Page 65 of Out to Get Her
“Oxycodone.” Erin frowned. “Some brand I didn’t recognize, but I looked it up.”
Samantha’s chest tightened like someone had gripped a fist around her heart. This whole situation had a stink to it, but she didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
“I thought you said he was healthy.”
“As far as I knew. I mean, he could have been hiding a diagnosis. And it would be like Grandpa to ‘tough it out.’ But I don’t know if he’d hide something that big. Someone around here would have known if he had a big surgery or cancer, even if I didn’t.”
Samantha heard the pain in those last few words.
“Maybe it wasn’t something new. Maybe he had an old injury?”
“Then why keep going to the doctor if he didn’t plan on taking anything for the pain?” Erin shook her head. “And they were all recent prescriptions. All within the last several months. Too many for a minor issue.”
Samantha frowned. “Unless…”
Erin nodded. “Unless.”
Samantha had been hoping to find some reasonable explanation for all of this. Something that made all her fears and suspicions vanish.
Erin stared at the book in her hand. “I thought that stuff was going off the market.”
Samantha shook her head. She’d kept up on the court case because she knew prescriptions of all kinds turned street drugs were a problem for lots of communities. A problem that shouldn’t be solved by punishing the people who were lied to about the pills and then cut off by overreactive doctors and lawmakers. She wanted to keep current with the issue so her department could help people get the resources they needed, not throw them in jail.
“The big company that lied about their product got in trouble, but the medicine isn’t inherently evil,” Samantha explained. “People still need the pills, so generic and other brands are available. But overprescribing for profit is always a problem.”
And a potential motive.
But there was still a missing piece. Mr. Sonnier’s prescriptions didn’t draw a direct line to Nathan. Yet. Since Mr. Sonnier hadn’t filled them, the only person potentially on the hook so far was the doctor. The prescriptions that were now missing.
That,unfortunately, painted a giant flashing arrow pointed at either her boss or her political opponent. Or both. They were the last people in the office when the evidence went missing. One or both of them could have made that evidence disappear.
Samantha’s money was on Jordan. Not just because she didn’t want to imagine the chief involved in this, or because she couldn’t stand Jordan Fonseca, but because Jordan was the only one with a connection and possible motive.
Had Nathan been worried about the evidence tying him to the doctor and asked Jordan to make it disappear as payment for securing his win in the election?
It sounded far-fetched, but she couldn’t ignore the connections. Nor could she ignore the fact that it sounded exactly like something Nathan and Jordan would do.
“I don’t get it,” Samantha said. “Why would he keep them in here? Why go through the trouble of hiding them in a book?”
“He kept everything of value here.” Erin held up a finger and grabbed a book on the second shelf. She pointed at the spine, which read,The Collective Stories of Raymond Carver. Then she opened the cover, once again revealing a hole in the pages. This time, filled with cash. “See? Carver. Ca- forcash.”
Samantha knew Erin’s grandfather had always been mildly eccentric, but this was more than she’d expected. “Are all the books like this?”
“No,” Erin said. “Some are just normal books. I haven’t been through all of them yet.”
Meaning they could be standing in front of more evidence.
“Wait. If he kept his valuables here…”
Erin nodded. “He considered those prescriptions valuable.”
“But why? If he wasn’t filling them, what was their value to him?”
Erin waited silently while Samantha pondered the possibilities. Something in her eyes told Samantha that Erin had an inkling of an answer to her question, but she was waiting for Samantha to figure it out on her own.
“Maybe they weren’t valuable tohimspecifically.”
They were valuable, Samantha had to admit. Street value for one. But also to her and the department for protecting the parish.
