“If we’re right, I’ll do my best to see you don’t go to prison for murder. Assuming you’re cured, you’re not a danger to anyone, and someone did this to you. That person should be punished.”
Clement gave the kind of nod that said he didn’t entirely agree with me. His fingers stayed steepled onto his face.
The person who tampered with Clement’s medicine could be charged with attempted murder at the very least, and depending on how strong a case I could make, potentially for Gordon’s murder as well.
But that still wouldn’t get Clement acquitted. Now that we were both accepting that Gordon was collateral damage, I’d have to first prove Clement’s medications had been altered, then show that alteration caused his fatal insomnia, which caused a hallucination that resulted in Gordon’s death. And, at the end of all that, hope I could find precedent for having Clement released. Given the unusual circumstances, it’d be a long shot.
First, I had to make sure he didn’t tip off Darlene if she was involved somehow.
He hadn’t responded to my question about whether he’d told her his suspicions or not. I didn’t want to plant doubt in his mind about his wife unnecessarily. Their relationship was already going to have a hard-enough time recovering from Gordon’s murder, and Darlene might not have been involved at all in Clement’s condition.
“I think it’d be better if you didn’t tell Darlene about this for now.”
Clement rubbed the spot where his wedding ring normally sat. “You think she’ll find it hard to believe that I wasn’t faking this whole time? She might think I meant to kill Gordon.”
The poor man. Believing he’d killed his best friend was bad enough. Believing he might lose his wife as well could send him into a depression. There was a reason the guards removed all items a person could hang themselves with in prison.
I didn’t want to be a contributing factor to Clement heading down that path. That would be as bad as planting doubts about his wife prematurely.
“I was thinking more that we don’t want to get her hopes up. It could be that this is a temporary respite from your condition and it’ll return. Maybe no one tampered with your medication at all. Give me time to look into it first, okay?”
Clement seemed to like the idea that his condition might simply be in remission better than that Darlene might believe he’d faked his disease to create an out for murdering his friend. That was love, when a man preferred death over losing his wife. At least he hadn’t guessed at my real motive for asking him not to tell Darlene. That spoke to his love for her as well.
I got his permission to enter his house and remove an old pill bottle if I needed to. From my visit to Darlene, I knew that, like so many people in Fair Haven, they didn’t lock their doors. All I’d need to do was find a time when Darlene wasn’t home. Clement provided that for me, too. Darlene did water aerobics three mornings a week at the Fair Haven pool, and she’d recently joined a knitting club that met once a week.
Once the guard brought the medical release forms and Clement signed them, I headed out.
The first thing I needed to do was establish when his medication had been tampered with so I knew whether to investigate Darlene or Clement’s doctor for a possible motive. Hopefully I could somehow prove that his medication had been altered. If I couldn’t, Clement would go to prison for murder, and when he got out, someone might still want to kill him.
Saul would be able to tell me what prescription was on file for Clement. I still wanted to tell him about Gordon Albright’s house as well and how it was already set up for someone in a wheelchair. Once it was released, Leonard would no doubt sell it, and people tended to want to move a house they’d inherited quickly, which meant they often sold for less than they otherwise would have. After losing his chance to buy the pharmacy, hopefully learning about a house that was already wheelchair accessible would cheer him up a little.
I parked as near the door of Dr. Horton’s Pharmacy as I could to avoid the biting wind and headed inside.
A middle-aged man with dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses stood behind the counter where I’d expected to find Saul.
I stuttered to a stop. Surely the new owner hadn’t fired Saul, but he had been worried about reduced hours.
The man gave me a professional smile, the kind you knew was offered only because they thought they should and not because they felt it. “Are you picking up a prescription or dropping off?”
I rested my fingers on the edge of the counter. Without Saul here, I felt like I wasn’t even in the same pharmacy. If I had been here to pick up a new prescription, I would have felt very unbalanced to not be able to speak to him. Though maybe Saul was still here and this man was simply another employee hired by the new owner to help carry the load. Saul did work ridiculous hours.
“I actually wanted to talk to Saul about something. Is he in today?”
“He’s out for a funeral, unfortunately. His brother-in-law passed away.”
Poor Saul. To lose a family member on top of everything else he’d been going through. He couldn’t seem to catch a break, and this must have come as a shock. When I’d been in here last time, he hadn’t said anything about his brother-in-law being sick. Though it might not have come up anyway. We’d only talked about his brother-in-law in relation to how he’d been a contributing factor in his sister’s death. “Was it sudden?”
“I think so. Saul said he went into a diabetic coma and didn’t wake up. You can ask me what you need to, or he should be back in next week, if you’re more comfortable waiting.”
Some people might not have understood why Saul would even attend his brother-in-law’s funeral or need time off to grieve, but I did. I’d attended the funeral of a man who tried to kill me. There was a sense of closure that came from attending. It let you put things behind you in a way you couldn’t otherwise—or at least, it had for me. When your life was in turmoil, any bit of closure you could get was a blessing. My suspicion was that Russ was also struggling now because he’d never found a way to get that closure. Convincing him of that, though, was another thing altogether.
Saul might find his brother-in-law’s funeral dredged up a lot of old emotions. A week might not even be enough, and I couldn’t wait.
I explained who I was and laid out the signed consent forms, leaving out why I needed access to Clement’s prescriptions. That wasn’t something anyone else needed to know.
He printed off a list of all the medications the pharmacy had dispensed to Clement over the past year. The only one on the list I recognized was penicillin.
I pointed at the other two. “Could you tell me what these are for?”
“That one is the shingles shot.” He touched a finger down beside the single-dose prescription on the list, then slid his finger down alongside all the others, filled at monthly intervals. “And these are for high cholesterol.”
The heaviness in my stomach was so intense that I felt like my feet must be sinking into the floor. He received a high cholesterol medication from the pharmacy. That meant they had to be switched afterward by someone with easy access to them. Only two people had that kind of access to Clement’s house. One of them was dead. The other was his wife.
Since the police hadn’t found a motive for Clement to want to kill Gordon, the reverse was true as well. There wasn’t a clear reason Gordon would have wanted to kill Clement.
Which left Darlene.
Now all that was left for me to do was prove it.
18
If Saul had been working instead of the new pharmacist, I might have asked more questions about what medications could cause insomnia. I trusted Saul to keep it to himself. I wasn’t going to ask his replacement.
The Fair Haven rumor mill had a stronger draw than gravity. Some of the things I’d heard since coming here shouldn’t have been common knowledge. Even though pharmacists weren’t supposed to share confidential information, this man might think a question about medications that could cause insomnia didn’t apply. After all, it wasn’t a question about my personal medications or Clement’s personal medications.
A general question probably wasn’t even covered under confidentiality. So if I asked, I’d have to trust in the discretion of a stranger. If he were a gossipmonger, asking him not to share would only convince him he had a tastier tidbit of news.
Even if he went home and only told his roommate or his wife about how a lawyer came in today asking about medications that could cause insomnia, that could travel the Fair Haven network before I woke up. Right now, I didn’t want to risk tipping anyone off to what I was doing.
