There were no drawers in the desk and the wastebasket was empty. In Spalding’s private bathroom, Ellie found some personal toiletries in a travel kit and another empty wastebasket, but no prescription bottle.
“Was anyone here when Mr. Spalding returned to his office from his business trip?” she asked the lawyer.
“I doubt it,” the lawyer said. “We were closed for the weekend.”
“Where does he park his car?”
“In the underground garage,” the lawyer said. “But when he travels on business, he leaves his car at our hotel here and takes the VIP limo to the airport.”
Ellie thanked the lawyer for his cooperation, went back to the garage, found Spalding’s reserved parking space, and searched the area. There was the usual accumulation of trash under and around the nearby cars, but no prescription bottle.
She drove to the hotel and spoke to a bell captain, who called inside for the limo driver. An older, skinny man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and black tie hurried out the lobby doors.
“Did you pick up Mr. Spalding at the airport last weekend?” Ellie asked.
The man nodded. “Yes.”
“Did he leave anything behind in the limo?”
“Yes, he left an empty prescription bottle on the backseat. It had refill information on the label, so I kept it in case he needed it.”
Ellie broke into a big smile. “Where’s the bottle?”
Ramona Pino wanted her next case to be a cake-walk. Maybe a gang member who popped a round into somebody’s ear in front of ten witnesses, or a body dump case with enough physical evidence at the crime scene to lead her right to the perp, drinking a beer and watching the tube at home, just waiting to be arrested. Even a good old-fashioned domestic disturbance that had escalated into a murder of passion would be a welcome change of pace.
Santa Fe averaged only two homicides annually, but last year had been a real bitch, in terms of numbers and complexity. A lone, smart killer with a bad attitude had chalked up seven victims. One of them, the perp’s mother, had been killed years ago and buried under some backyard shrubbery. The rest were all fresh kills done within a matter of days. The perp had been stopped just short of adding Chief Kerney, his wife, and their newborn son to his tally.
Since Spalding had died in California, Ramona wondered if the case even technically qualified as a local homicide. Maybe an argument could be made that murder was committed the instant Spalding’s medication had been switched. That made it a slow kill, Ramona thought.
With a new search warrant in hand and three detectives to assist her, Ramona walked into Dean’s pharmacy to find Tilly Gilmore, the clerk, and a pharmacist talking in low voices behind the counter. The pharmacist wore a name tag on his white smock that read GRADY BALDRIDGE.
She showed them the warrant and explained what the detectives were about to do.
“Where is Kim?” Baldridge asked. “He should be here for this.”
“I wish he was here,” Ramona said as she motioned to the officers to get started. Matt Chacon steered Tilly to a back office, while the other two men began looking through the filing cabinet and desk behind the pharmacy counter.
“Do you work for him full-time?” she asked Baldridge.
He shook his head and the folds below his chin jiggled. Ramona put him in his late sixties. The smock he wore bulged at his hefty waistline. His pasty skin almost perfectly matched his gray hair.
“No,” Baldridge said. “I’m basically retired. Kim uses me as his relief pharmacist. This is the last day I can be here for three weeks. The wife and I are leaving tomorrow on vacation.”
“Were you supposed to work yesterday?” Ramona asked.
“No, Kim called me at home early in the morning and asked me to come in.”
“Did he say why?”
“Just that he needed coverage,” Baldridge replied.
“Was that unusual?”
“I’d say so,” Baldridge said. “In fact, Tilly and I were just talking about it. He’s only called me to come in on short notice before when he’s been sick. We don’t know what to do if he doesn’t come back tomorrow, except refer his customers to other pharmacies. I only came in today because people were waiting to have their prescriptions filled.”
“What a nice thing to do before your vacation,” Ramona said. Baldridge smiled at the compliment.
“Do you know Dean’s customers well?” she asked.
“Most of them. I’ve filled in here for the past five years.”
“How about Claudia Spalding?” Ramona asked.
“Oh yes, she has several current prescriptions on file.”
“For what?”
“Unless your warrant specifically permits you to gather prescription information about our customers, I can’t tell you that.”
“It does,” Ramona said, showing Baldridge the appropriate paragraph in the search warrant.
“I’d have to look it up,” Baldridge said.
“Please do,” Ramona replied.
Baldridge spent a few minutes at a computer, then returned and rattled off Claudia Spalding’s current prescription information. Ramona had him translate it into language she could understand. Baldridge told her one script was for a mild muscle relaxant and the other was for a narcotic painkiller. She asked Baldridge to pull the hard copies, and while he went off to do so, she called the doctor who’d prescribed the medications and asked him to verify the information.
“The muscle relaxant, yes,” the doctor said. “But I never gave her any painkillers.”
“What did she need the muscle relaxant for?” Ramona asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that, Sergeant.”
“If you talk around the subject a little bit, Doctor,” Ramona said, “I might not have to pay you a visit.”
“Do you ride horses, Sergeant?”
“Not since I was a little kid,” Ramona replied.
“Let’s say you did, and you took a bad fall from a horse and strained the muscles in your back. Not severely, but enough to cause discomfort. The muscle relaxant, in a very low dosage, provides relief.”
“That helps,” Ramona said. “What about the narcotic painkiller?”
“It had to be forged,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Spalding has no medical condition I’m aware of that requires it.”
“Your records confirm that?”
“Absolutely,” the doctor said before hanging up.
Baldridge hovered next to her with the hard copy scripts in hand. Both looked real, but who better to forge a doctor ’s prescription than a pharmacist?
“Tell me about this painkiller,” Ramona asked.
“It’s hydrocodone acetaminophen, a Class III controlled substance,” Baldridge said, “which means it doesn’t have to be as strictly inventoried and accounted for as Class II drugs under federal regulations.”
“How is it accounted for?” Ramona asked.
“We do an annual report and give an estimate of how much was dispensed and what’s on hand. It doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate.”
“Would the painkiller give the user a high? Make them nod out?”
“It’s a downer, so I’d imagine so,” Baldridge said. “In normal dosages, other than relieving pain, it tends to cause drowsiness, dull the senses, and flatten the affect.”
“Can you find out how many other people have had this medicine dispensed to them at this pharmacy?”
“Easily,” Baldridge said, returning to the computer. He came back with the names of twelve individuals, all with scripts written by Claudia Spalding’s doctor.
“Did you fill any of these?” Ramona asked.
Baldridge shook his head and pointed to a line on one of the scripts. “Each prescription must be numbered and initialed by the pharmacist who filled it. All of these were filled by Kim.”
“What about phone-in prescriptions?”
“That’s in a different computer file,” he said, stepping back to the monitor. He printed out another ten names of persons receiving the medication, all supposedly phoned in from the same doctor who’d treated Claudia Spalding.