Chapter 8
CRIME SCENE NUMBERTwo.
At least that was how Decker had designated it in his mind.
It had been an auto repair facility. An unexpected place for a murder. But then again, most everything about a murder was unexpected.
He and Lassiter climbed out of her car, a pale blue four-door Prius with limited legroom,at least for someone as tall as Decker. It was her personal ride. The department didn’t have money in the budget for cars for their detectives, she’d told him on the drive over.
Decker said, “FYI, I saw at least six drug deals going down on the way here.”
“Seven,” replied Lassiter. “You might have missed the soccer mom with the little girl in the rear seat. Mom was gettingher pop from the dude at the last traffic light before she dropped her kid off at daycare.”
“And you drove right past?” said Decker.
“If I stopped every drug deal I saw, I wouldn’t have the time to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom. I happen to know the woman. She won’t take the pop now. She’ll do it later, at home, when her hubby is there. He’ll take care of her and the girl.”
“What’s the drug of choice around here?”
“Used to be OxyContin and then fentanyl. Now it’s heroin even though fentanyl is far more potent.”
“Must be impacting your crime rate.”
“People burglarize their neighbor’s house so they can sell the stuff for cash to service their addiction. Or a son embezzles his mom’s bank account to do the same. Or a granny stealsfrom her granddaughter’s piggy bank. It’s seriously demented stuff and happens every day.”
“And heroin is popular because you get a gram of it for about fifty bucks and it’ll last you a lot longer than fentanyl, or OxyContin, which runs about, what, eighty bucks a pill on the street?”
“Hell, you don’t have to buy it on the street anymore. They’ll deliver it right to your house,like pizza. Or they get it from pharmacies or the local Boy Scout troop leader. Or it comes down one of the drug pipelines around here. They crush and snort it, inject it. They even chew on fentanyl patches instead of putting them on their skin to get the pop.”
“Maybe that mark on the dead guy was a fentanyl patch.”
She nodded. “Could be. Our OD rate is up nearly seventy percentfrom last year. And the last ten cases we’ve investigated have been people over sixty-five. Some people call it ‘Rust Belt Retirement.’”
“I left being a cop in Ohio before the opioid crisis really got going. But even back then we started calling it the zombie apocalypse.”
“It’s why we all carry Narcan with us.”
“To resuscitate an OD?”
Lassiter nodded. “Andthe city enacted Good Samaritan laws, so you won’t get in trouble if you report an overdose, even if you might be doing drugs as well. The woman we passed? Her husband keeps a Narcan kit at home. Rehab place in town started to give them out. Some say it’s enabling. I say until we get this figured out, it’s better to keep people alive. We got an army of addicts and a twenty-bed rehab center. Tellme how that makes sense. I think the town’s just sick of it. They don’t want to spend tax dollars they don’t have on people they don’t think give a damn. They hear methadone treatment center and think it’s what meth addicts take to get their high and not the drug used to treat that addiction. They don’t want ‘these’ people around them, not coming to grips with the fact that ‘these’ people are oftenmembers of their families. So some say let ’em die and good riddance.”
“But not you?”
“It’s hit pretty close to home with me, Decker. So, no, I don’t say good riddance to a human being.”
“Your family?” he asked.
“Not going there,” she replied curtly.
As they reached the door of the repair facility, Decker said, “I take it since Mrs. Martin taughtyou in Sunday school that you grew up here?”
“I did. Though I went to college in Philly. Criminal justice degree at Temple. Then I came back here, joined the force, was a street cop for four years, passed my exams, became a sergeant, and then moved up to detective.”
“Pretty fast-track for you.”
“I worked my ass off for it.”
“I’m sure you did, more than theguys had to.”