by Lisa Regan
I got out, jogged over to him, made the necessary small talk. Given how badly things had gone the last time we’d seen one another, he was happy to accept my gift of hot, fresh coffee. I wanted to throw it in his face. It was clear he saw it as a peace offering, when in fact he should have been the one extending an olive branch or an apology. He had made fun of the way I did things, going on and on, insulting me and then laughing about it. Who laughed at his own jokes? I had told him to shut his damn mouth, and it had only made him laugh harder.
I never forgot it. In fact, he was the first person on my list once I realized just what the drug could do. It didn’t disappoint. It didn’t even take long for it to kick in. I’d had to do a lot of research to figure out the exact moment when a person was completely in the thrall of it. When I knew he was there, I leaned closer and whispered instructions into his ear. Then I made sure that he had his keys in his hand, walked him to his car, and waited for him to start it up.
I leaned in through the window. “Remember,” I told him. “Go as fast as you can. Don’t stop until you make a dent.”
Thirty-Five
On the interstate on the way back to Denton, Josie had to consciously and repeatedly remind herself to stay within the speed limit. Anger coursed through her body. She hadn’t even watched the worst of the Robyn Arber video, but she felt sick to her stomach. Breathing through her rage, she tried to work through things more clinically in her mind. Doug Merlos had told Robyn he’d ‘learned to make’ the drug he gave her from the dark web. It stood to reason that he had also created the creepy sticker. He’d had it on his messenger bag when he took the video of Robyn. The videos had stopped after a deal was struck between the Dean and the Arber family. A deal that included Doug being banned from campus. Josie assumed that also meant Hollister Way, since it was managed by campus housing. Although the only person who really knew that Doug had been banned from campus was his father. Robyn had left the university. It stood to reason that Doug could go anywhere on campus at any time, more or less, and no one would sound an alarm. On the other hand, maybe Doug had sold his branded drug to someone else. Maybe Brett Pace. Although, given the content of the videos that Doug had made, it seemed more likely that he was behind the Somers drowning and the Walsh fire.
Josie pressed the voice control button on the steering wheel and through gritted teeth said, “Call Noah.”
“I’m sorry,” the vehicle’s robotic voice replied. “I do not recognize that command. Please try again.”
“Shit.” Her cell phone wasn’t synced to the rental vehicle. She put on her turn signal and pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, using her cell phone to call him. After eight rings, it went to voicemail. Without leaving a message, she hung up and called Gretchen.
After two rings, Gretchen answered. “Boss? I’ve already got Doug Merlos’ current address. I’m just running some background on him now. No criminal record that I could find.”
“Great,” Josie said. “You have a photo?”
“I’ve got a driver’s license photo, yeah. His license was suspended over the summer for his second underage drinking/DUI charge, but I’ve got a photo.”
“I’m wondering if you can check the surveillance we have from Sunday night and Monday morning on campus and see if you can find him on any of it.”
“I can certainly look,” said Gretchen. “The Chief brought me and Mett up to speed on the leads your brother gave us when we got here today, and Noah told us he checked in to the cheerleader from one of the videos, but neither she nor her friends or the cheer coach knew who took the video. Noah also told us about Robyn Arber. What else did she tell you?”
Josie recounted her conversation with Robyn Arber.
“What a sack of shit,” Gretchen said. “Two sacks of shit. Him and his dad. Where are you now?”
Josie read off the upcoming exit sign. “Give me Merlos’ address, would you?”
She heard the pages of Gretchen’s notebook turning. Then she rattled off the address to Josie.
“I’m bringing him in,” Josie said.
“Or,” Gretchen said evenly, “I bring him in and let him sit in an interview room for an hour and sweat. Then when you get here, he’ll be good and freaked out about why he’s there.”
Josie liked this idea even though they technically could not detain Doug Merlos. They couldn’t force him to come into the station or even to talk with them. Even if he agreed to go with Gretchen, he could actually leave at any time. Of course, oddly enough, they rarely ran into a situation where people refused to come to the station or, once there, demanded to leave. They had no idea if Doug Merlos was one of those people.
Gretchen’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Boss? You still there?”
“Yes,” Josie answered. “Fine. Bring him in. I’ll meet you at the station. Also, see if you can get some alibis for him for Nysa Somers’ death and the fire at Clay Walsh’s house. If he’s got them, we’ll need to check them out.”
For the rest of the ride, she went back over every detail of the case in her mind. The name Doug Merlos had never come up. Not once. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, especially if he was picking his victims at random as Robyn had suggested. As she drove into Denton, a beep from her console alerted her that she was low on gas. She pulled into the nearest gas station to fill up. It was only once she was pumping the gas into her tank that she realized she was at the same mini-market that Dan Lamay had stopped at yesterday morning. Like it had been on the CCTV video they’d pulled from yesterday, it was busy now. Its central location ensured that it always got a lot of traffic. Josie finished up her transaction at the pump and got back into her car, ready to pull away, when something at the front entrance caught her eye.
