“Oh fuck, are you kidding me?” Faith was practically shouting. “Look farther down the list—Lidocaine. Ibuprofen. Neosporin. Taxol. Ofloxacin. NebuPent.”
“Clever girl!” Amanda pumped a triumphant fist into the air.
Faith swooped up her hand for a high five. Will offered a lame slap. He had no idea why they were celebrating a list of medications.
“Will!” Faith showed him the phone. “There’s a message embedded in the list. Ignore the other words. Look at these two sections here. The first letters of each medication—they spell out a code: ‘H-E-L-P, then L-I-N-T-O-N.’”
Will shook his head, hearing what she was saying but not understanding.
Amanda said, “Sara dictated this list. She sent us another message. ‘Help Linton.’”
Help Linton.
The words had a weird echo in his ears. Will braced his hand against the wall. He stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped processing anything but the fact that Sara was reaching out to him again.
Help.
“Here.” Faith zoomed in the list, like that would make it better. She pointed at the letters. “H-E-L—”
Will nodded so she would stop. He could see the numbers, but the words got tangled. This was the important part: at 6:49 this morning, Sara was alive and okay enough to send a coded message.
“We know Sara met Beau,” Amanda told Faith. “She must’ve put it together that he would be the one who filled the shopping list.”
“Band-Aids. Gatorade.” Faith kept reading. “Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. That’s for diaper rash, but you can use it for chapped skin, burns, scrapes. Most of this looks like the kind of stuff you need for kids. Amoxicillin, Cefuroxime, liquid acetaminophen. I’ve got gallons of this stuff in my medicine cabinet.”
“Aspirin,” Amanda read. “You wouldn’t give that to a child because of Reye’s syndrome.”
Faith said, “We need a doctor to look at this list and tell us if there’s anything that we’re missing.”
“Go,” Amanda said, but Faith was already out the door.
“The subject line said ASAP.” Will told Amanda. “Beau has to meet them in person to give them the drugs. I want to be there. We can figure out a cover story.”
“It won’t be Dash who meets Ragnersen. The man in charge doesn’t run errands. He’ll send a flunky.”
“A flunky can—” Will put his hand on the wall to steady himself. “A flunky can take me to them. Lead me to them. I can find a way in. All I need is one guy who—”
“Keep babbling while I send this email.” Amanda was on her BlackBerry again. Her thumbs were a blur as she typed.
Will looked away. The bright screen had shot tiny swords into his eyes. His brain had turned back into a balloon. He could feel it bumping against his skull. He breathed in as much as he could, then out as much as his ribs would let him. He forced away the same dread that had niggled at him all night.
Sara had sent the coded message at 6:49 this morning.
What had happened at 6:50?
Amanda asked, “Do you need to sit down?”
Will shook his head. The motion made the dizziness worse. He was missing things, not making the right connections. He silently replayed Amanda’s excited conversation with Faith until his thoughts cleared enough to pose a question.
He said, “You told Faith, ‘We know Sara met Beau.’ What proof do you have of that? All Sara wrote on the ceiling was Beau and Bar. That doesn’t mean that she met him. She could’ve overheard his name. Or Dash or one of his men could’ve—”
Amanda held up her finger for silence. She finished her email. She dropped the BlackBerry into her pocket, then looked up at him. “At the motel last night, Charlie found a partial fingerprint on the inside lip of the plastic table by the door. It came back as a match to Beau Ragnersen.”
Will remembered another detail Zevon had relayed to Amanda. “Beau is the caretaker at the motel. His prints are probably all over the place.”
“Ragnersen’s fingerprint was pressed into Carter’s blood. Charlie says that based on the composition of the print, the blood was fresh when Ragnersen touched it. That puts him at the scene at the time of the stabbing. That’s how we got the search warrant for Ragnersen’s house. The print is clear proof that he was in the room where a murder took place. We served a no-knock warrant at three this morning.”
At three this morning, Will was sitting on his couch replaying Sara’s phone message like a desperate teenager. He felt his jaw clench in anger—not at Amanda; he might as well be mad at a snake for slithering. He should’ve never gone home in the first place.
He asked, “Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”
“Because you needed, still need to, rest. Alone, without sound, in the dark. You are severely concussed. You killed one man and shot another. You’ve lost the woman you were too stupid to marry as soon as your divorce was finalized, and I can either stay here and change your diaper or we can both go into that room and force Beau Ragnersen to take you undercover so you can persuade Dash’s flunky to take you into the IPA.”
Will glared at her. Then he realized what she had just told him.
He looked through the glass mirror. Beau’s hands were still gripped together on the table. His beard was long, but his hair was military tight. He was wiry and muscled in an MMA way. He sold black tar heroin to desperate junkies and took cash for patching up criminals. Right now, he was the only chance Will had to get Sara back.
He asked, “Do you have the other half of that aspirin?”
She reached into her coat pocket. Her pill case was silver with a pink rose enameled into the top. “I’ve got more in my purse. You’ll have to ask if you need them. Aspirin can tear up your stomach.”
Will dry-swallowed the pill. He didn’t let Amanda leave the room first. He didn’t hold open the door for her. He walked into the hall. He headed down to the interrogation room. The bright lights cut into his pupils. His eyes started to water. He opened the door.
Beau didn’t look up this time. He stared down at his hands. There was a wiriness about him. Spring-loaded, like Will’s stolen knife. His heel tapped against the floor. He was either a junkie who needed a fix or he had realized that life as he knew it was over. Actually, he was probably both. You didn’t wear long sleeves in August unless you were trying to hide the scars on your arms.
Will clenched his stomach muscles so he could pick up the chair Beau had kicked across the floor. He gently placed it in front of the table. He gripped the back with his hands and waited.
“Good morning, Captain Ragnersen.” Amanda breezed into the room and took the second chair. “I’m Deputy Director Amanda Wagner with the GBI. This is Special Agent Will Trent.”
Beau finally looked at Will, sizing him up. Will straightened his fingers on the chair, drawing attention to the cuts and bruises. He wanted this guy to know that he was not above beating the shit out of somebody.
Amanda said, “Captain Ragnersen, you’ve already been read your rights. I want to remind you that anything you say in this room is being recorded. You should also know that lying to an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Do you understand me?”
Beau’s eyes were still on Will. He clearly didn’t like another man hovering over him. He lifted his chin up in a defiant nod to Amanda.
“For the record, the prisoner nodded his understanding,” Amanda said. “Captain Ragnersen, you are currently under arrest for assaulting Special Agent Zevon Lowell, but a few more charges have been added to the list since we last spoke to you.”
Beau pulled his gaze away from Will. He looked Amanda up and down, his mouth twisted inside the pelt of his beard. He clearly didn’t like a woman being in charge, which to Will, was the beauty of having a woman in charge.
Amanda said, “Based on the search of your vehicle, we’ve added to your arrest warrant that you illegally altered the barrel of a weapon designed to be shot from the shoulder, which is a violation of Georgia Code Title 16. Further, the barrel was sawed off to seventeen and three-quarter inches, which is a quarter inch less than allowable under the National Firearms Act of 1934. That’s a Class 4 felony with a two-to twenty-year sentence. If you are proven to have possessed that weapon while you were involved in or abetting the commission of other felonies—kidnapping, murder, rape, robbery—that bumps your possession of the illegal weapon to a Class 2 felony with a twenty-year to life sentence. And that’s before we start layering in your Macon side business in black tar heroin and pharmaceuticals.”
Beau’s mouth kept working, but he said nothing.