Before I Wake

by Dee Henderson

  Nathan moved left to sweep the rooms, and Will went right.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  * * *

  “He was back here, at least briefly,” Will decided.

  “I agree.” Nathan could still see the snow tracks that glistened with water leading from the kitchen back to the back bedroom. The signs of someone frantically opening drawers and cupboards were everywhere.

  “Clothes are cleared out. The chest is open; the underwear drawer is empty.”

  “Think he grabbed his bag and got out as fast as he could?”

  “I don’t see much care taken in the leaving.”

  Nathan put in a call for Sillman to join them. They would need to sort out anything they could find for where Isaac was heading. A few hours too late, but at least they knew one person they were after.

  “What’s this?” Will leaned over the beat-up sofa in the living room and then shoved aside the piece of furniture. A sledgehammer rested on the floor, and the wall had a nice hole in it, about knee high. “Stash site.”

  “I’d say.”

  Will got down to check out the busted wall with his flashlight. “Cash. More than I’ve ever seen in one place before.” He reached up into the wall and pulled a plastic wrapped bundle out from between the studs. He reached in and found another one.

  Nathan walked over to watch. “How much is in there?”

  Will tried to get a look into the wall. “Possibly several more bundles. I can’t reach that high.”

  Nathan picked up the one near him and tore through the plastic wrapping. He held one of the dollars up to the light. “Real bills. Security stripe, watermark, and all look like used bills, not new. Isaac must have taken what he could carry and left the rest. Or he took the twenties and left the smaller denominations. This package looks like ones and fives.”

  “Same with these.”

  Will picked up the sledgehammer. “What do you think?”

  “I’m not planning to leave this kind of thing around for just any officer to watch over. Break it out.”

  Will put a hole in the wall higher up.

  Bundles of money tumbled out to the floor. Nathan got his first real look at the wall as a chunk of drywall flapped out. “Bundles between every stud? What did he do, drywall over a million dollars?”

  Will poked his fingers into a gap and tugged more drywall free. “Don’t laugh. Inches per bundle times the number of stud openings in a standard wall this length—it’s probably more like two million.”

  “He never spent it around this town.”

  “I knew the kid was disciplined, helping his dad with the shop as he was and working the part-time job at the plant, but disciplined enough to do this kind of job and just sit on it?”

  “Ambitious is more like it. He wanted to make it big by the time he was thirty and the only way not to give himself away in a small town was to be very careful about it.”

  “He left a lot of money behind.”

  “I’m betting it’s not personally his money. Remember those tile-plant boxes? They fit for holding a couple of these bundles. Isaac was probably receiving in money, storing it, and sending it on for someone else. A money mule.”

  “Okay. That makes sense. Which means the bundles he took with him might not be his own money, and someone out there is going to be very upset with him when they realize we have this house.”

  “I’m leaning that way,” Nathan agreed. “Let’s get a statewide APB out on him.”

  “Where’s he likely to run?” Will asked, tugging more money bundles out of the wall to stack up on the couch.

  “I suppose it depends if he’s just trying to hide, or if he’s trying to leave and get out of the country. His family is mostly around here.”

  “Do you think his father is involved? The senior Keif?”

  “He loves chocolate and that shop. There’s never been a suspicion the man was anything but aboveboard. Maybe a bit of this money is keeping the business afloat, but I can’t see its source being something known to the father.”

  “This isn’t a new designer drug we’re seeing here, Nathan. This is an established drug business transit point—cash, drugs, not a small vial of something new they are testing. That may be almost a minor side business of what was really going on here.”

  “I agree.”

  Sillman joined them and stepped into the living room. “If you told me about it, I wouldn’t have believed it. What is this, his private bank?”

  “Sure looks it. I need you to handle this scene, Gray, so Will and I can chase down where this guy is heading.”

  “I can take it. But you’d better get someone from the DA’s office sitting here with me and someone from the bank able to open their vault tonight. This money is real; it’s not counterfeit?”

  “It’s genuine US currency,” Will confirmed. “I want to know how he was managing to move this kind of cash around without someone hearing rumors of its existence.”

  “He was working at a tile plant part-time, he was working for his father at the chocolate shop part-time, and he had a growing large scale drug business forming. This is one enterprising young man,” Sillman agreed.

  “This kind of cash says he’s had a long-term operation going on under our noses. Or at least he’s been working for someone else for a long time.”

  Will put another hole in the wall, then stopped to nod at the money piles. “You have to admit, stopping by restaurants and hotels frequently to refill free chocolate sample baskets is an awful good cover for also meeting customers who are buying drugs from you. Cash transactions, public parking lots, stopping to chat with someone he knows just looking like a chance encounter and social exchange. He was all over this town and no one would question seeing him.”

  Sillman thought about that. “And working at the tile plant—he could raise the volume of product he could handle just by being able to ship in a case of contraband occasionally instead of just a can or two. Why be involved in a new designer drug? From the look of this he’s got a large business already under way.”