A card table sat several feet to the left of the double doors. A banner stretched across the front of it, which read: Support Precious Paws Rescue & Adoption Center. Atop the table were a number of what looked like pins, brochures, magnets, and pens, all featuring the Precious Paws Rescue logo as well as several boxes of baked goods. A small handwritten sign next to a box of cookies, Rice Krispie treats, and brownies read: “50 Cents per Baked Good or 5 for $2.” Beside that was a small metal lockbox which was being manned by a woman in her sixties. A tingle started at the base of Josie’s spine. She pulled into one of the parking spots in front of the mini-market and got out.
“Hello,” said the woman at the table as Josie approached. “Would you be interested in supporting our local animal shelter? We’ve got cookies, brownies, Rice Krispie treats.”
Josie appraised her. She carried some excess weight around her middle, and her brown hair was shot through with gray and pulled back in a bun. She wore navy slacks and a bright fluorescent-green shirt with the Precious Paws logo on it. A handmade name tag said Terri.
“Terri,” Josie said. “What’s your last name?”
Terri’s smile stiffened on her lined face. “It’s Cassavettes. Do I know you?”
“Do you work for Precious Paws?” Josie continued.
“I volunteer. Are you interested in volunteering? You can volunteer at the shelter with the animals, or do community outreach and fundraising like this.”
“How long have you been out here selling baked goods?”
“All week.”
“Just you?”
“Well, yes, I volunteered this week.”
“Did you make the baked goods?”
“No. I pick them up from the shelter each morning and bring them here. Did you want to donate baked goods for our fundraising efforts?”
Josie stared at the boxes. “No,” she said.
Terri’s face fell.
“I’d like to give you a property evidence receipt.”
“I—I don’t understand,” said Terri.
Josie said, “How much for all of these?”
Josie deposited the boxes of baked goods onto her desk at the station. Mettner stood up from his own desk and reached for a brownie. She smacked his hand. “No
one eats these,” she said. “In fact, get me a Sharpie and some tape. I’m marking them and taping the boxes up.”
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “I’m serious, Mett. Sharpie. Tape. Now. I might have another lead. Is Gretchen here? Did she bring in Doug Merlos?”
Mettner riffled through his desk drawers until he came up with a marker and some tape. “He wasn’t home. She’s over there staking out his place. She’ll call as soon as she sees him. What’s with the baked goods?”
“Precious Paws Rescue has been fundraising outside the mini-market that Dan went to yesterday morning. You didn’t see the table there when you went to pull their CCTV footage?”
“Well, yeah,” Mettner said. “I saw it. So what?”
“He didn’t hit it up that morning though, did he?”
“The Precious Paws table? No. I watched the video, boss. I would have mentioned something like that to the team.”
“That’s what I thought,” Josie said. From her jacket pocket, she produced a flash drive. “But when I saw Dan at the hospital this morning, he told me that he stops at the mini-market every day. Gets something sweet with his coffee but doesn’t want his wife to know. The volunteer from Precious Paws, Terri, told me she’d been there all week.”
Mettner folded his arms over his chest and looked down at her. “Did the mini-mart manager pull the footage from the rest of the week for you without a warrant?”
Josie grinned. “He sure did.”
She plopped into her chair and plugged the drive into her computer. A moment later, Mettner leaned over her shoulder as they watched footage of the Precious Paws table just outside the mini-market doors on Tuesday morning, the day before Dan had gotten disoriented and gone into the bell tower. Josie fast-forwarded through some of the footage until Dan emerged from the doors, a coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other. The doughnut already had a large bite taken out of it. Terri must have called to him, just as she had to Josie, because he froze, and his head turned toward her table. He took a slow walk toward the table and spent over a minute looking at Terri’s selection. Then he thrust a dollar at her and snagged two brownies from the box before shuffling off to his car.
“But he didn’t have his incident until the next day,” Mettner pointed out.
“Because maybe he stashed the brownies in his car until the next day. He was already eating the doughnut. It’s possible he didn’t remember that he had those brownies until yesterday morning. I bet if you call his wife and ask her to check in the car, you’ll find a brownie still left in there. He bought two.”
“I’ll go over there and check,” Mettner said. “If there’s one in there, we’ll need to have it tested. But boss, you don’t think this is a stretch?”
Josie taped up the boxes and wrote DO NOT EAT in huge letters on each one. “I know. But it’s the only thing we didn’t account for in Dan’s situation. Where are we with the warrant for the hospital? The one for the names of all the patients who came in the day Nysa Somers died?”
Mettner tipped his head back and let out a long breath. “I see where you’re going with this. The names came in a half hour ago. Fraley’s downstairs in the break room. I’ll get him and we’ll run these people down, see if any of them stopped at the mini-market that morning or any time this week. If we can connect any of the seizure or heart failure cases to the Precious Paws table, then we can prove that someone—maybe your Doug Merlos—is running around Denton poisoning people. But boss, why give Nysa Somers and Clay Walsh specific instructions: ‘time to be a mermaid’ and ‘time to be a match’ but then poison a bunch of people randomly with the drug using Precious Paws?”
Josie’s cell phone chirped. It was a text from Gretchen. Doug Merlos had just arrived home to his apartment.
