannon’s room was three doors down from the nurses’ station. Dan pointed to the door and then went down to the desk to ask about the plan for discharging his daughter. No one noticed Packard or saw him go into her room.

It was dark inside. The room’s single window was black except for the hole punched in the night sky by the waning moon. Ambient lights behind the bed gave off a sleepy yellow glow. A TV mounted near the ceiling was on with the volume low. The air was sharp with cleaning products and sweat from the woman cranked up in the bed.

At the sight of him, Shannon’s expression collapsed like a hand was crumpling her features from inside her skull. She knew who he was, even out of uniform. She turned away and cried soundlessly. Packard pulled a chair close to her bed and sat down without a word. He brought the coffee cup to his lips, remembered what it was, put it back down. He watched the television while the girl with the neck tattoo and the unwashed face and the IV in her arm cried and gasped.

When she finally got herself under control and turned her face toward him, she opened her mouth to say something but he held up his hand.

“Listen to me. You think you know why I’m here, but you don’t know the half of it,” he said. She tried to say something but he stopped her again. “I’m going to start by telling you everything I know. Don’t bother trying to tell me that I’m wrong or that any of it isn’t true. I know better. When I’m done with that, I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to tell me everything you know. No lying. No withholding. Understood?”

“Where’s my dad?”

“It’s not time for your questions yet. That comes later.”

“I want my dad.”

Packard shook his head. Shannon reached blindly over her head, looking for the call button clipped on the corner of her elevated mattress.

“Shannon, if you push that button I’m going to arrest you. I’ll leave if the nurses come in here and tell me to, but I’ll find a deputy to sit outside your room, and as soon as you’re discharged, he’ll take you straight from here to the jail. You’ll detox in a jail cell instead of a treatment facility.”

Her hand froze where it was, then dropped back to her lap.

Packard laid out everything. Jenny and Jesse’s disappearance late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning. The text from Sam to Jesse. The eyewitness who saw Sam and Jesse together in Sam’s car. Sam’s Meals on Wheels history. The drugs and the prescription bottles they found at the house.

“You’re involved in this through your job at the drugstore. I know you cover the prescription counter sometimes. Tell me how it works.”

“I’m not involved. You’re making assumptions.”

“Bullshit. Let me give you one more reason to tell me the truth. There’s a chance what happened to your brother wasn’t an accident. I think there’s actually a very good chance someone else figured out the connection between Sam and Jesse and got to your brother before I did. If he also knows your involvement in all this, then he could come looking for you next.”

Shannon fought to keep from crying again. Packard stared at her without sympathy.

“Tell me how it worked between you and your brother.”

“If I tell you, I’ll lose my job.”

Packard shook his head. “Shannon, you lost that job the minute we found you OD’d in bed. You’re never going to work there again. Now, for the last time, how’d it work between the two of you?”

Shannon hung her head and scratched the tattoo on her neck. She snuffled snot and wiped her forearm under her nose and rubbed her wet eyes with the back of her hand.

“It was Sam’s idea for me to get a job there. A lot of what he sold was stuff he bought from other kids who were selling their own prescriptions. ADHD drugs, things like that. Sometimes it was pain pills from someone else in the house, old meds they found in a medicine cabinet or a hall closet. Sometimes they skimmed pills from Grandma and Grandpa or a friend’s house. After he graduated, Sam couldn’t keep those connections up and Jesse wasn’t as good at making the deals.”

“Sam set Jesse up in the school to take over for him.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Did you see them together a lot?”

Shannon shrugged. “I’d see Jesse at the house now and then. They played video games together. Got high. You know.”

“What else?”

“You already know about the Meals on Wheels, how they kept moving him around because people didn’t like him. That’s exactly what he wanted. It gave him more places to skim. Eventually they asked him not to come back, so that dried up. I was using him to score by then. He said if I wanted to keep getting high, I needed to help with the supply. He said if I got a job at the drugstore and could tell him what he wanted to know, then he would owe me.”

“What did you do?”

“I got the job at the drugstore. After a few months they let me start covering the register in the pharmacy. It was my job to show people the instruction sheet that comes with their pills and ask them if they had any questions for the pharmacist. I was the last quality check to make sure what was in the computer matched what was in the bag. Sam gave me a list of drugs he was interested in. I memorized the list and watched for who was getting the good stuff. And then I told him.”