The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  I wondered why Navarro had opted to send an armed ex-Marine on a bad trip into a crowded mall. But then going from everything I’d learned over the past few days, it was clear that Navarro enjoyed the chaos and death that he caused. And that this almost certainly wasn’t going to be the last of it.

  54

  Tess hadn’t slept well. She was all wired and angry, with a horde of powerful emotions warring inside her. It didn’t help that she also felt like a caged animal, straining against the confines of the safe house, unable to go out for a jog or a therapeutic cup of coffee.

  She’d already called her mom and spoken to Hazel and to Kim, too, putting a gloss on what was really going on before asking them to keep an eye out while trying not to alarm them too much. She failed, of course, and she knew it. It wasn’t the first time she’d got herself into a sticky situation, even though this one wasn’t through any fault of her own. Still, she was glad the call was behind her. It needed to be done.

  Jules was with Alex in the living room, keeping him busy. She’d hit gold by signing him up to Club Penguin on her laptop. Given his giggles and squeals, he was having a blast. Tess had left them alone after breakfast, feeling a need to some time on her own, and was out in the back garden of the house, sitting on the grass with her back against the trunk of a lone sycamore tree, deep in thought.

  She was still reeling from what Reilly had told her the night before. At first, she’d been horrified by it, no matter what spin she put on it. Then she’d spent a lot of the night trying to put herself in his place, reliving it from his point of view, wondering what it was like and what she would have done in his place. And what she’d realized was that she couldn’t know. She knew it was easy to come to a rash judgment, as a passive outsider. It was very different from being there, on the ground, in the thick of it, with bullets flying and men intent on killing you swarming around you and the pressure of having to make a split-second decision weighing up your own moral instincts against a threat to the greater good. It wasn’t about excusing what he’d done. It was about trying to understand it, knowing that in his line of work, in the kinds of situations he willingly put himself into in the line of duty, impossible choices sometimes had to be made.

  She was also locked on one other thought. She knew that, sooner or later, McKinnon would have been killed by Navarro. She knew this was a self-serving rationalization, but she still found some solace in it. Then she reminded herself of something else that had given her a small uplift. After they’d talked late into the night, she’d asked Reilly if there was anything else he hadn’t told her. If there would be any more bombshells to rock their world. He’d assured her there weren’t, and she believed him.

  Her thoughts migrated to the reason all this was going on, and to Alex. She found herself wondering about the drawing, about what his teacher had told her, about what he’d said about the plant. She went back inside, picked up her iPad, grabbed the firewalled cell phone Jules had given her to replace her iPhone along with the piece of paper on which she’d scribbled the number Reilly had given her, and went back outside.

  She called the number in Berkeley.

  The phone went to voicemail, its standard message informing Tess that she’d reached the office of Dean Stephenson, that neither he nor his assistant, Marya, were available, and to leave a message.

  She waited for the requisite beep, then introduced herself and said, “I’m calling for Professor Stephenson. It’s about Alex Martinez. It’s . . . I really need to talk to you. Alex’s mother has . . .” She hesitated, unsure about how much to say on a cold message. “She passed away, and I was hoping to talk to you to find out what we can do to help Alex through this difficult time.” She ended the message by asking him to call back, leaving her phone number, and thanking him.

  The call made her uncomfortable, but she wasn’t sure why. She focused instead on moving on with the other question that was on her mind: what Alex had told his teacher, and her, about the plant he’d drawn.

  She brought up Safari and Googled “Brooks,” the name Alex had mentioned, along with “plant” and “heart.” She got more than thirteen million hits, and after trawling through the first couple of hundred of them without coming across anything that struck her as relevant, she decided she needed to narrow her search and try again.

  She tried it again, spelling the name with an “e” this time—Brookes.

  Thirty-four million hits and change.

  She frowned, went back to the original spelling, and typed in “Brooks,” “plant,” “flower,” “heart,” “medicine,” “treatment,” and “death,” then deleted a couple of names that had cropped up in her first search to avoid useless hits.

  She was down to a slightly less daunting three hundred thousand hits, so she waded in.

  An hour later, she came across something.

  It was a news item on the WebMD website about a promising new heart treatment a pharmaceutical company had been trumpeting that had just had its testing suspended. The drug, which was based on an extract from a rare flower, had initially shown a lot of promise. Although the sap of the plant itself was poisonous, more than twenty useful alkaloids had been identified from it, and early testing had shown the drug they had synthesized from them to be a powerful cholesterol inhibitor. The company’s stock price had soared based on those early tests. Two years into the testing phase, however, everything had gone wrong. Several patients had developed cardiac complications that were traced back to the use of the drug, and the test phase was shut down.

  Tess Googled the plant the article mentioned.

  It was a small, unremarkable white flower. Then something else snared Tess’s attention. The plant’s natural habitat.

  It was indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest.

  Her skin tingled with unease, as if tiny, invisible ants were crawling all over her.

