The Bitterest Pill

Three

A shame. Sometimes all it took were a few syllables to sum things up. But those two simple syllables were also woefully inadequate, because while they summed things up, they would also leave a thousand questions in their wake. The questions for Jesse and his department would be the easy ones: When did the girl start using? Who was her supplier? Could they catch him or her? Could they make a case against him or her? The questions for Heather’s parents would be the harder ones: How could we not have known? What didn’t we see? How had we failed her? And some of those questions, maybe all of them, would go forever unanswered. Jesse liked the Mackeys and hoped the questions wouldn’t tear Patti and Steve apart, but Jesse had seen the scenario play out a hundred times before. The parents would need someone to blame and, short on answers or with answers they didn’t like, they tended to blame each other.

If there was anything that experience had taught Jesse about drug cases, it was that they didn’t happen in a vacuum. Where there was one case there would be others. It wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of how many, how severe, and when. The tough thing was that to limit the damage, Jesse was going to have to ask some of those hard questions of the Mackeys, and he was going to have to do it sooner rather than later. Sooner being now.

He found Patti Mackey in the kitchen, Suit standing silent guard over her. Jesse was glad for Suit being on hand. One of Suit Simpson’s remarkable qualities was that in spite of his size, he was almost always a comforting presence. People just felt at ease around him. The same could not be said of Jesse. He supposed he was a little softer around the edges these days, now that he was a father and he was no longer drinking, but there was something about his self-containment that didn’t allow people to feel the kind of comfort around him that they felt around Molly or Suit. He was okay with that. Those qualities helped make him good at his job. Still, there were times, especially times like these, when he wished he had the knack.

Patti was no longer wailing. No, she sat at the kitchen table nearly as still as her daughter had been. Jesse had seen it before; the stages of initial shock play out in only a very few minutes. First the disbelief, then the flood of pain that came with the realization that your child was lost to you forever and that there would never be another unblemished day for the rest of your life, then the momentary self-imposed numbness. It wouldn’t last long. Her zombielike state certainly wouldn’t survive the ME’s guys toting the body bag down the stairs.

“Patti,” Jesse said, “I’ve got to ask you some questions.”

“What?” Her answer seemed to come from somewhere very far away. Her red-rimmed eyes unblinking. Her expression excruciatingly blank.

Suit made to leave the room, but Jesse waved for him to stay, to sit at the table beside Patti Mackey. When Suit had taken a seat, Jesse began again.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Heather’s behavior lately?”

Patti blinked, fighting herself. “Different? No, not different. She just seemed a little more tired lately. Her stomach was giving her trouble, but she’s a — was a junior and, you know, looking at colleges and taking tests and all. Now, I don’t—”

Jesse knew it was unkind, but he had to keep Patti in the moment and not let her drift into the dark place just yet.

“Patti, Patti, come on. I need you to focus. So she was a little depressed and tense with all the junior-year stuff. Anything else? Was she keeping new company? Any new boyfriends? Girlfriends?”

But it was no good. Patti still wasn’t ready. The strength she was using to hold it together was blocking her ability to think deeply or to feel anything. And then, when the front door opened and the ME’s men came in, one holding a folded body bag under his arm, Patti exploded out of her chair and charged at them, clawing. “No! No! You leave her be. That’s her room. This is her house. You don’t touch her. You don’t touch her!”

By then Suit had caught up to her and was holding her back, clamping his arms around her. She put up a hell of a struggle, and Jesse could see that Suit needed to exert some strength to hold Patti back. Even as Suit held her, Patti screamed and kicked at the air.

“You leave my daughter be. You leave her be! You’re not going to put her in a plastic bag, not my girl, not my beautiful little girl.”

But that was exactly what those men were going to do. They were going to place the body of Heather Mackey, cheerleader, popular high school junior, in a liquid-proof bag and pull a zipper up over her cooling, lifeless face. Then they were going to carry her down the stairs and out the front door, place her remains in the back of a van, and drive her to the morgue.

Jesse nodded for Suit to take Patti Mackey into the living room.

“You keep her there no matter what,” he said.

Jesse watched the sad procession. The ME first, his men behind him, and Peter Perkins in the rear.

“Chief,” the ME said as he passed, head down. “I will have the results for you as soon as I can, but the tox screen is going to take a while.”

“Do what you can, Doc.”

Peter Perkins stopped and stood in front of Jesse.

“What is it, Peter?”

“I heard an author interviewed on TV last week. He said we declared the war on drugs fifty years ago. We’ve spent a trillion dollars fighting it, but that drugs were cheaper, more available, and more potent now than ever before. Said that if that was victory, he’d hate to see defeat.”

Jesse didn’t say anything to that. What was there to say?