Hold Tight
Mike tried to keep the exasperation from his voice. “That’s right. Look, Agent LeCrue, is there any way we can rush this? My son is missing. I’m worried about him.”
“Of course you are. So let’s move right along, shall we? What about Rosemary McDevitt, the president and founder of Club Jaguar?”
“What about her?”
“When was the first time you two met?”
“Today.”
LeCrue turned to Duncan. “You buy that, Scott?”
Scott Duncan lifted his hand, palm down, tilted it back and forth.
“I’m having trouble with that one too.”
“Please listen to me,” Mike said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice. “I need to get out of here and find my son.”
“You don’t trust law enforcement?”
“I trust them. I just don’t think they see my son as a priority.”
“Fair enough. Let me ask you this. Do you know what a pharm party is? The pharm is spelled with a p-h, not an f.”
Mike thought about it. “The term is not completely unfamiliar, but I can’t place it.”
“Maybe I can help, Dr. Baye. You’re a medical doctor, isn’t that correct?”
“It is.”
“So calling you doctor is cool. I hate calling every dumb ass with a diploma ‘doctor’—Ph.D.s or chiropractors or the guy who helps me get my contact lenses at Pearle Express. You know what I mean?”
Mike tried to get him back on track. “You asked me about pharm parties?”
“Yeah, that’s right. And you’re in a rush and all and I’m just blathering away. So let me get to it. You’re a medical doctor so you understand about the ridiculous costs of pharmaceuticals, right?”
“I do.”
“So let me tell you what a pharm party is. Put simply, teens go into their parents’ medicine cabinet and steal their drugs. Nowadays every family has some prescriptions lying about—Vicodin, Adderall, Ritalin, Xanax, Prozac, OxyContin, Percocet, Demerol, Valium, you get the point. So what the teens do is, they steal them and get together and put them in a bowl or make a trail mix or whatever. That’s the candy dish. Then they get high.”
LeCrue stopped. For the first time he grabbed a chair, turned it backward, and sat with his legs straddling the back. He looked hard at Mike. Mike did not blink.
After some time passed, Mike said, “So now I know what a pharm party is.”
“Now you do. So anyway, that’s how it starts. A bunch of kids get together and figure, hey, these drugs are legal—not like dope or cocaine. Maybe little brother takes the Ritalin because he’s overactive. Dad takes OxyContin to relieve the pain from his knee operation. Whatever. They gotta be pretty safe.”
“I get it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see how easy it would be? Do you have any prescription drugs lying around at home?”
Mike thought about his own knee, the prescription for Percocet, how he worked hard so he didn’t take too many of them. They were indeed in his medicine chest. Would he even notice if a few went missing? And how about parents who didn’t know anything about the drugs? Would they be wary of a few missing pills?
“Like you said, all households have them.”
“Right, so stay with me a minute. You know the value of the pills. You know these parties are going on. So let’s say you’re something of an entrepreneur. What do you do? You take it to the next level. You try to turn a profit. Let’s say you’re the house and getting a cut of the profits. Maybe you encourage the kids to steal more of the drugs from their medicine cabinets. You can even get replacement pills.”
“Replacement pills?”
“Sure. If the pills are white, well, you just put in some generic aspirin. Who is going to notice? You can get sugar pills that basically do nothing other than look like other pills. You see? Who’d notice? There’s a huge black market for prescribed medications. You can make a mint. But again, think like an entrepreneur. You don’t want some small-ass party with eight kids. You want big. You want to attract hundreds if not thousands. Like you might in, say, a nightclub.”
Mike was getting it now. “You think that’s what Club Jaguar is doing.”
Mike suddenly remembered that Spencer Hill had committed suicide using medications from his home. That was the rumor anyway. He stole drugs from his parent’s medicine cabinet to overdose.
LeCrue nodded, continued, “You could—if you were really entrepreneurial —take it to another level. All drugs have value on the black market. Maybe there’s that old Amoxicillin that you never finished up. Or your grandpa has some extra Viagra in the house. No one keeps track, do they, Doc?”
“Rarely.”
“Right, and if some are missing or whatever, well, you chalk it up to the pharmacy ripping you off or you forgot the date or maybe you took an extra one. There is almost no way you trace it back to your teenager stealing them. Do you see how brilliant it is?”
Mike wanted to ask what this had to do with him or Adam, but he knew better.
LeCrue leaned in closer and whispered, “Hey, Doc?”
Mike waited.
“Do you know what the next step up that entrepreneurial ladder would be?”
“LeCrue?” It was Duncan.
LeCrue looked behind him. “What’s up, Scott?”
“You like that word. Entrepreneurial.”
“I do at that.” He turned back to Mike. “You like that word, Doc?”
“It’s great.”
LeCrue chuckled as if they were old friends. “Anyway, a smart entrepreneurial kid can figure out ways of getting even more drugs from his house. How? He calls in the refills early maybe. If both parents work and you got a delivery service, you are home from school before them. And if the parent tries to refill and gets stopped, well, again, they figure it’s an error or they lost count. See, once you start down this road, there are just so many ways you can make a beautiful dollar. It is almost foolproof.”
The obvious question echoed in Mike’s head: Could Adam have done something like that?
“Who would we bust anyway? Think about it. You have a bunch of rich, underage kids—all of whom can afford the best lawyers—who have done what exactly? Taken legally prescribed drugs from their family homes. Who cares? Do you see again how easy this money is?”
“I guess.”
“You guess, Dr. Baye? Come on, let’s not play games here. You don’t guess. You know. It is nearly flawless. Now normally you know how we’d operate. We don’t want to bust a bunch of dumb teens getting high. We want the big fish. But if the big fish here was smart, she—let’s make her a she, so we aren’t accused of sexism, okay?—she would let the underage kids handle the drugs for her. Dumb goth kids who’d have to move up a step on the food chain to be called losers, maybe. They’d feel important and if she was a grade-A-felony hottie, she could probably get them to do whatever she wanted, you know what I’m saying?”