  She wondered how Alex knew about this. Sure, he could have seen it on a news broadcast. But to understand what it did, at age four? And register the name of Brooks? And then, there was the way he said it. In the first person. I told them about it. They didn’t like it.

  The ants were getting more agitated.

  She chewed it over, her mind bouncing from one thought to another without managing to line them up into a coherent whole. After a while, she grew frustrated and decided to go inside and have another go at seeing if Alex would elucidate things for her, and her eyes caught sight of the note she’d written down when Reilly had called. She found herself pausing to stare at the name that was on it with a sense of intrigue that wasn’t there before.

  Dean Stephenson.

  Why did she know that name?

  It was there, she was sure of it, tucked away in the attic of arcane tidbits her mind was prone to hoard, taunting her—but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  She decided to cheat and typed his name into the search box—and in the 0.15 seconds it took for the results to flash up, it came back to her.

  There were more than four hundred thousands hits. She skipped the Wikipedia entry about the professor and went straight to the third result, his own webpage. It redirected to the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and specifically, to a specialty subsection called the Division of Perceptual Studies.

  She felt her insides shrivel up with dread as the unthinkable started to fall into place, and within seconds, she was gone, losing all sense of place and time as she read page after page, immersing herself in Stephenson’s work and the endless stream of information rushing at her while tying it back to what had been happening the last few days.

  And then an impossible thought struck her.

  Impossible, and yet . . . she couldn’t ignore it.

  She went back to the news item about the heart treatment, noted the name of the plant it had been derived from, and ran a new search around the suspended cure. This time, she added the name Wade McKinnon to the mix.

  Her finger was trembli
ng as she tapped the screen to initiate the search.

  The result drove a spear through her senses that pinned her in place, and she understood.

  55

  We arrived back at Aero Drive feeling shell-shocked and with morale sinking fast. The body count had risen still further, a viable lead had been wiped out before we could make any use of it, and Navarro had yet again proven himself to be both lethally effective and spectacularly audacious, with seemingly no sense of a line that he would not—or could not—cross.

  I followed Villaverde into the large meeting room that had become the de facto operations center since Michelle’s death three days earlier. A couple of junior agents were co-coordinating with local law enforcement, trying to see whether Navarro had left behind any kind of trail before the siege started. One was reviewing traffic camera footage; another fast-forwarding through video from the two security cameras that surveilled the main parking lot at the mall. As Villaverde sat down, he looked from one to the other. They shook their heads in turn. Nothing yet.

  After a moment, Munro joined us. He didn’t look any happier than Villaverde. In fact, if anything, he appeared to be even more frustrated than I felt myself. Villaverde hit the Intercom button and asked for sandwiches and coffee for everyone, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was clearly gathering his thoughts, but there didn’t seem to be too many of them to gather.

  “The guy’s a fucking ghost,” he grumbled. “We’ve got nada, and the way things have gone over the past seventy-two hours, I don’t expect that’s going to change much.” He turned to Munro. “Anything from your side?”

  Munro shook his head. “No hits. We’ve talked to everyone from Border Patrol to informants on the street. Corliss is in direct contact with the PFM,” meaning the Mexican federal investigators. “He’s called in every favor he’s owed on both sides of the fence and come up empty-handed.”

  There was only one hand left to play now. We needed to give the bastard exactly what he wanted. Or at least to make it look like I was within his reach for as long as it took to tighten a strategically placed net around him.

  “I don’t think we have any choice,” I offered. “We need to flush Navarro out into the open. Or at least his soldiers. We know he thinks I have the information he wants. Let him come and get it.”

  “If it’s him we’re dealing with,” Villaverde put in. “We still have no solid evidence that it is.”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is for this to work. We just need to agree how to stage it so that he feels confident enough to make a play for me and I have some cover.”

  Villaverde’s grim expression betrayed his lack of enthusiasm for my willingness to be the bait. He was clearly frustrated as hell—and unhappy at not being able to disagree with me on this.

  “Anyone have any other ideas?” I let the question hang there for a long second. “Okay. So let’s talk about how we hook him.”

  Munro—always the brutal pragmatist—jumped in immediately. “News conference. That woman from the sherriff’s department can lead. Lupo. Fugate’s widow. A psychiatrist, one from the army if we can get one. You can’t sit on the panel, but they’ve got to know you’d be there for something like that. Hold it somewhere with at least three ways in and out. Ramp up the police presence at two of the three, but leave the third light to the naked eye. Then you pop out to take a call or something, he makes his move, and we spring the trap.”

  Villaverde shook his head, his face wearing a look of total disbelief. I could see that his fuse had just burned all the way down to the explosive. “After what just happened? You want to put that many people in his line of sight? No way.”

  It was the first time since I’d met him that he’d looked anything other than totally calm.

  The door opened, but instead of coffee, the junior agent who entered was carrying a thin brown file folder, which he held out to Villaverde.

  “Tox report on Eli Walker.” He handed it over, adding, “There’s a rush on the same for Ricky Torres. The sheriff’s office has already called the mayor. We should have it by the end of the day.”

