Breathe Your Last: An addictive and nail-biting crime thriller (Detective Josie Quinn Book 10)

by Lisa Regan

  “About what?”

  Josie said, “About Robyn Arber, for a start.”

  “Oh shit,” said Merlos. Before they could ask him to come down to the station, he disappeared into the apartment, leaving the door open behind him. Josie put a hand on the butt of her gun and unsnapped her holster.

  Gretchen called, “Mr. Merlos, may we come in?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” came his voice from another room.

  With Josie in the lead, hand still at the ready on her gun, they walked through the door. A short, dark hallway led into a square room that might have been a living room at one time but now looked like something from NASA’s control center. Josie counted four desks, each with at least two laptops on them. Cords and wires snaked every which way along the floor and up walls and even beneath some closed doors on the opposite side of the room. Two windows were covered with garbage bags, held in place by duct tape. The room was lit by purple LED lights lining the crease where the walls met the ceiling. Josie blinked to adjust her vision. A chemical smell hung in the air, but she couldn’t quite place it. Merlos sat in an elaborate, high-backed office chair with headphones attached to one of its arms.

  He said, “Does my dad know you’re here?”

  “No,” Josie said.

  “Robyn decided to press charges, or whatever?” he asked.

  Josie wished she had. “Maybe,” she told Merlos. “It depends on what you tell us right now.”

  Merlos pushed a hand through the front of his hair and his black locks stood up in a wall. Josie waited for them to fall back into his face but they didn’t. She couldn’t decide if the effect was comical or sinister. Gretchen pulled up a photo of the cracked skull sticker on her phone and showed it to him. “Did you create this?”

  Merlos took a long look at it. “It was a failed venture,” he said.

  “Your venture?” Josie asked.

  “Yeah. Are you really here about a sticker?”

  “It’s your brand, isn’t it?” Gretchen said.

  “Was,” he said. “It was going to be my brand. Like I said, it was a failed venture.”

  “So you did draw it?” Josie said.

  “Yeah, I drew it.” He leaned back in the chair, and his right hand slipped down under the seat. Josie’s gun was halfway out of its holster when a footrest popped out from under the seat of the chair and Merlos set his feet, clad in blue slides, on top of it. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t shoot me, lady.”

  Gretchen told him, “Just keep your hands where we can see them, okay? Your failed venture—what was it?”

  “Aw, come on,” Merlos said. “If you talked to Robyn, then you know what it was.”

  “A drug,” Josie said. “Is that right?”

  “Not just a drug. The drug. Something we don’t have here. Something we’ve never had here. People talk about the dark web all the time, but no one actually knows how to use it.”

  “But you do,” Gretchen said.

  “Damn right. You wouldn’t believe the shit you can get from the dark web.”

  “You mean the drugs.”

  “You gonna arrest me if I say drugs?”

  “I’m still thinking about it,” Josie told him, her hand still on her Glock. “Doug, I think it would be best if you came down to the station with us to talk.”

  He looked down at his hands clasped in his lap, then around at his monitors. “Nah,” he said. “I’d prefer not to.”

  They couldn’t make him. Not at this juncture. They needed a lot more information, and if they wanted to arrest him, a warrant. “Okay,” said Gretchen. “We can talk here. But I’d like to read you your rights, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  Gretchen recited his Miranda rights and, once he acknowledged that he understood them, she asked, “Where were you on Sunday night?”

  Doug chuckled. He waved his hands in the air, indicating the room around him. “Where do you think?”

  “Here?” Gretchen said. “Alone?”

  “I’m not much for company, and shocker, but girls don’t really dig me that much.”

  Josie couldn’t imagine why. She asked, “Where were you between three and four p.m. on Tuesday?”

  Again, he spread his hands and laughed. “Here. Alone. Let me save you some time. Except for this morning when I walked down to the corner store for some smokes, I’ve been here alone for the last two weeks. Okay? But if you’re really into this alibi thing, or whatever it is you’re trying to do here, the pawn shop has exterior cameras that show the walkup to the apartments, okay? They get broken into like twice a month. You can ask them for their footage.”

