Before I Wake

  “I’m liking everything I see right where it is. A few more plants, a couple more table lamps, my pretty knickknacks on the shelves and photos on the wall—” She laughed. “This is really great. Thank you, Bruce. Seriously. I appreciate this more than you can know.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She sat looking at him for a moment. He’d meant to touch her heart, he had, and she’d remember that in his lasting favor every time she turned on the lights in this room and sank into this seat behind her elegant spacious desk.

  “So—” She opened the file drawer behind her desk to find it empty. “The only problem is no case files to work. Let’s fix that. You’ve got my box of Peggy Worth materials?”

  “In my office. I’ll get them after we figure out what we are ordering in for dinner.”

  “Chinese? I would love that taste right now.”

  He looked relieved she was suggesting something substantial. “Let me go make a call.”

  “I’ll find new file folders I can label as we sort out paper. I’m going to be officially an office person again.”

  Bruce laughed as he got to his feet. “I knew this was something you were going to take to like a duck takes to water.”

  She shooed him out the door to go call in their dinner order.

  * * *

  “Now this is what an office should look like.”

  Rae looked up from the papers she was sorting out to see Nathan standing in the doorway of her office. She waved him in with a grin. “I hear you were part of this magic transformation.”

  “Bruce just asked for muscles. Sillman and I took one look in the back of that truck and said, ‘You want us to do what?’”

  Rae laughed. “Well, it’s very much appreciated. That sack you’re carrying wouldn’t be what I think it is, would it?”

  “Dinner. Bruce said take a break and join us, he was buying. He just didn’t mention I’d be the one picking it up. You want to eat in here or set this up in the break room?”

  “Here, definitely. Let’s get this office officially broken in. Food is the best office-warming gift there is.”

  “You’re getting your appetite back.”

  “Doing my best to take your advice and just ignore what happened. I happen to love Chinese.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Nathan set down the sack on a discarded newspaper and went to get them plates and drinks.

  “Hey, buddy. I think she liked the furniture.”

  “Ye of little faith,” Bruce replied, laughing as he headed down the hall. “Find me something with caffeine and bring me a spoon—you know how miserable it is to eat fried rice with a fork. I’ll be with you two in a minute. A call’s come in from Chicago.”

  36

  “Talk to me, Rae.” Nathan gestured to the folders on her desk with his fork.

  She set aside the fried-rice container she was working her way through down toward the bottom. “Wouldn’t you rather have Sillman join us for this?”

  “I sent him home to get some sleep. I don’t think he’s paused since we found you at the hotel.”

  “I like that about him, the fact he wants the guy that tried for me as badly as I do.”

  “There’s a reason he’s my top guy on investigations. Bruce will be back whenever he can get off that phone call, but he’s heard most of this already, so just start somewhere. He can catch up when he shows up.”

  “If he’s talking to his Chicago cop buddies, we may see him a century from now. I noticed he piled his plate pretty high before he went to make that call.”

  “Good point.” Nathan pointed to the whiteboard she’d confiscated from the break room. “Start with the highlights about Peggy. Let’s make sure we’re not stepping past a piece of information that would make a difference in how we proceed with this case.”

  Rae found a Magic Marker from the mug of pens she had added to her desk. “It’s very simple at its core.” She used the board to track the timeline of events and began marking down dates.

  “Peggy was chasing a rumor that a new designer drug is coming on the market very soon, something with a unique delivery system. I can vouch for the unique delivery system. I never saw how I got hit with the drug. The initials EE she mentions in her notes may stand for Extra Ecstasy; that’s a guess based on a washed-out page in her notebook.

  “Peggy came to town Thursday, started asking questions, and Nella died Friday night. That remains our strongest tangible link to the cook that we have found. Nella was shut up before she could talk to a reporter, and that says she knew something, either about the cook, or where he was working.

  “Saturday night the reporter Peggy dies. We’ve found her orange-covered notebook, but not her BlackBerry. It may still be lost out on Prescott’s land, since we never got back there to finish that search.

  “Karen dies next. She’s passing through town and seems to be truly just a test of the drug. Based on how she died, it was a more refined version of the drug than what killed Peggy.

  “Saturday I found Peggy’s notebook. That same night, I somehow got taken out. The fact the notebook pages were not removed from the hotel room after I was hit—maybe it was just the fact I was out running around asking questions that was considered the threat. We know this guy is close to having his drug perfected; he just needs to keep people off his trail for maybe a couple weeks and he’s done and gone.”

  Nathan nodded. “He’s stopping the people asking a lot of questions. He’s not worried about the investigations of the deaths easily leading back to him.” He grimaced. “He knows we don’t have much of a path from the scenes back to him.”

  “The pattern in the cases will show up eventually,” Rae reassured. “It’s there. But figuring out who it is crossing all of our paths isn’t an obvious name.”

  “It’s a good summary.” Nathan studied her notes on the board. “What else do we know? Or know that we don’t know?”

