Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(24)

Caroline came padding in around 6:00 a.m. to get some orange juice so she could take her morning pain medication.

“This thing at ETSU is getting crazier by the second,” I said.

“I think somebody’s stealing my meds,” she said.

I looked up from the paper.

“Are you serious?” I said.

“Remember when I came up short on the 80 milligram pills a few weeks ago and we thought maybe the maid had stolen them at the hotel in Nashville? I don’t think it was a maid.”

Caroline took a lot of OxyContin. She had to. There were tumors virtually all over her skeletal system, and if she didn’t receive high doses of pain medication, she wouldn’t have been able to survive. She took the Oxy in two dosages—one eighty milligram pill in the morning and another at night, and thirty milligram pills for what they called “breakthrough” pain. If she had a lot of pain in her knees or her back or her hips during the afternoon or at night, she could take a thirty-milligram pill and it would usually help. She didn’t take the thirties all that often. She’d told me she’d been hoarding them because the doctor prescribed them once a month, the insurance company paid for them, and she picked them up at the pharmacy. What she didn’t use, she stashed in a bottle that she kept on her vanity in the bathroom. She never knew when she might need them.

But when the eighties came up missing, she was miserable for more than a week. The kind of pain that cancer causes in a person’s bones is the kind of pain you have to stay ahead of. Without the eighties, she got behind, and she suffered tremendously. Twelve pills were gone, and she couldn’t just go to the doctor and get another prescription. The insurance company wouldn’t let her have more than the prescribed dose, thief or no thief. Oxycontin was heavily regulated, sometimes, I thought, to the point of ridiculousness, but it was being abused all over the country and the government—and the insurance companies—had really cracked down. You couldn’t just go to your doctor or to the pharmacy and say, “Somebody stole my eighty-milligram Oxycontin tablets.” The doctor couldn’t prescribe more, and even if she had, the insurance company wouldn’t have paid and the pharmacy wouldn’t have dispensed the pills.

“You know how I store up the thirties?” Caroline said. “I should have about ninety of them. I looked last night and I only have around twenty. Somebody’s stealing pain medication from a cancer patient, and I think I know who it is.”

“Tracey?” I said.

“It has to be.”

Tracey Rowland was Caroline’s home health care nurse. He’d started coming to the house to give her intravenous sodium chloride after a urinary tract infection dehydrated her so badly she didn’t know her name and wound up in the hospital for a week. He was friendly enough, but there were a couple of things that had bothered me about him from the beginning. The first was that he was a pretty boy who gave off a sleazy kind of vibe. He was always chatting and sharing details of his personal life that he shouldn’t have been sharing. He was supposed to show up at eight in the morning on Monday and Wednesday, hook up the IV, and leave. The IV usually took about three hours, and I always went home and turned off the machine, unhooked Caroline from the machine, flushed her PICC line, capped it, and we’d have lunch together. But Tracey texted Caroline a lot and even managed to get her to invite him and his wife out to dinner. He acted like he wanted to become a friend of the family, but I just wanted him to do his job. I wasn’t jealous of him; he simply made me uncomfortable. I’d mentioned it to Caroline and she agreed that he was a little too friendly, but Caroline wasn’t as cynical as I.

The other thing that bothered me about the guy was that he went into our master bathroom, which was where the drugs were, every time he came to the house. He said he was washing his hands, but I noticed he had hand cleaner with him and he always put on gloves. So why all the hand washing? And why in our bathroom? He could have washed his hands in the kitchen or in the half-bath right outside of our bedroom. But he always washed them in our bathroom, and he did it twice during every visit. He washed them as soon as he got there and he washed them right before he left.

“That miserable son of a bitch,” I said. “I knew there was something wrong with the guy. I’ll break every bone in his body.”

“Joe, you can’t do that.”

“The hell I can’t. You were crying when you ran out of the eighties. You were in so much pain you barely slept for a week. If he’s doing this, I’m definitely going to see to it that he suffers as much as you did.”

“You’ll go to jail. And besides, we have to prove it,” she said.

“I won’t go to jail. First things first. We have to catch him red-handed.”

“How do we do that?”

“I guess a nanny cam would probably be best. I’ll get Jack to help me set it up. We put it at a good angle and when he goes in to wash his hands, if he’s stealing, it’ll be on the camera. They’re compatible with phones now. I can’t wait to sit down with him and show him a video of him stealing your medication. The look on his face will be priceless.”

“And then you’re going to call the police.”

“Not before I hurt him. I can’t believe this, baby. A freakin’ junkie working as a home health nurse and stealing Oxycontin from a cancer patient. I wonder how prevalent it is.”