  “We’ll do that,” Gretchen said. “Do they have footage of the rear entrance as well?”

  Merlos laughed. “You can’t get out that way. Dumpster’s in front of it.”

  “That’s against the city codes,” Gretchen pointed out.

  He laughed again. “Does this look like the kind of place that gives two shits about city codes?”

  Changing the subject, Josie asked, “You drive?”

  “My license is suspended.”

  “In my experience, that rarely stops people,” Josie told him.

  “Nah. Don’t have a car.”

  “Borrow one?” Gretchen asked.

  “Nope. What do you want to talk about next? Planes I don’t fly? Helicopters? How about trains?”

  “Names,” said Josie.

  Merlos smiled. His dark eyes glittered in the purple light. “Okay. Go.”

  “Nysa Somers.”

  “She’s that swimmer who just died, isn’t she? From the college? Yeah, I watch the news. Don’t know her. Never knew her. Robyn should have told you I got expelled and banned from campus, so it’s pretty unlikely I’ll know any of the names associated with the university.”

  “Clay Walsh,” Josie said.

  “The firefighter. Also on the news.” He giggled, the sound disconcerting. “Are you really cops or are you from the local news station, conducting some freaky poll to see how much viewers are paying attention?”

  Josie wondered if he was high. “Brett Pace,” she said.

  He stabbed the air with an index finger. “Now there’s one I don’t know. Never heard of him.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about ‘the’ drug,” Gretchen said. “You got it from the dark web?”

  Josie added, “Robyn Arber says you told her you learned to make it from the dark web.”

  “Oh well, yeah, the dose I gave her, I made myself. But as you know, the drug thing didn’t turn out the way I hoped.”

  “Because you got caught?” Gretchen said.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “What I was hoping to do with those videos was get my brand out there, show people how much fun they could have with it and then they’d start buying it, but my dad came down so hard on me, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work out. I mean, I was lucky to get off with an expulsion. Dude cut me off completely. I’m not even allowed to see my mom or my brother anymore. He didn’t appreciate the brilliance of it, you know? Like, he worked his whole life for the university and what’s he got? A big house, some shitty IRA, and a mountain of debt? I could have been living large. Start here at the university level, get the drug out there, let people have fun with it, work out the kinks, dosages, and all that, and then take it to the dark web. There’s a completely untapped market here in the U.S. People don’t know what they’re missing.”

  Josie said, “You said the dose you gave Robyn you made yourself. What about the other doses? There were four videos total.”

  “Yeah, rad, huh? They were all my shit. My drug. I got some of the real deal from the dark web and then I recreated it.”

  “What was the real deal?” Gretchen asked. “What are we talking about here, Doug?”

  The chair creaked as he leaned forward, extending his hands until his fingers curled over the toes of his slides and tapped the bottom of his shoes. “Devil’s Breath.” He licked his lips and grinned, as if waiting for
some grand reaction from them. It occurred to Josie then why he was telling them all this, even though he was confessing to illegal activities and they’d already read him his rights—he was proud of himself. He wanted to tell someone. He’d probably been waiting for the opportunity to brag about what he’d done. When he didn’t get a reaction from Josie and Gretchen, he shook his head and sat back in the chair. “You don’t know, but it’s a big deal. In Colombia, they give it to people and—”

  “We know what it does,” Josie said, cutting him off. “If you could get it from the dark web, why did you try making it yourself?”

  “Because it’s expensive as shit, and you know, we’ve got some stuff here in the U.S. that isn’t even illegal, like scopolamine and jimsonweed, and you can basically make a synthetic of it if you know what you’re doing.”

  Gretchen asked, “How did you know what you were doing?”

  He smiled again. “Research, my friend. Research. You can find anything on the web, especially the dark web.”

