Harlan Coben - Hold Tight

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 entre- preneurial-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?”

“Sure,” Mike said. “You think this is what Rosemary McDevitt is doing at Club Jaguar. She has this nightclub and all these underage kids go to it legally. It makes sense, on one level.”

“And on another level?”

“A woman whose own brother died of a drug overdose pushing pills?”

LeCrue smiled at that one. “She told you that little sob story, did she? About her brother who didn’t have an outlet so he partied too hard and died?”

“It’s not true?”

“Total fiction, far as we can tell. She claims that she’s from a place called Breman, Indiana, but we’ve checked the books. No case like the one she describes happened anywhere near there.”

Mike said nothing.

Scott Duncan looked up from his note taking. “She’s smoking hot though.”

“Oh, no doubt,” LeCrue agreed. “A fine first-class honey.”

“A man can get stupid with a woman who looks like that.”

“Sure can, Scott. That’s her MO too. Gets a sexual hold on a guy. Not that I’d mind being that guy for a little while, you know what I’m saying, Doc?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“You gay?”

Mike tried not to roll his eyes. “Yes, fine, I’m gay. Can we move on with this?”

“She uses men, Doc. Not just the dumb kids. Smarter men. Older men.”

He stopped and waited. Mike looked at Duncan and then back at LeCrue. “Is this the part where I gasp and suddenly realize that you’re talking about me?”

“Now why would we think something like that?”

“I assume you’re about to say.”

“I mean, after all”-LeCrue spread his hands like a first-year drama major-“you just said you never even met her until today. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“And we totally believe you. So let me ask you something else. How’s work? I mean, at the hospital.”

Mike sighed. “Let’s pretend I’m thrown by your sudden change in subjects. Look, I don’t know what you think I’ve done. I assume it has something to do with this Club Jaguar, not because I did something but because you’d have to be a moron to not realize it. Normally, again, I would wait for my lawyer or at least my wife, the lawyer, to show up. But as I’ve repeated several times, my son is missing. So let’s cut the nonsense. Tell me what you need to know so I can get back to finding him.”