Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen Page B

waste any time reading the labels. Just take it all.” Maura went into a bedroom and stripped off two pillowcases. She tossed one to Grace. “You search the dresser and nightstands. Look anyplace they might keep their pills.”
    In the bathroom, Maura scanned the contents of the medicine cabinet, tossing items into her pillowcase. She left behind the vitamins but took everything else. Laxatives. Aspirin. Hydrogen peroxide. Any one of those might be useful. She could hear Grace in the room next door, opening and slamming shut drawers.
    They moved on to the next house, their pillowcases rattling with bottles. Maura was first through the front door, stepping into a home where silence hung as heavy as gloom. She had not set foot in this house before and she paused, glancing around the living room. At yet another copy of the now familiar portrait hanging on the wall.
    “It’s that man again,” said Grace.
    “Yeah. We can’t seem to get away from him.” Maura took a few steps across the room and suddenly halted. “Grace,” she said quietly.
    “What?”
    “Take the pills back to Elaine. Arlo needs them.”
    “We haven’t looked in this house yet.”
    “I’ll do it. You just go back, okay?” She handed the girl her pillowcase of pill bottles and gave her a nudge toward the door. “Please, go now.”
    “But—”
    “Go.”
    Only after the girl had left the house did Maura cross the room. She stared at what Grace had not seen. The first thing she’d spotted was a birdcage, the dead canary lying on the bottom, just a tiny mound of yellow on the newsprint cage liner.
    She turned and focused on the floor, on what had stopped her in her tracks: A smear of brown tracked across the pine planks. Following the drag mark, she moved into the hallway and came at last to the staircase.
    There she halted, staring at a frozen puddle of blood at the bottom of the steps.
    As her gaze lifted toward the second floor, she imagined a body tumbling down those steep stairs, could almost hear the crack of a skull as it bounced down the steps and smashed onto the floor near her feet. Someone fell here, she thought.
    Or was pushed.
    B Y THE TIME she walked back into their house, Doug had already returned with their belongings from the Jeep. He unzipped Arlo’s backpack and dumped the contents onto the coffee table. She saw sinus tablets and nose spray, sunscreen and ChapStick, plus a whole drugstore’s supply of toiletries. Everything a man needed to stay well groomed, but nothing to help him stay alive. Only when Doug unzipped one of the side pockets did he find the pill bottle.
    “Valium, five milligrams. As needed for back spasms,” he read. “It’ll help him get through this.”
    “Doug,” Maura said softly. “In one of the houses, I found—” She stopped as Grace and Elaine walked in the room.
    “You found what?” Doug asked.
    “I’ll tell you later.”
    Doug spread out all the medications that they’d scavenged. “Tetracycline. Amoxicillin.” He shook his head. “If his leg gets infected, he’s going to need better antibiotics than these.”
    “At least we found some Percocet,” said Maura, uncapping the bottle. “But there’s only a dozen pills left. Do we have anything else?”
    Elaine said, “I always have some codeine in my …” She stopped, frowning at what Doug had brought back from the Jeep. “Where’s my purse?”
    “I only found one purse.” Doug pointed to it.
    “That’s Maura’s. Where’s mine?”
    “Elaine, that’s all I saw in the Jeep.”
    “Then you missed it. There’s codeine in it.”
    “I’ll go back for it later, okay?” He knelt down beside Arlo. “I’m going to give you some pills, buddy.”
    “Knock me out,” whimpered Arlo. “Can’t stand this pain.”
    “This should help.” Doug gently lifted Arlo’s head, slipped two Valiums and two Percocets into his mouth, and gave him a swallow of whiskey. “There you go. We’ll give that medicine some time to work