  “Good distinction.” Rae thought a moment. “Three things. We don’t know where this drug is being made. We don’t know how many more tests of the drug have been done that didn’t result in a death. We don’t know if this is the same cook that was involved in the millennium rave-party deaths. Danforth’s suicide strongly suggests it might be the same guy coming back on the scene with another drug.”

  Nathan added an observation of his own. “We know from Franklin’s work that it’s likely a new class of designer drugs. The tests should have picked up on variations.”

  “Another indicator it might be the same guy. The cook had to lay low after the kids’ deaths; he’s been using that time to create something new,” Rae suggested.

  “And while that cook may not live around here, he at least has a place to work around here that probably goes back a few years.” Nathan shook his head. “I’m not hopeful we find that lab. It could still be a spot in the woods, and probably is given the sounds and smells to be covered up, but it’s tucked someplace it’s not attracting attention.”

  “A mobile home on a remote corner of a property, maybe,” Rae offered. “Someplace able to be used for a number of years in all kinds of weather. But I doubt it would be a home or an address where a postman would be delivering mail.”

  “A warehouse, hog barn, hunting cabin, abandoned house. You’ll find protected places against the weather dotting this county.”

  “He’s being careful to not get connected to his product. I think that extends to how he treats where he’s making it. He’ll try to stay a step away from being easily identified to the location.”

  “I won’t find an electric bill for the lab in his name,” Nathan said with a rueful smile.

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay. So does any of this change how we’re working this? It still says our focus here is on the timeline of your Saturday night and lots of lab tests. Tracking down Danforth’s contacts to see if we can find a patron to squeeze to get a cook’s name—that’s weeks if not months of work for the guys up north.”

  “He??
?s got to have some raw-chemical ingredients to work with and he can’t just be out buying that stuff in this town. So where is he shopping? Maybe we can work on that a bit.”

  “We can try.” Nathan studied the list she had jotted down. “We’re already doing all we can.”

  “I think so.”

  “And we’re waiting for victim five to show up.” Nathan hated that reality but knew he was stuck at that point.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. The source is still here in Justice. Somewhere. We’ve just got to find the person before he moves on.”

  He thought about it and sighed. He nodded. “Thanks, Rae. I needed to see this laid out one more time. I’m planning to head over and talk with Franklin this evening and see what he’s thinking now.” He got to his feet and started collecting food cartons. “Bruce took all the egg rolls with him?”

  “I bet he did.”

  “Then I’m taking the last of the spicy shrimp. You sure you don’t want to finish up this beef and broccoli?”

  “I’ll pass.” She dug a fortune cookie out of the sack. “Has there been any word on the union contract?”

  “Zachary thinks maybe he gets the final decision tomorrow. Corporate has been taking apart the profit numbers and asking a lot of questions but hasn’t been tipping their hand much one way or the other. If they decide to close the plant, they say that to Zachary and then lean across the table and say, ‘Sorry, we think you’ve done a great job, but your position is being eliminated and you’re being laid off too.’”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  Nathan shrugged. “Zachary has. If it weren’t for what that would mean for this town, I think he’d actually be relieved to be done with these people at this point. Anyway—maybe the final word one way or the other comes tomorrow.”

  “Can I do anything for you? Bake you cookies? Walk your dogs? Toss snowballs at you? Just generally be a distraction?”

  Nathan grinned. “I’ll be okay. I’m one of the few that knows what may be coming. I’ve been absorbing this for a few days now. I’m ready for whatever it is we get handed. But thanks for the offer. It was novel.”

  She smiled. “Anything I can do, please, Nathan, ask. I prefer to be useful.”

  “You know I will.”

  He stepped out of her office to dump the trash and find Bruce.

  * * *

  When he wanted to kill a lady, he managed to miss. He stewed about that as he measured liquid into an oversized measuring cup. He’d wanted to kill the lady but also not give them enough of the drug to test after the fact to figure out what his formulation was. He’d guessed wrong on the amount to use. That was his mistake.

  He added the liquid slowly to the kettle on the old stove, letting it mix into the warm water at a steady flow. He thought about trying again but decided he’d better pass on that idea. Three deaths and one attempt had occurred without even a close call for being discovered. A fifth might be pressing his luck.

  The formula was right. They’d tried ten more samples across other area towns without any adverse reactions, just the pleasant euphoric high promised to their willing testers. Free drugs did find willing partakers, he reflected cynically. The only open question now was how many doses over what period of time made a user fully addicted to the product. If his assumptions were correct, it was so highly addictive that three to five uses would be enough to create a craving which could be filled in no other way. The money to be made was always in the addiction.

  He looked at his watch and the date in the corner. The formula was figured out. Now he was just in a race against time to get enough prepared before his meeting with Devon to meet his backer’s expectations for enough to do an initial marketing trial. If Devon liked the feedback he got, they would be in business. The manufacturing would be small scale at first, and he’d handle that himself to ensure the quality control until the product was established on the street and the price was rising. After that—the formula itself would be worth a serious seven-figure purchase price, and Devon could own it outright. His backer was in a much better position to deal with the bulk manufacturing problems. He’d get out of this business a wealthy man, which was what he had always planned.

