Page 110 of Tasting Fire
“The teenager who was swatted is now dead.”
He shook his head. “Emerson, I don’t know what’s happening in your life, but whether you believe me or not, I did care for you,” he said. “I’m not the person you’re looking for, but perhaps you’ve made someone very angry, someone willing to hurt others to get to you.”
As they drove back to Steele Ridge, Cash let everything that had happened today steep in his brain.
The only thing Emmy said after they left the hospital was, “Max sent me the updated lab report. I don’t want to wait until we get home to look over it.” She spent the remainder of the drive hunched over the little screen, eyes scanning and fingers tapping. Cash glanced over from time to time only to watch her expression become tighter and tighter. “What? Did you find something?”
Emmy leaned her head onto the truck’s seat back. “We need to take this to Maggie.”
“Emmy, what’s in that report?”
“Please call your sister and let her know we’re coming to talk with her.”
Rather than go into the sheriff’s office, Cash called and asked Maggie to meet them back at his place. Maybe some food and a beer would mellow her out enough so that she wouldn’t bury his body in his own backyard for keeping secrets from her.
Ended up, Maggie was more than happy to knock back his beer, but that didn’t keep her from glaring at him with a look that could dismember a man when he told her that he and Emmy had been following leads.
“You’re telling me that you’ve been withholding information and evidence? Dammit, Cash. Maybe I’m a little more laidback now that Jay and I are together. But you damn well better not forget that I’m still the sheriff of this county and—”
“We don’t even know exactly what the crimes are or how they hang together. But we do know Amory was behind a lawsuit against Emmy.”
“Your ex?” Maggie demanded, putting Emmy in her crosshairs.
“Yes.”
Regardless of Maggie’s newly revived love life with a pro football player, she could still jump on a good rant, so Cash tried to take the heat. “And we visited the kid who swatted Jesse Giddings.”
“What? You found the person responsible? How did you… Jonah. Or Micki.”
“I’m not confessing which. That way you can’t be mad at either of them. I’ll give you the kid’s name and address so you can follow up.”
Maggie grunted her lack of satisfaction.
“I don’t know how the swatting plays in, exactly,” Emmy said as she stared at her beer instead of sipping it. “But I have some information that does point in a particular direction.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “It was the damn lab report, wasn’t it?”
“What lab report?” Maggie asked.
“I asked Max Causewell to run a tox screen and some other tests on Jesse Giddings postmortem. Initially, nothing looked unusual.” Emmy said. “But when we confronted Oliver today… I don’t know. At first, I was convinced he wasn’t capable of this type of violence.”
“What type of violence?” Maggie’s voice was getting louder with each question.
Although Cash wanted to shout at Emmy, too, he tried to soothe his sister. “Let Emmy get through this.”
“Thanks, Cash.” Emmy took a big breath. “I studied the new report Max sent me. In his e-mail, he mentioned that the metabolites looked slightly off.”
“Metabolites?” Maggie asked.
“The easiest way to think of them is how a drug breaks down because of human metabolism. Jesse Giddings had paralytic metabolites in his blood.”
“That wouldn’t be unusual post-surgery,” Cash said.
“But metabolites from two different paralytics would be.”
Was this what she’d been so busy studying on their way here?
“I’m not sure I understand,” Maggie said.
