by Alex Kava
“Dawson Hayes said this morning that a wolflike animal came at him.”
“Really?”
“Did you find any tracks down in the campsite area?”
“Not a one.”
“Anything that could have produced a light show?”
He shook his head. Glanced at her again but this time it looked as if he was trying to decide how to say what he wanted to say.
“I have to tell you, I think some of those kids were stoned last night. We didn’t find any bottles or cans. A few cigarette butts. No joints. But I know from their stories and that spaced-out look, it wasn’t just shock and awe.”
Maggie hadn’t told Sheriff Skylar about the salvia because of his holding back evidence of drugs in a previous case. Allegedly he’d rather have the girl’s parents believe she accidentally fell from the bridge instead of knowing she had tripped out on salvia and jumped. But she couldn’t hold out on Donny.
“Lucy did find a baggie. She thinks it may be Salvia divinorum.”
She left it at that, letting him believe Lucy could have found it today while she prepped the two boys for autopsies.
“I thought so,” Donny said, tapping the steering wheel in triumph of being correct. He didn’t even question the how or when of the discovery.
“Do you know much about salvia?”
“It’s a hallucinogen. I’ve heard it compared to LSD. Supposed to be nonaddictive with no long-term side effects. The big trend right now is with kids filming their trips, posting them on YouTube.”
“You think that’s what was happening last night?”
“It would certainly explain their stories, the fireworks and laser light show. I had one kid telling me how loud the purple was.”
“We didn’t find a camera, though,” Maggie said.
“Nope. No camera.”
“And isn’t it a little strange that they would all see fireworks and a light show?”
“Kids are easily influenced. The drug might make them more impressionable. If one kid claimed he saw fireworks, maybe they all thought they did.”
Maggie noticed they had driven for miles on the rolling ribbon of two-lane asphalt and yet they hadn’t crossed a single intersection. The only breaks were a few long driveways to ranches or farms or cutouts to pastures. She couldn’t help thinking that even in the middle of nowhere these kids knew about salvia and were able to purchase it illegally. Donny was right. Teenagers were easily influenced and not much different no matter where they lived.
“If we’re right,” Maggie said, “chances are this wasn’t their first trip, so to speak, in the forest. Can we get ahold of Trevor’s and Kyle’s text messages and their computers?”
“I can probably do that.”
“When we were looking at the cattle mutilation … ” Maggie started but paused. Was it only yesterday? “Nolan Comstock mentioned lights in the night sky. Said people were used to seeing them.”
She watched as Donny’s jaw twitched.
“He didn’t seem to be a crazy, old rancher,” she said, choosing the two adjectives that Skylar had used to describe Lucy. “Do people see lights in the night sky? And if so, what are they?”
He was quiet for a while then said, “We really are smack-dab between two major air force installations. It’s no secret they fly maneuvers over this part of the country. They probably test drive all kinds of strange new technology. And of course, they’re not going to be announcing it or admitting it.”
“Any chance that’s what these kids saw? Some sort of clandestine war game.”
“No. The government wouldn’t purposely hurt kids.” He looked offended by the idea.
She didn’t push it. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but she needed Donny Fergussen on her side. She remembered the look Sheriff Skylar had given her when she told them Johnny Bosh was dead. There was something about it that made Maggie realize a lot of people would be taking sides before all this was over.
THIRTY-TWO
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Benjamin Platt carried a hard-shell case filled with an assortment of samples. He was anxious to get back to a lab at USAMRIID. Bix had overnighted a set to his CDC scientists in Atlanta as well. Platt would, no doubt, be cross-checking what Bix’s experts had looked for at the Norfolk high school, including a variety of strains of E. coli and salmonella along with norovirus and a few other sneaky bacteria. He also had more than a dozen baggies filled with leftovers and garbage that he and Julia Racine had carefully scavenged.
He was still smiling at Julia’s last remark: “I’ve never seen a guy get so excited about vomit. Your mother must be very proud.”
She stood beside him now, shoulder holster in full view as if providing backup while he loaded the samples into his Land Rover. They ignored the media that had followed, tossing questions and sticking microphones in their faces. That’s when Racine pushed back her jacket to show her badge as well as her firearm. She shoved one reporter off the curb then held out her hand like a running back, strong-arming anyone else who dared get in their way.
Finally inside the vehicle, Platt was ready to make a getaway. He revved the engine to warn the Channel 5 news crew at his hood that he wouldn’t hesitate to roll over them. He accelerated forward, braked hard. Watched the big guy with a camera jump-step out of his way. Suddenly the back door to the Land Rover opened. Racine turned ready to pounce over the seat. Roger Bix slid inside.
“Go,” Bix said. “Run these assholes over if you have to.” Halfway down the street Platt said, “I’m taking Detective Racine to her car. You want me to take you to yours?”
“USDA just invited us over to their house to play a game of information swap.”
“Really? I thought they had to assess your request.”
“Evidently they’ve assessed it. My guess, our new Miss Undersecretary watched a little television this afternoon and is now as nervous as a long-tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
Platt glanced at Racine then at Bix in the rearview mirror. Bix was finally slipping back to his old self, using metaphors that would still sound ridiculous even without the Southern drawl.