  He listened to the kettle begin to boil inside and turned down the heat to no more than steam the core ingredients together. He turned to begin work on the second-stage powder.

  He saw the kid working on the packaging reach for a brown bottle. “No! Not that one. The flask of yellow liquid next to it.” The forming agent wasn’t particularly dangerous unless you dumped in a flask with some hydrochloric acid, and then the angels took over and you got to explain why your body was in bits and pieces. “Why don’t you just not touch anything.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. You also said you’d had some chemistry courses.”

  “If you had some of this labeled or in proper containers . . .” The young man let his words fade away.

  How his partners had thought bringing in this kid to help with the packaging would be a help rather than a hindrance, he did not know. The extra hands out here were needed, and he understood why his partners were not free to help tonight given the alibis they had to maintain—but still, this was an unworkable reality. The kid might be their meth production helper, but it wasn’t the same as doing this kind of work.

  He turned down the burner heat under the ten gallon soup pot. “Come over here and take this pot, set it outside in the snow to cool down.”

  The young man picked up pot pads and carried the smelly pot outside.

  He moved to the dried powder bench and began the laborious job of adding the suspension liquid so the drug would have enough volume it could be measured into controllable doses as it was formed.

  By the time he measured components, heated them together, cooled it, dried it, pounded it to powder, and then resuspended the product in its suspension medium to be able to measure it into the final product, this job became so laborious that there was a reason few cooks could be found willing to do the work.

  The young man didn’t return.

  When shouts for him didn’t get an answer, he angrily tugged off his gloves and face mask and went toward the cabin door. The kid wasn’t going to try to walk miles home from here. He was probably out there pouting.

  The young man had walked out of the cabin with the pot, managed to take about eight steps, collapsed to one knee and set down the pot, and then went down hard.

  It chilled him for a moment to see the way the kid had just fallen, but then the anger came. Touching the body would just leave more evidence to find. He picked up the cooling pot, thankful it hadn’t tipped, and he moved it to a thicker snow drift to keep cooling.

  The list of bad breaks on this job just kept growing. He’d told the kid to wear a mask for a reason.

  He had enough components cooked that he could do the final forming and wrapping at his home. There was more than enough counter space there, and quiet. But he’d have to rush it, get the packaging done, and get himself out of this county entirely in twenty-four hours. Devon would understand the need for setting up at another location; as good as this one was, it had still lasted years longer than most labs ever had.

  He stepped around the body and ignored the melting snow around it. He went back to finish his work for the night.

  He could blow up the cabin easily enough, but that would just make its existence easier to discover, and there was no need to attract the attention. It would likely be days before the kid was reported missing and many more after that before someone happened onto this place. He’d be long gone by then. Long gone.

  By the time the kettle was ready to pour he had his plans made for the night. The notebooks were outdated, and most of the chemicals stored here were unused since the millennium disaster. His prints were nowhere to be found for he never came here without gloves. If his partners’ prints were around to find—well, someone had to be connected to this place or the c
ops would keep looking. Their carelessness wasn’t his concern.

  If they were caught—they knew well what would happen if they tried to exchange his name for a lesser deal with authorities. Devon would deal with that for him.

  The cops would eventually match him to be Nella’s guest, for he hadn’t tried to remove the fact he had been at her home, but his alibi for the time of her death would withstand the scrutiny. He worried about his move away from the town being the red flag that gave him away as the man they hunted, but he’d been setting down markers for his departure for long enough now; he thought it would be accepted as the natural course of things.

  He finished his work for the night. He loaded his truck. He took the cooled pot with him on the last trip. It felt odd carrying a pot of powder that would translate into more money than he had ever seen in his life. He’d been dreaming about this payday for years.

  He started his truck and kicked up the heater. He studied the cabin in the light cast by the truck headlights. It looked like less now than when he had first seen it years before. But it still felt a bit sad parting with what he had built here. A season of his life was ending this next week.

  He backed out on the long narrow road and headed home.

  37

  “You can’t play music aimed at the tile plant at that decibel, even as free speech,” Nathan stressed for the third time Thursday morning, trying to make his point to the grandson of Mark Yates. Families of the union members were on the strike line today, and the teenagers were getting creative.

  “This is arbitrary harassment,” the teen protested. “So I can’t play it at twelve, then I’ll play it at seven.”

  Nathan put his hand on the volume control. “You’ll play it at three, if you play it at all.” He had never felt less like a diplomat than he did today. “Give it a rest, Greg. You’ve made your point. As interesting a protest as this is, they can’t even hear it inside the tile plant when the mixers are running.”

  More strikebreakers had been sent in today. The tile-plant guys were getting a few trucks in and out of the back gate, hauling finished shipments. Product was being made today, and product was being shipped. It was taking Nathan sixteen officers just to keep the two sides separated so the trucks were able to go out without slashed tires or smashed windows. He didn’t need this noise adding to the stress.