“To throw us off, maybe?” Josie suggested, pocketing her phone. “To break up his pattern? That was Gretchen. Merlos is home. I’m going to drive over there. I don’t have all the answers, Mett, I’m just following leads.”
“Got it,” he replied.
Josie pointed to the pastries she’d confiscated. “I’m giving you custody of these pastries. Call Hummel,” she told him. “Get him to drive these out to the lab along with anything you find in Dan’s car. I talked to my contact in Greensburg. She said the tests for scopolamine can be done in twenty-four hours in urgent cases.”
“Is this an urgent case?”
Josie raised a brow. “In the span of only a few days, we’ve potentially had a half dozen poisonings.”
“But we don’t actually know that,” Mettner pointed out. “We haven’t gotten any lab results back. All we’ve got is a sticker found at the Somers and Walsh scenes.”
“That is true,” Josie conceded. “But within the next twenty-four hours we could potentially have proof that the brownies Nysa Somers ate were laced with Devil’s Breath or something similar, that both Dan and Clay had it in their bloodstream, and that these pastries I confiscated from Precious Paws also have Devil’s Breath or some derivative in them. If I’m right, and someone is poisoning people in this city, I don’t want to waste a single second.” The sight of Clay Walsh’s charred legs flashed through her mind. “It could mean the difference between life and death, Mett. If I’m wrong, then all we’ve wasted is time—”
“And some of the department’s money,” he said with a smile and a sideways glance at Chief Chitwood’s closed door.
Josie nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I’m not Chief anymore. My job is to solve this case, and that’s it.” An image of Nysa Somers’ parents plodding through the lobby of the Marriott, their grief so heavy it weighed them down, came back to her. “It will be worth it. If I’m right and all these lab reports come back positive for Devil’s Breath, or something like it, I want to be ready to go.”
“You got it,” Mettner said.
“Also—”
“I know, I know. I’ll find out everything there is to know about everyone associated with Precious Paws,” Mettner filled in. “I’m on it.”
Thirty-Six
Doug Merlos lived in an apartment in one of Denton’s seedier areas, where a number of the tall, forgotten buildings were condemned, and the ones that were occupied—by storefronts on the bottom and roach-infested apartments on top—always looked on the verge of being condemned. A pawn shop inhabited the first floor of Merlos’ building. A glass door to the side of it led to a set of stairs that spit Josie and Gretchen out into a lobby above the pawn shop.
“An elevator!” Gretchen exclaimed. “This has got to be the only building in this part of Denton with an elevator. Let’s see if it works.”
She punched the button and something behind its doors screeched to life. What felt like an eternity later, the blue doors lurched open, and a cloud of unpleasant odors filtered into the lobby. Josie waved a hand in front of her nose. “You sure you don’t want to take the stairs?”
“He lives on the eighth floor,” Gretchen said. “We’re taking this elevator.”
Surprisingly, they arrived on the eighth floor without incident, although Josie swore the odd mixed scent of sewage, cigarettes, weed, and piss clung to her shirt even after they made their way down the hall to Doug Merlos’ door. “This is where the Denton University Dean of Students’ son lives?”
Gretchen snorted. “Apparently, the campus isn’t the only place he got banned from.”
Josie knocked on the door. Behind it, a voice called, “Just a minute.”
They heard movement inside, footfalls coming toward the door, and then nothing. Gretchen took out her credentials and held them up to the peephole. A muffled “shit” could be heard from the other side of the door.
“Doug Merlos,” Josie said loudly. “Denton Police. We just have a few questions for you.”
They heard another muttered, “Shit.”
Under her breath, Gretchen said, “I am not chasing this guy.”
Josie thought of the foot chase they’d had five months earlier during a homicide case they’d
worked only a couple of blocks from where they now stood. “We might have to chase him,” Josie whispered.
From behind the door, they heard the sounds of rustling and glass clinking.
“You know what we need?” Gretchen said. “A dog. A big dog. Like a German shepherd. He could do the running, no problem. I’m getting too old for this shit.”
“You’re never too old to take up running,” Josie suggested. “You should try it. It’s good for you. Releases endorphins. Makes you feel better.”
Something inside made a loud thud. They heard a muffled, “Son of a bitch.”
“This kid better not be a runner,” Gretchen groused. Making her voice louder, she yelled, “Mr. Merlos, please open the door.” Then, lowering her voice, she replied to Josie, “You know what else makes you feel better? Therapy. You should try it.”
Merlos shouted, “Be right there!”
Josie said, “Guess that means he’s not a runner.” As the door swung open, Josie got one last mumble out the side of her mouth. “And I’m not going to therapy.”
Doug Merlos was not at all what Josie expected, although she hadn’t had time to ask Gretchen to show her the suspended driver’s license photo. He was short—even shorter than Josie, which put him somewhere between five foot two and five foot four. He had shaggy black hair that hung in hanks around his head. Almost like someone very angry had given him a haircut and quit in the middle of doing it. Close-set dark eyes stared at them over a long nose that hooked at the bottom. A gray sweatsuit hung on him. His skin had the pallor of someone who rarely saw the sun. “What do you want?” he asked.
Gretchen said, “We need to talk to you.”