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“Okay…” I push the fall board up to reveal perfect ivory beneath. “He was a boring nobody. But now you’ve found others?”
“Aubs found the first one. Move!” He shoves past someone in the halls of the precinct, scuffling feet and heaving breath ricocheting along the line. “Martin Weston. He was also a nobody. He was a regular Joe, working and raising kids and whatnot.But, he, too, sold Evicta, and he attended that convention last week. A few days ago, he bit it, with blood in his eyes and poison in his body. He was from Maine, so the detectives over there caught the case, and no one really connected it to ours, but the M.E.s report is damn near identical to the one Aubs sent over for Arun.”
“So same poison.” My heart jumps a little faster, the way it always does when we inch closer during an investigation. “Same killer.”
“Yep. But that’s not where it stops. Aubs only found one, Arch. She stopped once he popped and studied his files instead of digging deeper.”
“You found more?”
“Yeah! Twenty-seven of them. They’re all over the US. I have three in LA, and another four in Phoenix. A couple in Albuquerque, and another in Indiana. They’re spread from coast to coast, and they’re not slowing down yet. I’ve found twenty-seven in the lasthour, and I haven’t even checked every state yet. Some folks aren’t so quick loading files to the database, which means we’re probably missing a few.”
“Jesus.” I set my elbow on the edge of the piano and scratch my nails over my scalp. “This is a big fucking deal.”
“Ya think? I’m heading to the departmental shrink now. I need help profiling this guy.”
“He’s someone’s widow, right? Or the kid of someone who died on Evicta. He’spissed, because folks like Savese and Weston and the twenty-five others are selling a placebo, charging out the ass for it so dying folks are re-mortgaging their homes, and then they’re dying, anyway. It doesn’t take a genius to find motive.”
“Right. But who the hell is he? How did he poison nearly thirty people and make it so fucking sneaky, they all had time to travel home, unpack, and die in the comfort of their own homes? None of them dropped early? None on the planes? No one was feeling sick or bleeding from their eyes out in public?”
“Says our killer was extremely controlled during administration. We gotta figure out how he got it into them without a panic.”
“It’s not like that Opulus Killer case we ran. That was injection, and the vics died within minutes. They knew right away they were fucked.”
“Right. This guy made them ingest it somehow. They drank it, or ate it, or breathed it in. Maybe it was a contact thing, a laced doorknob they all touched, or something placed into the air conditioning system.”
“But if that were true, there’d be a panic in Jamaica right now. The guys at this conference weren’t the only people inside that venue, Arch. We’ve had no servers drop. No Jamaican citizens die. The event planner is alive. The hotel receptionist. They’re all still fine.”
“So not in the air.” Rolling my bottom lip between my fingers, I search for sense. “Not a contact thing, because then we run the risk of waitstaff touching that same doorknob or whatever. This was directed specifically at pharma sales reps.”
“So the food? Or the beverages, maybe. Something catered to this function specifically.”
“Shit, I?—”
“But why haven’t all three-hundred-odd folks kicked the bucket? Why only thirty?”
“Fletch,” I push up straight on my stool. “That hotel is cateringmywedding this week.”
“What?”
“The fucking catering! I’m getting married in a matter of days, and I’m sure as shit not flipping burgers for our wedding. I contracted with the hotel to send across our meals for Sunday. But if they’re serving up poiso?—”
“I suggest you find a new caterer,” he chuckles nervously. Shakily. “You bleeding from the eyes yet?”
“No! Shit…” I think of what Minka and I consumed on the island yesterday. Where did we eat? What did we touch? Who did we speak to? “All the vics are bleeding internally prior to death, right? Aubree’s report mentions the organ destruction. Add the nose, eyes, and ears, and we’ve got a substance that is essentially theoppositeof what Mayet infuses every other day. She has the Factor to help her blood clot. This poison is doing the opposite.”
“So maybe I need to talk to the tox lab, too.” He slows his run to a fast walk. His breath, a consistent panting. “What thins blood?”
I choke out an incredulous laugh. “Everything?! Starting with rat poison and moving over to good old-fashioned aspirin. But it takes days to work. You have vics dropping dead approximately twenty-four to thirty-six hoursaftertheir return home.”
“Fuckkkk.” He comes to a stop outside an office door and takes a moment to catch his breath. I see him in my mind, folding at the hips and staring along a hallway of dented walls and ugly, worn carpet. “Why do I get the feeling we’re going to turn upsomany more bodies?”
“Probably something to do with a family member’s rage after their loved one’s needless death,” I groan. “Grieving people can get kinda pissy.”
“This is gonna getwayworse before it gets better.”
“Yeah.” I lean on my bench and glance along the hall as shadowed movement catches my attention. “It usually does. What do you need from me? How can I help?”
“I don’t…” He shakes his head and sighs. “I dunno, Arch. There’s nothing you can do. You’re over there and I’m here. If you get a chance to sneak back into Montego Bay again, you could hit up the research center and talk to them about anticoagulation poisoning. But this is your honeymoon. You gotta stay where you ar?—”
