“You holding a grudge against Dr. Trenton?”
“I’ve never met him. I didn’t even know his name until you told me.”
“You picked his office at random?”
She didn’t answer.
“You were just cruising through that one-horse town, spotted his office, and decided to bust the lock on the back door and help yourself to some medical supplies?”
She remained silent.
Knight leaned forward. “Emory, let’s cut this BS. Excuse the French. Why’d you break into that doctor’s office and take—” Grange stepped forward and extended him a sheet of paper he withdrew from the manila envelope. Knight shoved on his reading glasses. Reading aloud, he itemized the things she had collected into a plastic trash can liner for easier toting, which had been her accomplice’s idea.
When he finished, she said, “Plus a box of latex gloves.”
Knight shook the paper in his hand. “Why’d you take these things that you could’ve gotten from your own office?”
“I was more than a hundred miles away from my office.”
“And you needed this stuff right that minute?”
She said nothing.
“Did you need these things to treat a patient?”
Again, she remained silent.
“Yourself? Were you treating yourself? Don’t look at me like I’m loco. Did you need these items for yourself?”
“No.”
He sat back, took a moment. “Okay. The man with the flashlight, he called you Doc, suggesting some level of familiarity. Is he the man from the cabin, who took good care of you but whose name has escaped your recollection?”
“It hasn’t escaped my recollection. I don’t know it.”
“He was your partner in crime, and you don’t know his name?”
Without admitting to the commission of a crime, she said, “I don’t know his name.”
Knight and Grange looked at each other. Grange raised his eyebrows expressively. Knight glanced toward the door, then, lowering his voice, asked, “Emory, is he a boyfriend you met up here for the weekend?”
“A boyfriend?” It was a laughable term when applied to him. “No. I’d never seen him before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I regained consciousness inside his cabin.”
Still speaking in a hushed voice, Knight said, “We don’t want to cause a rift between you and Jeff. Y’all will have to sort out the marriage angle on your own. But you need to tell us who this burglar is.”
She looked at each of them in turn. “If you want his name from me, you had just as well save your breath and put me in jail now. I don’t know who he is.”
Knight released a long sigh. “Technically you committed a Class H felony, which, if convicted, is punishable by several years in prison. However, in North Carolina we have structured sentencing, and we use a point system to rank a crime, taking into account the severity of it, the perp’s motive, and previous criminal history.”
“I’m not sure what—”
“What that means is,” he said, cutting her off, “nobody wants to lock you up. This was no crash and grab. There was a bank envelope with a couple hundred dollars of petty cash in the office manager’s desk. It’s still there.
“A locked cabinet containing painkillers, uppers, and downers, which would have sold on the street for a bundle, was left untouched. Well, not untouched, exactly. The lock on it was broken, but nothing was taken except for two weeks’ supply of antibiotics, which, I’m told, in Europe you can buy at the CVS or whatever.”
He let all that sink in before continuing. “Dr. Trenton said it looked to him like the missing articles had been shopped for, so to speak, by a professional. A medical professional, not a professional thief. He said the only things taken were what would be needed for a procedure. Say, the termination of a pregnancy.”
He’d been cataloging her reactions, and when she cast her eyes down she cursed herself for being so transparent.
Knight sat forward again, all earnestness and compassion now. “Did that man force you to steal that stuff and get rid of a problem for him?”
She said nothing.
“Emory?”
She refused to respond.
As though receiving a silent signal from Knight, Grange pulled out a chair and sat down with them at the table. He had lived up to Jeff’s description as the “bad cop.” She prepared herself for some arm-twisting.
He said, “Sam and I don’t believe you got it into your head to commit a B and E and steal some country doctor’s plastic gloves. Dollarwise, the medical equipment stolen didn’t add up to much. If Dr. Trenton is reimbursed for it, I doubt he’d want to see an esteemed colleague like you charged, much less tried. Granted, the medications that were stolen are controlled substances, but somebody could get a lot higher on a bottle of NyQuil.”
He paused. “Sam and I think you were forced or coerced into committing that burglary. What we don’t get is why you’re protecting him, the guy we can’t see. The guy with the raspy voice. Who is he, Dr. Charbonneau?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know.”
“Well, we may be able to help with that.”
Surprised by that statement, she watched Grange remove a map from the manila envelope. He spread it open. It was a duplicate of the map she’d used to chart her run on that otherwise innocuous Saturday when, without any foretelling, her life had turned upside down. If the last five minutes were any indication of things to come, it appeared likely that her life would never be right side up again.
Someone had drawn a star in red ink on the map. Grange put the tip of his index finger on it. “This is the parking lot where you left your car. Your starting point, right?”
She nodded.
“The Chevron station where you were dropped off yesterday is here at this crossroads.” He pointed it out to her. “And here’s the town where Trenton’s office is.”
“What we did,” Knight said, “was sorta connect those dots to form a circle. Then we started checking arrest records, looking for anybody with priors who lives within that circle or close enough.”
Grange said, “Several names popped up.”
She held her breath.
“One was a guy who is currently serving time for armed robbery,” Grange said. “Another’s wife killed him eight months ago, so he’s not our man. But we got several other names.” Knight smiled at her. “And one in particular looks real good to us.”