  As he left, Villaverde opened the folder and scanned the single sheet inside. Then he glanced pointedly at me and handed it to me.

  Walker had an organic paralyzing agent in his blood. A combination of spider and lizard venom, specifically the brown widow, Latrodectus geometricus, and the Mexican beaded lizard, or Heloderma horridum of the family Helodermatidae. Plus a third neurotoxin that the lab couldn’t identify.

  I chucked the file to Munro. “Now tell me it’s not El Brujo we’re dealing with.”

  Munro went over the sheet and, for once, kept his mouth firmly shut.

  Closely on the report’s heels, our refreshments arrived and the three of us used the well-rehearsed rituals of shaking sugar into coffee and rewrapping an overfilled ciabatta without dripping fat onto our clothes to take a step away from the case and be in our own heads for a second. I was used to these moments being almost exclusively filled with thoughts of Tess, but the person who catapulted to the front of my mind this time was Alex.

  He didn’t deserve any of this.

  I finished a mouthful. “I’ll go on the morning news tomorrow. Alone. They can talk it up, make a lot of noise about how they’re going to have an exclusive with the FBI agent dealing with this investigation—whatever it takes to make sure Navarro has a chance to hear about it. I’ll drive there on my own and leave on my own. Full police presence in the studio, but none outside. None that they can see, anyway. We run multiple tails. I’ll be safe till he thinks I’ve told him everything I know and I’ll be sure to keep my mouth shut before we arrive wherever it is we’re going.”

  Villaverde sipped his coffee and again shook his head, but this time it was clearly in resignation.

  We were all out of alternatives, and if nailing the sick bastard meant that I was walking directly into harm’s way—tribal pharmacy and organ removal included—so be it. It was still, in real terms, nothing that hadn’t already been aimed at Michelle, or Tess, or Alex, or countless others since this goddamn mess had blown up.

  I was ready to do it.

  After all, you could only die once, right?

  56

  Tess wasn’t sure what to do.

  She felt hyperalert, and her pulse was raging wildly. It was like an awakening, like her mind was suddenly unchained and set free to roam through uncharted territory. She’d spent a couple of hours roaming through Stephenson’s website, and by the end of it, questions were accosting her from all sides while competing insights jostled for supremacy inside her, all of them demanding she push them through to their rightful conclusion.

  She didn’t know where to start. The one question that was foremost on her mind was the one she was too scared to ask—and yet, she knew she had to do it. She wasn’t sure she could. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

  He was only four years old.

  As if to pry her out of her torment, her phone rang. She stared at it absentmindedly, then recognized the area code.

  510.

  Berkeley.

  She leapt at the call.

  It was Dean Stephenson’s assistant, Marya.

  “I just got your message,” she told Tess. “I’m so sorry to hear about Miss Martinez. That’s just . . . awful. What happened?”

  Tess simply told her that Michelle had been killed by an armed intruder at her house, and that Alex was now in the care of his biological father. She then explained who she was.

  “I’ve been talking to Alex’s teachers,” she added, “and they told me that he’s been going through a tough time. I was hoping I could talk to Professor Stephenson about it.”

  “Given what’s happened, I’m sure Dean would absolutely want to help you with Alex,” Marya replied. “The thing is, he’s away.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m afraid so.” The woman sounded uncertain.

  Tess paused, unsure about why she was perplexed by her tone. “
Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  Marya’s tone was still hesitant. “I’m not sure.”

  Tess’s antennae spiked up. “Well . . . can I call him? Do you know where I can reach him?”

  “No, I’m sorry. He . . . he didn’t tell me where he was going, and his cell’s just going to voicemail.”

  Tess was picking up all kinds of alarming signals. “How long has he been away?”

  “About ten days, I guess. Since the beginning of last week.”

  “And he didn’t tell you where he was going?”

  “No. He just left me a message saying he had to go check out a new case and would be away for a while.”

  Which sounded odd. “Does he do that a lot?”

  “Well, no, not really. He usually sends one of his researchers first. And it’s not like him to be rash like that. He’s got a full calendar and I’ve had to field some tough calls and reschedule everyone.”

  “Isn’t there anyone you can ask about him? Does he have a wife, someone he lives with?”

  “He’s divorced,” she said. “And he’s not living with anyone.”

  Tess’s mind was on fire. More insights were crashing in, more associations linking up.

  She swallowed and asked Marya, “Tell me something. Does Professor Stephenson wear contact lenses?”

  “Yes, he does.” Marya sounded perplexed. “Why do you ask?”

  Tess felt the pressure push up to her temples. She didn’t know what to say. She needed to end the call. “Let me get back to you. I need to check a few things out. Thanks, you’ve been a huge help. And please let me know if you hear from him in the meantime.”

  She ended the call and took in a deep breath.

  She couldn’t avoid it anymore. It was kicking and screaming at her.

  She steeled herself and went into the house.

  She retrieved the drawing from her bedroom and found Jules in the kitchen, preparing Alex a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk.