Before I Wake

by Dee Henderson

  “The dose she got is the most likely reason. She got a borderline lethal dose, not enough to trigger a heart attack or seizure. She got hot, and heat is one of the body’s defense mechanisms. It’s possible her body was able to sweat some of it out of her system before it got hold. Fast transfusions, hydration, help for her lungs—we got lucky with something, enough to help her body win.”

  Nathan looked back at her and at the awful stillness as she lay there, monitored, but on her own now to fight this off. He worried about how much of that fight she had already lost in the last hours. “How long before we know the damage?”

  “She’ll be stirring by morning; there’s no indication of coma. It’s fast acting which gives us some help on the recovery side—it’s fast to decay out of her system too. We’ll know a lot more in forty-eight hours.” Franklin rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Nathan. I didn’t see this coming.”

  “You’ve been giving me 100 percent and then some on this mystery. At this point we’ve just got to find it.”

  “I’ve got blood work going to every expert I can think to ask for help.”

  “Rae may give us the best clues for where to look. We need to talk with her just as soon as she begins to stir. If she can talk to us.”

  “MRI and CAT scans were both promising. We’re hoping for the best. Don’t fear the worst until we know something. The staff can find you some relatively comfortable chairs for the room. There’s no reason you and Bruce can’t stay with her even through this ICU stretch. All the signs are she’s returning to a normal sleep.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  * * *

  Nathan flipped through the photos Gray Sillman had brought him. The officer had walked through Rae’s hotel room taking detailed pictures of everything in the room to start giving them something to work with for the search. “You’ve bagged everything.”

  “Tried to. We know it’s a drug, Nathan. We know it’s something they breathe in or eat or by some means get into their system. But you and Bruce are walking around, so it’s got to be something that she encountered between when you left and the early hours of Sunday morning.”

  “You said she left her hotel room.”

  “Three times. Twice briefly for about two minutes each time: we walked it; that suggests a trip to the ice machine and vending area on her floor. I’ve closed both vending and the ice machines for that floor as a precaution.”

  “We used the last of the ice trying to cool her off, so if it was something in that ice she used with her drink, we destroyed what evidence might be left.”

  “I bagged the towels you used; all may not be lost there. The third time she left the room was for about eighteen minutes. I think she went downstairs to use the business-center copy machine—we found photocopies for ten curled notebook pages and I don’t think she made those while you and Bruce were there. Rae had jotted notes on the copies, deciphering faint phone numbers.”

  “She hadn’t made them before Bruce and I left her. So she was downstairs in the hotel. That widens the scope of this considerably.”

  “Management is cooperating. I’ve got guys trying to photograph and bag anything from the business center that she could have touched or anything she might have eaten—the complimentary welcome table is in the hall between the elevator and the business center. Coffee, cookies, nuts, chocolate squares—it’s all being removed to be tested.”

  Bruce joined them. “Her family is here.”

  Nathan nodded at Bruce’s quiet words. “Tina told me. We’ll give them some privacy for a while. What do you think?” he offered the stack of photos.

  Bruce looked through the stack, flipping several to the top. “All the obvious things to check, the drinking glass she used, the empty soda can, the food—but we’re looking for something not obvious at this point. I don’t know.”

  He turned one of the photos. “The pillow she was using as she stretched out on the bed. Was it something on the pillowcase that she breathed in? It’s something that hits at night. Every lady so far—they’ve been pillow people.”

  “Yes,” Nathan agreed. “It’s that kind of thinking we need more of. Gray, when the next batch of photographs come in from the business center and what’s between her room and that center, get some of the clerical staff to just brainstorm what-ifs. We need a list of those pillowcase-type ideas. We’ve got to check everything.”

  “I’ll get it to happen.” He slid the photos back into his folder. “Will wants to know if you want to call in the state guys.”

  “Are your guys tripping over themselves at the hotel?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You can handle the evidence collection. Franklin has already brought in drug experts to help him with the toxicology on the blood. The strike is another matter—we may need to borrow Brentwood guys if the negotiations collapse.” Nathan looked at his watch. “Give me an update every two hours for how it’s going at the hotel. I’d like to just get us through tonight if possible and see where we are at in the morning before we go for outside help.”

  “Will do.”

  * * *

  “Nathan.”

  Nathan opened his eyes and raised his head to turn and see his chief deputy in the doorway. “It’s okay, Will.” A day of no change wore on a man in ways nothing else ever could. He glanced at the wall clock and realized it was after midnight. Nathan stepped out of the ICU room to join his deputy.

  “The negotiators have a draft contract in place.”

  “They got it done.” Nathan breathed out a sigh of relief. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. I just left the lakefront house. Zachary is catching a plane to walk corporate through it and to fight to get it blessed. Adam is heading out for a few hours of sleep.”

  “What’s the mood?”

  “Fifty-fifty, which seems to be better than it was a few hours ago. If corporate will sign off, Adam expects the union will vote to ratify it. No one will be happy, but it’s a fair deal on both sides.”

  “Strikebreakers will be at the plant this morning?”

  “Yes. Zachary couldn’t get that decision reversed. We’ll escort the bus in the same as we did Friday. The union line will be heavy, we think, so we’re going to have Chet bring in several of his patrol officers to create a cordon in and see if we can’t defuse anything from getting started that way.”

  “Do you need me out there?”

  Will looked toward the ICU bed where Rae rested. “We need to know who’s killing people in this town. Stay put. As bad as the strike is, this is much worse. You can be at the plant in five minutes if it starts to go bad. Adam and I will stay tight, and I’ll have your dad and grandfather serving as intermediaries with the union rank and file.”

  “Remind me to talk you into running for sheriff next election. You deserve a pay raise.”

  Will smiled. “And deal with the media? You know I’ve got the better job of the two of us.” Will nodded toward the ICU room. “I hope she comes out of it soon.”

  “The docs are optimistic. Stay in touch.”

  “We’ll get through this Monday,” Will reassured. He headed back to the elevators.

  Nathan walked back into the ICU room and moved over to the bedside to study Rae. He thought she was breathing just a little easier. He’d been grasping at straws all day for any signs of change. He looked again at the clock. Almost twenty-two hours since they thought she had collapsed in that hotel room. “It’s time to open your eyes, Rae,” he whispered. “Time to smile at your guys. We’re worried about you.”

  He moved her relaxed hand on the blanket to change her position a small bit, wondering if in her sleep she could feel the movement. Her family had visited for several hours, and finally had been talked into going to a nearby hotel to get some sleep.

  “She’s going to wake up eventually.”

  Nathan looked over at Bruce, the man so rumpled and tired and with a heavy shadow of a beard coming in that he looked like a grizzly stirri
ng from hibernation.

  “She will, if only to keep you on the straight and narrow,” Nathan replied.

  Bruce smiled at the whispered words. “Yeah.” He sighed. “Hard to imagine her not in my life, you know? We’ve been friends back as far as my memory goes.”

  Nathan settled back into the chair beside his friend. Bruce was slipping Rae’s pearl ring that the hospital had removed earlier in the day on and off his little finger, holding it for her so it wouldn’t be lost. Nathan couldn’t imagine what this day had to be like for his friend. They had spent a good three hours on the edge of losing her before the doctors began to show their first signs of relaxing and expecting her to make a recovery. “She’ll pull out of this none the worse for wear.”

  “Has to.” Bruce sighed. “I nearly asked her to marry me eleven years ago, had the ring bought and everything. Not smart, not asking her then. She’s been carrying around a ring won at a county fair instead.”

  Bruce rubbed a hand across his face. “I’m going to go get more coffee. I hate waiting. It’s a whole lot easier to be the one in the bed than to be sitting here waiting.”

  “I know.”

  Bruce got to his feet. “It means a lot to me that you stayed. Just in case I don’t tell you that later.”

  Nathan glanced at the bed. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

  * * *

  “Hey, lady.”

  Nathan nudged Bruce, waking his friend. The long night was ending for all of them. Dawn was peeking in the window, so that he could watch her stir without a side light on. He’d been seeing the early signs for a few minutes now but hadn’t dared hope he’d see those eyes open until they finally did.

  “Nathan,” Rae whispered. He watched her assimilate where she was at. She lifted a hand and rubbed at her forehead. “Talk about a killer headache.” He moved with Bruce to the bedside. She lowered her hand, glanced at the taped-down needles in the back of her wrist, and gave him a tired smile. “I won’t ask where am I; it’s not the first time medical staff have stuck me full of tubes and assumed it was for a good cause. Almost victim four?”

  “Way too close. We couldn’t get you to answer the hotel-room door. Bruce kicked it down.” She looked much more coherent than he had expected, and her voice was softer than normal but clear. He could feel the relief settling inside at those realizations.

  She smiled over Nathan’s shoulder at her friend. “Thanks.”

  “What happened?” Bruce asked softly.

  “I don’t know—I was working. I was pleasantly punch-drunk from lack of sleep. My notes were turning into gibberish. I turned down the temperature and stretched out to close my eyes for a minute before I crawled into bed.”

  “It was close to ninety-five in your room. You turned the heat on full blast.”

  “Really?” That puzzled her but she shook her head. “I don’t remember feeling ill; if anything I was feeling pleasantly good. But the dreams were bad, too real to be dreams.”

  “Do you remember them?”

  “Floating images of ghosts, blood smears, someone asking about flowers.” She gave a fading smile. “Not exactly workable facts.”

  “Did anyone stop by your hotel room?” Nathan asked, hating to push for answers but needing them urgently. “A room-service order? A fax? A delivery of any kind?”

  “No. I had all the Peggy files and notes in the file box I’ve been carrying with me; I spread them on the bed and started working through them, comparing them to the drying pages from the notebook, looking for common names, dates—just working.”

  “You had several things to eat and drink in your wastebasket. Did you get them from the vending machine at the hotel?” Bruce asked her.

  “I’ve avoided the vending machine since Karen’s death. I had picked several items up at the pharmacy and the corner store. I had the sacks next to the dresser; I set them off on the floor when we opened the pizza box.”