  Nathan pulled down window shades, aware they had residents of the block now beginning to be spectators wondering what was going on at this Keif place. “What do you think? Isaac is the second guy we’re after, the facilitator? For cash he’ll move product via the tile plant warehouse; he’ll handle the distribution of product to buyers for a cut of the profits. He’ll store and ship money around. He’s a utility fielder, not someone using his own product. A designer drug isn’t his game, but maybe it is someone else’s who’s in the area and Isaac’s just willing to be of help for a price.”

  “The shots at the tile plant—maybe they were protecting something related to this designer drug. Or maybe it was just to protect a few pounds of pure cocaine still stored in the warehouse.”

  Nathan knew they could talk it in circles all night, but he had enough to make some judgment calls. “Sillman, let’s take apart this place and learn as much as you can about Isaac Keif in the next few hours.

  “Will, I need you to talk to the HazMat guys and see how the cabin cleanup is going. See if there is anything which points us more toward who the cook is. What we have so far seems to be just Isaac and the distribution side of this. I’m going to meet up with the coroner and see what he can tell us about this designer drug itself, based on the chemicals being used to make it. As diverting as the tile plant has been today and this find, we need to get focused back on locating this drug designer and stopping him before we get a call about another death. This is cleanup; that designer drug is an imminent threat.”

  “Give me an hour, and I’ll tell you if there is anything like a paper stash in this place that might give you names or dates of who Isaac was working with,” Sillman agreed.

  Nathan pulled out his keys and hoped he was up to driving. He looked around the living room one more time. “Let’s hope the state boys don’t want to claim all of this seized cash for their task force. I could fix the department
roof with one of those bundles.”

  Will smiled. “What do you say I stick with Sillman until the DA guy arrives? I’ll call for another car to pick me up.”

  “Very good thinking. I’d hate to have one officer run over by townsfolk hearing there is two million bucks in this apartment. Put high on the list coming up with a way to block that busted front door too.”

  Sillman laughed but nodded.

  Nathan left them to sort it out.

  * * *

  Nathan let himself into the Chapel Detective Agency. Bruce was pushing around papers on Margaret’s desk, muttering to himself. Nathan smiled. “I got your call, Bruce. It sounded urgent.”

  “Rae has something you need to see.” He looked up and paused to take a second look. “Man, you look awful.”

  “I feel worse.”

  “She’s back in her office. I’ll join you if I can ever find this phone number.”

  Nathan remembered carrying in Rae’s new desk. He didn’t think he could lift so much as her lamp right now, but he did appreciate the fact her office furniture was beautiful and new. With blood dried on his jeans, a borrowed shirt from someone, and who knew what staining his shoes, he didn’t plan to cross the threshold. “I’ll stand here, I think.”

  “Get in here, Nathan. Chairs clean, I’m tracking around who knows what too, and the carpets will clean. I’m sorry to make the call so urgent, but I thought you might want to hear this in person. But your news can come first, if you don’t mind.”

  Nathan took a seat and nearly sighed with the comfort of it. “I love these chairs. Isaac appears to be alive and well and to have skipped town while the plant burned. He’s the inside guy at the plant. He was the one handling shipping product in and out. And he had about two million plus in used bills stuffed into the walls of his apartment.”

  “You’re kidding me.” She paused as she thought about it. “They were moving currency with the tile-plant boxes, shipping it around?”

  “I think so. This wasn’t a new designer-drug operation, Rae. Isaac has been active for quite a while with more traditional products. The designer drug looks to be just a small sideline of what Isaac was doing.”

  “I was about to tell you the same thing, but with a different twist. I think you’re going to find Isaac was a lot more involved than just shipping product around. Remember Peggy’s notes about a rumor on the street—a drug with a unique delivery system. Chocolate. Our guys figured out how to deliver their drug in a piece of chocolate.”

  Nathan rocked forward in the chair and nearly put his hurt elbow down on his knee before he caught himself. “You’re serious? You can prove it?”

  Rae started to smile. “Yeah. I think I can. Franklin sent over some of the notebook pages from that cabin for me to compare handwriting samples with this file of items Peggy had collected, thinking she might have had a better lead on this cook than we realized. I haven’t found anything on that yet, but I did start to make sense of what was on the formula pages, and that’s what got me thinking chocolate in the first place. It fits, to a few things in Peggy’s notes, and some of the unusual items being retrieved from the cabin tonight. We’ve found out how the drug was being delivered.

  “The heat of melted chocolate would destroy most drugs; that’s why you rarely see drugs mixed with other things. They must have figured out a solution to that problem. And a guy who had been around making chocolates all his life would bring that expertise to the table. Talk about a clean way to put a drug on the market and sell it to the masses. They could form the chocolates into foil-wrapped chocolate kisses and sell them for twenty bucks a piece. No cop is going to be able to tell a piece of chocolate with a drug mixed in it from a piece that didn’t have it.”

  Nathan began to comprehend the scope of what it meant overall. “The beauty is in the packaging and delivery of the drug. The drug mix might be popular for what it is, but the real genius is making it safe for Middle America to try it.”

  “Exactly. Profitable. Easily shipped. With no way to detect it from millions of pounds of good chocolate in the retail world, and a way to made addicts out of a huge new slice of the public who would never think they would buy drugs.”

  “Can we prove that, that they got it to work? That these drug tests were getting delivered in the chocolate pieces?”

  “We know Peggy stopped at the Fine Chocolates Shop. We found the bag in her trash can. Karen may have tried one of the free samples at either the hotel check-in desk or at the restaurant checkout counter. Nella was known to love the chocolate and even dated the senior Keif. I’ve eaten the free chocolate samples and visited the store.”

  Rae moved around papers. “It’s very possible some of the deaths were a failure in the delivery system, the way the drug was formulated into the chocolate. Either the interactions under heat were not well understood, or the concentrations were going higher than they expected in the samples. This isn’t the kind of thing they would try on themselves to see how it worked, not those first pieces of chocolate. We’ll find some samples, Nathan, eventually there will be some found to test. At least we know the likely place to now look.”

  “I like the fact it fits, Rae. I like the fact it starts to remove open questions, rather than just create more.”

  “You still need to find out where they were mixing the drug into the chocolate. I don’t think they were doing it at the cabin; there weren’t basic things like butter and the rest of the ingredients for making chocolate out there, and nothing like the flat trays or wax paper or spatulas I think you would find. And I don’t think it’s being done at the chocolate shop—Isaac wouldn’t want his dad stumbling into something, assuming he wasn’t involved in this.”

  “We’ll find the place. I’ll check out the older Keif, but given it appears Isaac has been involved in this drug business for years, and the older Keif has already spent a lifetime building his chocolate shop and hasn’t eased off that pace in the last couple years—I think the son just decided to find a way to make an easier, faster living. The older Keif has put too much sweat equity into that business to risk throwing it away on something this illegal at this age of his life.”

  Rae nodded, agreeing with him. “Isaac Keif is half the equation. He’s the unique delivery system expert, the one who can take the drug and package it in chocolate in a way that can hold its properties. We’re still missing at least one more guy. There has to still be another cook out there who is making the drug powder itself. Isaac was too busy with his own business to spend hours poring over test tubes and textbooks. Whoever is making the designer-drug powder has to have a good solid knowledge of pharmacology and patience.”

  Nathan thought she was right. “The notebook found at the cabin, the formula notes, if this guy gets away, he’s still carrying his last notebook and the knowledge of his drug with him. He’ll just set up to manufacture it somewhere else.”

  “I know you don’t like the option, but maybe one of the town pharmacists?”

  “I personally had the handwriting in the notebooks checked against what we knew the men had signed. It’s not Walter Sr. or Walter Jr., and I’ve already got officers checking on Walter’s son Scott. His alibi for the last two days when the kid died looks tight. And I can prove he wasn’t one of our two shooters at the plant.” Nathan shook his head. “I don’t know; I’ll keep pushing that angle until I’m more comfortable they are off the list.”

  “Talk to the coroner. Maybe the drug they were trying to make will tell you something about who was trying to make it.”

  “I was on my way over there when Bruce called. You want to come along?”

  She hesitated.

  “Exhausted?”

  “As much as I so badly want to come, the idea of getting out of this chair right now is beyond me. I think I’ll sleep on Bruce’s couch tonight.”

  Nathan smiled. “Watch out for that support spring that likes to dig into your shoulder if you lay with your head toward the office door.”

  “It’s st
ill there?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Rae changed her mind and got to her feet to walk with him through the agency as he headed out. “You’ll call if there is something interesting the coroner has found?”

  “I will. If I don’t see you yet tonight, have a good rest.”

  “You’re at the hospital for your arm tomorrow afternoon?”

  “The white coats have me at 1 p.m. Let’s hope this is all wrapped up before then and they can just put me to sleep a happy man and I’ll stay sleeping for a couple weeks.”

  She smiled. “I just hope the surgeon is good.”

  “Please. They will x-ray it and tell me to take two aspirins and call them if it turns more swollen than it is. The elbow hurts, but it’s not that painful anymore. And the gunshot—at least he was a lousy shot and didn’t hit any bone.”

  She was starting to pale on him. “And since just listening to it is making you queasy, I’m going to forget about it for a while now.” Nathan smiled and nodded to Bruce. “Tell him to bring you in a sundae or something tonight. Start blocking out today.”

  “I will. Drive careful, Nathan.”

  “You want some company tonight, Nathan? I’m going to be done here in an hour. I can drive you around if nothing else,” Bruce offered.

  “Let me talk to the coroner and see what he has; then I may take you up on that. If I’m heading out to the cabin tonight, I’d like someone along who can push the car out of a snowed-in ditch if necessary. I’m sure that road has turned into a sheet of ice by now.”

  “I’ll be around. Just call, and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “Thanks, Bruce.” Nathan nodded a final good-bye to Rae and headed out.

  * * *

  Nathan settled gingerly into the chair in Franklin’s office, wondering and hoping this was the last visit he would be paying the coroner this year. At least Franklin hadn’t said to come on back to the morgue and talk while he worked.

  Franklin finished up the call he was on. “It’s good to see you walking around, Nathan. I heard it was bad.”

  “I hope to not repeat the experience,” Nathan replied, appreciating the doctor’s words. He wondered how many times he would be asked how he was doing or asked to tell the story of how he got shot over the next month. He lived in a curious town.