  Again, Josie was surprised by his honesty. She wondered briefly if he didn’t understand the law or maybe, she thought with a sudden chill, he understood it perfectly. In her mind, she went over what she knew about the Controlled Substances Act in Pennsylvania. Doug had used ingredients that were legal to create his drug. Neither scopolamine nor jimsonweed—or any combination thereof—was on the controlled substances list according to the Crimes Code, as far as Josie knew. The drug trafficking and distribution laws in Pennsylvania applied to very specific controlled substances and usually took into account the severity of those substances as well as the amount in the person’s possession. There was a chance that drug charges against Doug would never stick to begin with, and if they did, a good defense attorney could get them dismissed. They would have better luck charging him with reckless endangerment for what he’d done to Robyn Arber, but the district attorney would likely need her testimony to successfully prosecute him, and even then he might end up doing no time at all since reckless endangerment was a misdemeanor.

  They were on a slippery legal slope, and in spite of Doug’s willingness to confess to what he’d done, Josie wasn’t sure it was going to do them any good. Still, she wasn’t about to stop him from talking to them, especially since he had already been advised of his rights.

  “If you could make it yourself,” Josie said, “why buy the real stuff? Why the need to recreate it?”

  “’Cause I had to know what it felt like, you know?”

  Gretchen said, “You took it?”

  He nodded proudly. “Damn right I did.”

  Josie said, “Doug, we know that Devil’s Breath causes amnesia. How did you know what it felt like?”

  “I didn’t. I had to tape myself. Lock myself in a room and tape myself. Then once I had done that, I started making my own and taking that. Took me a few tries to work out the dosing and all.”

  Gretchen’s tone was skeptical. “You were doing all this on your own? With no help? You could have died.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “That’s part of the thrill of creating something, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Josie said. “When you gave people the drug, how did you slip it to them?”

  “In their drinks. Like a powder. Took me a while to get it to the point where it was totally dissolvable, but I did it.”

  “You said you stopped giving people the drug after you got in trouble over the Robyn Arber video,” Josie continued. “Did you still have some of your knock-off Devil’s Breath left?”

  “I dumped it,” he said. “I had to. That was one of my dad’s conditions. He talked to a lawyer who said since my drug wasn’t a controlled substance, I would probably get off if the police ever got involved, but still, he thought it was best to just destroy everything. He didn’t want anything leading back to me, you know? Well, back to him, really.”

  “You dumped it?” Gretchen said, her tone disbelieving. “What? Flushed it down the toilet?”

  “Yeah. What else was I gonna do with it?”

  “How about your stickers?” Josie asked. “What’d you do with them?”

  “Threw ’em out. It was a shame, too, ’cause that was one of my best pieces.”

  Thirty-Seven

  “You think he’s telling the truth?” Gretchen asked once they were back at the station.

  Josie sat at her desk and looked around. They were the only ones there. The Chief’s office door was closed. “About most of it. I’m astounded by how much he confessed.”

  “He obviously knows that the best we could do is charge him with reckless endangerment, which carries almost no time at all, and that we’d only be able to charge him on the Arber case because that’s the only video we’ve got,” Gretchen said.

  “Right, and without her testimony, the charges won’t stick. Even if we went ahead and arrested him anyway for recklessly endangering Robyn Arber, he’d be out in a few hours.”

  “You think?” Gretchen said. “Daddy cut him off.”

  “Because Daddy was worried about his own reputation. If his son got arrested for this, he’d do everything he could to keep it quiet and make it go away as quickly as possible, which means he’d have his son out on bail in a few hours and then he’d be pulling all kinds of strings to get the charges dropped. He’d probably contact Robyn Arber’s family to make sure she kept quiet. Then Doug would still be out on the street, and he’d know just how aggressively we’re prepared to come after him. It’s not going to do us any good to bring him in now, especially with the risk of his dad and a high-powered defense attorney getting involved immediately. I would rather he think we were only there to talk to him today while we keep working the case. He told us a lot, but he’s definitely leaving something out.”

