Every Kind of Wicked. Lisa Black

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СКАЧАТЬ this wasn’t a social call.

      Will asked if she were the wife of Marlon Toner.

      “Sister.”

      Rick said nothing, and neither did Will for a moment. Jennifer Toner was definitely African-American, and the dead Marlon had been pale long before dying in the cold. But sometimes kids took wholly after one parent or the other, or perhaps they were stepsiblings. Whatever.

      Will, always more—what do they call it, Rick thought, in-clusionary? —went on. That’s why they made a good team, Rick believed. Will handled all the touchy-feely crap, with Rick there to take down the bad guys when necessary. “Does he live here?”

      “No.”

      Will said, “He has this address on his driver’s license.”

      She flexed an eyebrow, a tiny reaction that told Rick she hadn’t known that, but it also didn’t surprise her.

      She asked, “Has he been arrested?”

      “You knew he had a drug problem?”

      She didn’t seem to notice the use of the past tense. “Yes—he didn’t always. He was clean his whole life. Even in high school he wasn’t part of that mess, no gangs, no dealing. Football kept him busy and that was all he cared about. Got a job, everything going good. It was that doctor.” She sat down after all, absently sinking into an armchair.

      “What doctor?” Rick asked.

      Jennifer Toner settled back in her chair and rubbed one temple with long fingers. “It started five, six months ago. He stopped by—we’re close, you know? There’s only the two of us since my parents passed. Talkin’ and catching up, but I could tell something wasn’t right. He said he had a summer cold, but finally I asked him if he was high. He said no, then left. Couple weeks, he stops by work, looks the same . . . I know the signs. Called me all dragging because his girlfriend had left him but all perky by the time he showed up and it wasn’t because I cheered him up, ’cause I told him he was an idiot, she had been great for him and he should get her back. Three months ago, he loses his job. Like I said, the signs.”

      Will bobbed his head sympathetically.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, Rick thought. Same old story. If he had five bucks for every time a family member said but he was turning his life around . . .

      “The next time I saw him, I asked where he was living since he broke up with Taya and he wouldn’t quite answer me. I told him flat-out he was a junkie and needed help, that I wasn’t going to watch him die like practically everyone else we grew up with.”

      “Do you know what he was on?”

      “Pills. That’s why he kept trying to tell me he wasn’t an addict, it was medicine; a doctor said he should take them. He had a real prescription from a real doctor, got the stuff from a real pharmacy, nothing illegal about it. I said he sure as hell looked exactly like the guys who live in the stairwells around St. Malachi’s so I don’t see what difference a prescription makes. We—” Her gaze fell to her lap, and she finished in what was surely an understatement, “We had a fight.”

      “We found him with a syringe,” Will said, gentle but straightforward—she seemed like a chick who appreciated straight talk—but left out how it had still been in his arm. “So he had graduated from pills, or started shooting them.”

      Again, the flick of an eyebrow. Not surprising. The rise and fall of a drug addict’s life had been witnessed so many times by people stuck in a certain milieu that small children could probably sketch it out for show-and-tell.

      Jennifer Toner straightened, clearly deciding that enough of her family’s dirty laundry had been sufficiently aired for one day. “Where is he now? Can I bail him out? Or is he at St. Vincent?”

      The two cops exchanged a glance instead of answering, and grief invaded with the speed of lightning. “Oh no. No, no, no, no—”

      “Ms. Toner, I’m sorry to have to tell you—”

      “No, no, NO!”

      This went on for a while. Will murmured soothing comments, made her some tea, offered to call in a Victim’s Advocate to help make funeral arrangements and contact family members.

      Rick spent the time surreptitiously checking his phone. He half expected Maggie to call or text, to try in some subtle way to find out more about his trip west. Surely she had clued the new boyfriend in, told him that Rick planned to check out Chicago and Minneapolis and follow the trail of that woman’s nightmarish nursing homes and, with luck, pick up the trail of the vigilante who might have been stalking and finally killed her. Then behind him the trail of the guy who followed him from city to city, appropriating other cops’ names in order to hide his obsession. That would be quite the coup for Rick—catch the vigilante, and expose Jack Renner as a lying, phony psycho.

      He realized he was smiling and stopped before the grieving sister could catch him at it.

      “What doctor?” he heard his partner ask.

      She sniffled into a paper towel Will had fetched for her. “He showed me a pill bottle last week, trying to convince me that he wasn’t taking drugs, it was medicine. Percodan. The doctor’s name was Phillip Castleman. I Googled, looking for an address. I planned to go to his office and read him the riot act about being a pill pusher. Except he don’t exist, at least not in Cleveland.”

      “Huh,” Will said. “Unfortunately fake scripts can be gotten from all sorts of outlets, even mail order.”

      “No, the pharmacy had an address on East Fifty-fifth. I can’t remember the name, something-something-pharmacy— I know that doesn’t help—but I remember Fifty-fifth. He’d get Medicare checks to pay for them. He told me all that, trying to convince me it was all legit, because I kept expecting him to ask me for money—that’s how it always goes, right? But he never did. But he also wasn’t old enough for Medicare, so I have no idea what that was all about.”

      “Not Medicaid?” Will asked.

      “He said Medicare.”

      Rick found this less than fascinating. He and Will could tell the guys in Vice about it and be done. It was their job, not the homicide unit’s.

      Perhaps Will thought so too, because he finally got back on track, nailing down the standard details to include in the report. “When was the last time you saw your brother?”

      “Two, two and a half weeks ago. That’s when we argued—well, every time I see him now we argue—about the pills and where he was getting them.”

      “Okay. Had you spoken to him since then?”

      “Yeah, couple times.”

      “When was the last?”

      “About an hour ago.” Her voice cracked. “I knew something was really wrong this time. He was talking crazy, like totally out of his head—”

      “An hour ago?” Rick asked.

      “Hour, hour and a half,” she said, then noticed the cops’ expressions. “What? What is it?”

      Rick СКАЧАТЬ