and shanty as she made it over the hill, and she spotted a makeshift carport covered in brush. If Val had parked here, she’d probably hidden the car beneath those limbs. Her tires chugged over the muddy ground, gravel spewing as she parked to the side of the house. She tugged her jacket on, then climbed out. Using the flashlight on her phone, she crept toward the carport.
Twigs snapped beneath her boots, and the wind hurled leaves around her. She pulled a branch aside and found an old rusted pickup. She was just about to turn and go to the house when a sound behind her made her freeze.
“Val?”
“Run, Peyton, run!”
Suddenly she felt the point of something sharp and hard in her back. A gun. Then another voice, menacing and cold.
“You should have kept your mouth shut. Now you both have to die.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The old building looked vacant. Liam and Jacob approached slowly, guns drawn in anticipation that they were about to stumble on trouble. They divided up, Liam going right and Jacob inching around the left of the building so they could see through the windows.
The windowpane was broken, so Liam hoisted himself up and peered inside. Nothing. Just an empty room.
Jacob strode toward him, boots crunching gravel. “Appears to be vacant.”
“Let’s search it.” Liam strode to the back door, found it unlocked and went inside. As they entered, they did a quick walk-though. The building consisted of a front room, four smaller rooms, and another room in the back.
“I’ll take the front room. It was probably the reception area,” Jacob offered.
“I’ll start in the back, in what must have been the doc’s office.” Jacob’s boots clicked on the tile floors as he walked through the hall, and Liam yanked on gloves, then checked the desk against the wall. Except for a few pushpins and paper clips, the drawers were empty. He looked in the file cabinet, but it had been cleaned out, as well.
A piece of paper on the floor behind the desk caught his eye, and he stooped to pick it up. A phone number was scribbled on the sticky note. He pulled out his phone and called the number, but received a recording saying the number was no longer in service.
Satisfied nothing else was in the office, he moved to one of the four exam rooms. The counter along the wall that had probably held medical supplies was bare, so he checked the cabinet. A few sterile wipes. Nothing else.
Dammit.
He moved to the second room but found nothing helpful in it either. In room three, he searched the drawers. Inside the bottom one, he spotted a prescription pad stuck in the corner. He tugged it free.
Jacob was exiting the fourth exam room. “Did you find anything?”
Liam showed him the pad.
“That’s the name of the prescriber on one of Gloria Inman’s prescription bottles.”
“So she was getting her pills from a pill mill,” Liam said. “But why kill her?”
“Maybe she planned to expose the operation,” Jacob suggested.
That was a possibility.
Liam’s phone buzzed. Bennett. “You asked me to dig more into Director Jameson,” Bennett said. “I may have found something.”
“What?”
“Your instincts were right. Edna Fouts, Lydia Corgin and Hilda Rogers all signed over their life insurance policies in exchange for medical care.”
“Signed over to whom?”
“The money went into an account under the name of Benjamin Richards,” Bennett said. “One contact said he paid for free care for the patients and only took the policies to pay him back, that he did it out of the goodness of his heart.”
Liam cursed. Out of the goodness of his heart? The damn bastard was taking advantage of residents/patients because they had no family and was scamming the seniors out of their insurance policies.
“Did you locate this Benjamin Richards?” Liam asked.
“I did. His real name is Richard Jameson.”
Liam’s blood turned cold. “The director of Golden Gardens.”
“He was at Whistler the night Gloria Inman died, and the night of the fire,” Bennett said. “He gave Peyton her job. And now Leon Brittles died under his watch, and Mrs. Weiss is fighting for her life.” Liam snapped his fingers. “Get me a warrant for his arrest. This bastard is not going to get away with hurting anyone else.”
* * *
PEYTON FROZE, the gun stabbing in her back. The voice... Oh, God, she recognized it.
Joanna. Her coworker. Her friend.
You can’t trust anyone there, Val had said. But Peyton had never considered the fact that her closest friend would harm her or her mother.
“Move,” Joanna ordered. “Inside