  “Like the part where some of his buddies helped him test the product?” Gretchen said.

  “Yeah, exactly that part. Also the part where he might still be selling this shit.”

  “How?” Gretchen asked. “He’s not exactly the most personable guy, and if he’s right about not leaving his place, where’s he distributing it?”

  “Maybe people are coming to him?”

  “But if they were, wouldn’t we have seen or heard about the sticker on the street already? Like Noah said, there’s no shortage of calls to the heavy drug areas. This has never come up before.”

  “Maybe he’s only selling it to a few close friends, then,” Josie suggested.

  Gretchen waved a flash drive in the air. “In that case, we might have to return to the pawn shop for more footage to see who’s been coming and going. For now, let’s see what they have for us in terms of alibi.”

  The pawn shop footage was a lucky break. The place looked cheap and run-down, but they’d sprung for an expensive Rowland Industries security system which stored footage going back months. Josie and Gretchen only needed it going back to Sunday. The owner hadn’t asked for a warrant because he didn’t want them coming back, if at all possible, as police hanging around tended to make his customers uncomfortable. Once he’d copied the footage they requested to a flash drive, Josie and Gretchen had made their way around the back of the building to find that Doug Merlos had been telling the truth. The single rear exit was blocked by a large, slime-covered dumpster that smelled worse than the city morgue. A fire escape crept up the side of the building, which would have allowed Merlos to leave unseen, except that the drop from the ladder to the ground was such that he would never have been able to reach it if he wanted to return to his apartment via the fire escape.

  Josie wheeled her desk around to sit beside Gretchen, and together they reviewed the footage, which confirmed exactly what Doug had told them. Since Sunday morning, he’d only left his apartment once and that had been earlier in the day just before Gretchen showed up and knocked on his door only to find out he wasn’t home.

  “All right,” Josie said. “He’s telling the truth about his alibi and we can’t disprove it, but it is no coincidence that he cr
eated this drug and the stickers. I think we need to find out who he was hanging out with when he was in school last year.”

  “Call Robyn Arber and ask her if she remembers any of his friends.”

  “Good idea,” Josie said, wheeling her chair back around to her own desk and fishing her cell phone from the pile of paperwork on its surface. Her call to Robyn Arber went to voicemail. Josie left a message, but she was doubtful she’d get a return call.

  Gretchen said, “I’ll contact Chief Hahlbeck about getting a list of Merlos’ classes and the names of people in them.”

  “Find out if he had a roommate,” Josie said.

  “I’m sure he did,” Gretchen said. “Given his age, he had to have been a freshman last year.” She started tapping away at her keyboard.

  Both their phones chirped with a text. Josie snatched hers up and studied it. “That’s a text from Mett,” she said. “He and Hummel found one brownie and one plastic baggie with brownie remnants in Dan’s vehicle.”

  Gretchen kept typing. “Which gets us closer to confirming your theory that the Precious Paws brownies were laced.”

  “Yeah,” Josie said. “Now we just have to wait for results. Hummel’s already on his way to the lab with the baked goods I got from the Precious Paws table and what they found in Dan’s car today.”

  Josie typed in a quick response thanking Mettner. It took her a few seconds to realize that Gretchen had stopped typing. When Josie looked up from her phone, Gretchen was staring at her. “Hey, your shift was over hours ago. Why don’t you go home?”

  Josie wanted to argue, but she was exhausted. The scope of the case—or cases—kept getting larger with every person they talked to and every lead they followed, and still they had no hard proof that Devil’s Breath—or Doug Merlos’ synthetic version of it—had actually been used on any of their victims. She made a mental note to call her contact at the state police lab the next day about the food analysis.

  “Boss,” Gretchen said. “Your eyes are glazing over.”

  Josie shook herself to attention and laughed. “Sorry. This one is getting to me.”