“So you want me to drop you off at the Department of Agriculture?”
“Drop me off? I thought we were in this together. Like Batman and Robin or the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”
Platt bit back: “More like Archie and Jughead,” and added, “Believe me, Roger, I’m more useful to you in a research lab, hunting for what made these kids sick. Not in some office, sipping tea, eating finger food, and batting around political mumbo-jumbo.”
“Actually you’re both coming with me. I need a show of force.”
“What happened to Agent Tully?”
“His boss said there wasn’t enough information yet to make this an FBI matter.” Bix pursed his lips and muttered, “Bastard.”
“Officially, I’m not assigned to this case either,” Racine told him.
Bix held up his cell phone. “Who do I need to call to get you officially assigned?”
“Roger, this is her day off. What the hell’s going on with you?”
“Only twenty minutes,” Bix promised.
“Sure, why not. I’m hungry.”
Before Platt could argue, Bix’s cell phone started playing something that sounded more like salsa when Platt would have expected country western. The guy was full of surprises.
Bix glanced at the caller ID, frowned, then shook his head as he answered, “This is Bix.” He listened for several seconds and finally said, “Yes, of course, I believe you. I never said I didn’t believe you.”
Platt exchanged looks with Julia but stayed quiet. He continued to shoot glances at the rearview mirror, watching Bix. The man appeared visibly shaken, eyes darting outside the vehicle windows as if trying to locate his caller someplace on the sidewalks of the District. Was that sweat on his upper lip?
“Christ almighty, you cannot be serious.” It came out as a hiss of disbelief rather than anger. “You’ve got to gi
ve me more than that to go on. Hold on. Wait a minute.” He brought the phone down and stared at it before he slapped it shut. The person had hung up before Bix was finished.
He wiped a sleeve across his sweaty face and then said, “There’s going to be more schools.”
He said it so quietly Platt wasn’t sure he heard him correctly.
“What do you mean, going to be?” Julia asked.
“If we don’t figure this out by Monday morning then Monday afternoon there’ll be more sick kids.”
“Who did you just talk to, Roger?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is this some food terrorist plot?” Julia asked.
“Almost as bad,” Bix said. “But not a terrorist. A whistle-blower.”
THIRTY-THREE
NEBRASKA
Since North Platte was an hour and a half away, Maggie called and told Lucy not to wait. She had finished the autopsy on one boy and was doing an external examination of the second when Donny and Maggie walked in.
Maggie had to admit, she was impressed with the autopsy suite, a bright, gleaming pathology lab in the basement of the community hospital. After discovering the archaism of Nebraska’s coroner system, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
Last night Lucy had tried to explain how Nebraska law required the county attorney to also be the coroner, which put prosecutors across the state in charge of each county’s death investigations. It was a ninety-year-old law that set few standards, leaving it up to individual county attorneys to determine if and when an investigation even took place. No medical training was necessary. Death investigation training, which amounted to a day down in Lincoln, was optional. At one time Lucy Coy was the only professionally trained medical examiner in a five-county area.
“You have to understand,” Lucy had said last night, “Nebraska has about 1.6 million people in the entire state and a million of them live within a fifty-mile radius of Omaha and Lincoln. Both cities, of course, have their own medical examiners and homicide departments. Lincoln has the State Patrol Crime Lab. Omaha has the Douglas County Regional Crime Lab. They have all the high-tech luxuries, you might say, of a metropolitan city, but that’s also where most of the crimes happen. In this part of the state it isn’t like people are stabbed or shot to death every week. It just isn’t necessary to have all the technology and specialties.”
“Unless it’s your family or friend who winds up dead out here in the middle of the Sandhills,” Maggie had countered.
“It’s been said before”—Lucy had shrugged—“that if you want to get away with murder, western Nebraska would be a good place to try it.”
When Donny had given Maggie his geography lesson yesterday, she hadn’t quite translated what that sort of isolation could mean. Today she was beginning to understand firsthand.
She was, however, relieved to finally have some familiar surroundings. Even the scrub gowns were the same—two sizes too large, which Maggie always believed was on purpose to reduce guests to a more vulnerable state. Sometimes law enforcement officers required a bit of humility to relate to the victim. But Donny’s gown stretched tight across his barrel chest. The shoe covers didn’t quite make it all the way up his heels.
Lucy had her hands on Kyle Bandor’s ankle, her long fingers in purple latex. She looked up at Maggie.
“I heard what happened,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“You already heard about Johnny Bosh?”
“Unfortunately bad news travels fast. Oliver Cushman will be doing the death investigation.”
“County Attorney Cushman? The man I sent away last night.”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful. Will he even order an autopsy?”
“For a suicide?” Lucy looked to Donny for the answer but he shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “He’ll probably order a toxicology report.” She glanced back at Maggie. “How did he look?”
“Dead,” Maggie said bluntly, avoiding Lucy’s eyes, suddenly aware of them studying her with genuine concern. She didn’t like the fact that if she closed her eyes right now she would still see Johnny Bosh staring at her.