  “Did anything taste odd? smell odd?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  Nathan moved over to the side table and poured her a glass of ice water. He held it and the straw for her. She sipped at it and gratefully nodded her thanks.

  “Talk to Walter about his itch cream,” she whispered. “It was the one new thing I’ve used. I started my second jar of it yesterday. That, and the shampoo was a new brand for me.”

  “Do you have any of the itch cream at the hotel room?”

  “My purse, in a small tin.”

  She closed her eyes, sighed. “Sorry, guys. Nausea is bad. We’ll have to do this later.”

  “The doctor is on his way in,” Nathan reassured.

  She tiredly smiled. “More poking and prodding. Just what a girl needs to make her morning.” She caught his hand. “Seriously. Thanks,” she whispered. “Both of you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Rae. You’ll be walking out of here in another couple days or I’ll be breaking you out,” Bruce promised.

  She smiled at her friend. “You need a shave. They’ll declare you a walking danger zone soon.”

  “Like it?” He rubbed the beard.

  “Bet it still feels like a porcupine kissing you. Go away. I want to rag on the doctor in private about how much I hate needles. I just realized how many IV lines they have stuck in me.”

  “Yeah.” Bruce smiled and tweaked the blankets covering her feet, then stepped back to let the doctor through. “I thought that might be high on your list of first comments too. We’ll be back.”

  32

  Franklin tugged off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Nathan understood that reality of little sleep since Rae had been found in the hotel room twenty-four hours ago.

  “The cream matches Walter’s recipe, all over-the-counter items in the specific proportions he quotes. There’s nothing showing as an unknown substance.”

  “The aspirin? At least two of the three had used aspirin.”

  “The tablet remaining in the packet Rae opened tests as pure aspirin. If it was poured in their drink, there would be a residual trace in the liquid remaining in the glass or can. There isn’t. If it was mixed in something they ate, then they ate the entire thing it was mixed with.”

  “Maybe something we haven’t thought to look at—toothpaste, deodorant,” Nathan offered. “Maybe it’s slowly being absorbed over time then overwhelming the system like a snake venom does.”

  “Rae’s observation that rather than feel bad she had the sensation of feeling unusually good—that suggests an opiate reaction. A synthetic drug, mimicking that kind of pleasant high.”

  “But this drug kills. That’s not a profitable designer drug.”

  “It didn’t kill Rae,” the coroner pointed out. “The drug is getting more refined. Peggy was a seizure then a heart attack. Karen was just a heart attack. Rae, as best we can tell, was a pleasant high that went toward paralysis—had the sedative otherwise been tempered a bit more she might have woke with a headache, memories of weird dreams, but otherwise remembering a night of feeling very good. This drug is being perfected, whatever it is. At some point it’s going to stop killing, and start being an expensive and nasty drug on the street. Probably highly addictive.”

  “How long do I have to find it and the person doing this?”

  “At the rate we’re seeing the tests—he’ll have his formula ready for the market inside two weeks. After that—the only limiting factor on this guy will be how much of it he can make.”

  Nathan closed his eyes, then opened them and faced reality. “Have any idea what we’re dealing with, Franklin?”

  “If we’re looking at a new drug class and I’m afraid we are—it’s a month of several labs working just to isolate the substance in Rae’s blood, assuming we even have enough of a level in her blood to test, another month to figure out the chemical compound. If it’s truly new—current laws won’t even classify the compound as a controlled substance, so technically, it won’t be illegal to possess the final
product, even if it is illegal to possess all the precursor chemicals being used to manufacture it. Having a recommended way to treat overdoses, developing a blood test that can recognize it, training doctors—”

  “I get the picture. It’s not good.”

  “If manufacturing of this drug can happen in quantities, we just became the epicenter of a new storm.”

  33

  Nathan left Bruce with Rae at the hospital late Monday afternoon and drove through town, turning his attention to his other growing crisis of the day. The entry into the plant this morning by the strikebreakers’ bus hadn’t gone smoothly, but at least it had gone by without injury. Getting the bus safely out—it was looking to be an open question.

  Nathan parked down the road from the plant. He got out of his car and just stood absorbing the scene. A day of shouted words, of watching someone else take their jobs, of swirling rumors of the plant closing, had turned the strike line from righteous anger to deep-seated anger. He didn’t like the feel of the situation. He wondered how many on the line knew the decision on the plant’s fate was less than seventy-two hours away. His officers on the scene had done a remarkably good job managing the situation through the afternoon.

  Nathan walked over to join Adam and offered his hand. “It’s been a long weekend, friend.”

  “Very. How’s Miss Gabriella?”

  “Coming out of it well, I’m thankful to say. Sillman is trying to get a handle around what is happening.” Nathan nodded to the two management negotiators talking with his father. “Zachary got safely away this morning?”

  “His flight left at 5 a.m.”

  “He’ll get them to see reason.”

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed. We made it a three-year deal just to buy us some more time before we would have to do this again. I give it a fifty-fifty shot, Nathan.”