“Do you have any police friends in Washington? Anyone you trust?” I said when Marino rang me back.
“1 know a couple of guys. Why?”
“It’s very important I talk to Abby Turnbull. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to call her.”
“Not unless you want to take the risk of someone knowing about it.”
“Exactly.”
“You ask me,” he added, “it’s not a good idea for you to talk to her anyway.”
“I understand your point of view. But that doesn’t change my mind, Marino. Could you contact one of your friends up there and send him to her apartment, have him see if he can locate her?”
“I think you’re making a mistake. But yeah. I’ll take care of it.”
“Just have him tell her I need to talk to her. I want her to contact me immediately.”
I gave Marino her address.
By this time, the copies of the Yellow Pages I was interested in had come off the fax machine down the hall and Rose placed them on my desk. For the rest of the afternoon, I called every pharmacy that Jill Harrington might have patronized in Williamsburg. I finally located one that had her listed in their records.
“Was she a regular customer?” I asked the pharmacist.
“Sure was. Elizabeth Mott was, too. Both of them didn’t live too far from here, in an apartment complex: just down the road. Nice young women, never will forget how shocked I was.”
“Did they live together?”
“Let me see.”
A pause. “Wouldn’t appear so. Different addresses and phone numbers, but the same apartment complex. Old Towne, about two miles away. Nice enough place. A lot of young people, William and Mary students out there.”
He went on to give me Jill’s medication history. Over a period of three years, Jill had brought in prescriptions for various antibiotics, cough suppressants, and other medications associated with the mundane flu bugs and respiratory or urinary tract infections that commonly, afflict the hoi polloi. As recently as a month before her murder, she had been in to fill a prescription for Septra, which she apparently was no longer on when she died, since trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole were not detected in her blood.
“Did you ever dispense Librax to her?”
I asked.
I waited while he looked.
“No, ma’am. No record of that.”
Perhaps the prescription was Elizabeth’s, I considered “What about her friend Elizabeth Mott?”
I asked the pharmacist. “Did she ever come in with a prescription for Librax?”
“No.”
“Was there any other pharmacy either woman patronized that you’re aware of?”
“Afraid I can’t help you on that one. Got no idea.”
He gave me the names of other pharmacies close by. I had already called most of them, and calls to the rest confirmed neither woman had brought in a prescription for Librax or any other drug. The Librax itself wasn’t necessarily important, I reasoned. But the mystery of who had prescribed it and why bothered me considerably.
12
Abby Turnbull had been a crime reporter in Richmond when Elizabeth Mott and Jill Harrington were murdered. I was willing to bet that Abby not only remembered the cases, but probably knew more about them than Captain Montana did.
The next morning she called from a pay phone and left a number where she told Rose she would wait for fifteen minutes. Abby insisted that I call her back from a “safe place.”
“Is everything all right?” Rose asked quietly as I peeled off my surgical gloves.
“God only knows,” I said, untying my gown.
The nearest “safe place” I could think of was a pay phone outside the cafeteria in my building. Breathless and somewhat frantic to meet Abby’s deadline, I dialed the number my secretary had given me.
“What’s going on? ” Abby asked immediately. “Some Metro cop came by my apartment, said you’d sent him.”
“That’s correct,” I reassured her. “Based on what you’ve told me, I didn’t think it a good idea to call you at home. Are you all right?”
“Is that why you wanted me to call?”
She sounded disappointed.
“One of the reasons. We need to talk.”
There was a long silence on the line.