“I didn’t see any drug paraphernalia,” Maggie explained. “His skin wasn’t red like it can be from certain poisons. His eyes were bloodshot but it didn’t look like petechial hemorrhage, so whatever he took didn’t strangle or asphyxiate him. I didn’t smell or see any vomit. His mother told us she noticed some OxyContin missing from her medicine cabinet.”
“Depending on how many he ingested and if he crushed them … most likely he suffered a cardiac arrest. Was there a note?” Lucy asked.
“If there was, no one’s found it yet.” Maggie remembered the boy’s cell phone in the side pocket of her suitcase. She was hoping it might offer some clues. Later she’d figure out if she could recharge it and take a look before handing it back to the family or—cringe—to County Attorney Cushman.
“Well, let me share what I’ve found so far.”
Lucy left Kyle with a soft double tap to his chest as though telling the boy she would be right back. Maggie was struck by the intimacy of the gesture. She’d watched dozens of medical examiners, coroners, and pathologists in her ten years as a federal agent and during her forensic fellowship. She believed it took a special personality to work with the dead, to slice tissue, pluck off maggots, suck out brains, and section apart organs, reducing the human body to bits and pieces all in an effort to solve a mystery, tell a story, and hopefully reveal secrets that even the killer couldn’t hide.
In Maggie’s experience the MEs and their counterparts were detail-oriented, efficient problem solvers, thinkers not feelers. They didn’t personalize their surgical procedures even while showing and demanding respect for the victim. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d watched a medical examiner stare down a visiting law enforcement officer who, in his own discomfort with the procedure, had made an off-color remark.
But there was something different in the way Lucy conducted business in an autopsy suite. Maggie watched as Lucy pulled a sheet off the first boy—the sheet, in and of itself, was a courtesy rarely used at this stage.
“Trevor displayed external signs of electrocution. He’s the one we examined in the forest.” She gently took his right foot in her hands, turning it slowly as if not to disturb the boy and showing the extent of the damage.
In the forest, Maggie had noticed that Trevor’s high-top sneaker had been blown off his right foot, leaving a smudge of black on his sock. Now with no shoe or sock she could see the broken blood vessels at the top of his foot and the charred leathery burn at the bottom.
“In cases of electrocution,” Lucy said, placing his foot down and going to the other end of the stainless-steel table, “the electrical current has a source point. Often the head or hands. In Trevor’s case it was up at his left shoulder.” She pointed at the obvious wound where the skin puckered red, swollen, and blistered. “The current passes through the body, usually taking the path of least resistance, choosing nerves and tissue rather than skin. The ground point is often the feet.”
She waved them closer to take a look inside his chest cavity. Maggie noticed Lucy hadn’t removed any of Trevor’s organs yet.
“Muscles contract,” she continued. “The nervous system goes haywire. Temporary paralysis results. And depending how high the voltage, organs, including the brain, can hemorrhage. As you can see.”
Donny had slid his hands into his trouser pockets. Without his Stetson Maggie thought he looked disarmed. But he didn’t seem fazed by any of this.
“This definitely wasn’t a Taser,” he said.
“No. Definitely not a Taser.”
“Any idea where the electrical current came from?” he asked.
“Take a closer look at the source point.”
Lucy’s purple-gloved finger traced over the shoulder wound. “Are either of you familiar with how lasers cut?”
She paused as Donny and Maggie exchanged a glance. The question seemed t
o come out of left field. Lucy didn’t wait for an answer.
“Lasers actually cut by burning or breaking apart molecules that bond tissue together. It looks like Trevor was initially cut when the electrical current hit his shoulder. Take a look.” She stood back. “It cauterizes the cuts automatically so there’s no blood.”
“You’re suggesting these two boys were hit and electrocuted by a laser beam?” Maggie asked. She didn’t bother to hide her skepticism.
“It would need to be a very intense laser pulse. But yes, that’s what I believe hit them.”
“And it just came out of the sky?”
“Or maybe a laser stun gun,” Donny said.
“Is there such a thing?”
“It uses a laser beam to ionize, if that’s the correct term.” Lucy nodded and he continued. “The ionized air produces sort of threadlike filaments of glowing plasma from the gun to the target. Supposedly you can sweep a lightning-like beam of electricity across a wide area. I can’t remember how many feet away. They call it a shock rifle. It can interrupt a vehicle’s electronic ignition system and stop it cold.”
“That would certainly explain the light show the kids talked about,” Maggie said. “But I don’t know of any available weapon like that. Are you sure you’re not just reading too many science digests, Investigator Fergussen?”
“Oh there’re available but there’s only one place I know of that would have them.”
“And where might that be?”
“The United States Department of Defense.”
THIRTY-FOUR
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Platt and Bix trailed behind Julia and their security escort to the third-floor conference room. Julia was still complaining about having to leave her weapon. Platt took the opportunity to whisper to Bix, “What’s the game plan, Roger?”
“Just follow my lead. This is solely to gather information.”
“No task force?”