by Hadena James
We let ourselves into the guys’ room. I put the extra bottles on their sink and extra towels on the toilet lid. They’d be sure to find them there. A young woman was opening the door to the room next to mine. She smiled, which faltered a little when she saw Gabriel’s legs. I couldn’t blame her. Before I had gotten my key card in the lock, she was gone.
Gabriel followed me back into my room.
“Um, what are you doing?”
“My room feels weird,” he said.
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know, just weird. I’m not sure I can explain it. Have you ever just had the feeling that your room isn’t right?”
“I have it now.”
“I’m not talking about right now. I’m in here in a bathrobe. Of course you feel that way. I meant in general.”
“No, seriously, something is different about the room that wasn’t different before.” I began scanning the room. Nothing looked out of place. I took two steps into the room and noticed them. Miniscule dark spots on the carpet near the dresser, right where I had put my six-pack. I walked over to them, grabbed a tissue, and dropped it on top of the dark spots. It absorbed a tiny amount of liquid. “Oh hell, tell me I didn’t pour out all those bottles?”
“There are two left,” Gabriel stepped inside the bathroom.
“We may have a giant problem,” I joined him. I set one bottle back against the wall. With the second bottle in hand, I gently twisted the cap until the hiss of carbonation could be heard, then wrapped it in a tissue and turned it on its side. We both waited. A wet spot appeared on the napkin.
“Tell me that bottle isn’t leaking,” Gabriel said.
“I think they all were,” I answered, righting the bottle. “And that is a very small hole, microscopic almost. Where is your Pepsi?”
“Where it always is,” Gabriel answered. He kept it in the tank of his toilet, because he said it made it cold. “The water isn’t brown.”
“Harder to put a syringe in a can.” I shrugged. “But you might get it anyway.”
“Shit! I do not want to issue a tamper warning for South Dakota.” He skulked out of my room. I stared at the bottles. The liquid inside gave up no secrets, but I was betting that belladonna once extracted and concentrated was clear, especially if it wasn’t coming from the dark blue berries.
“We should get a team here to take these away!” I shouted. My room door was standing open, but I wasn’t sure if Gabriel had heard me. I’d tell him when he returned. In the meantime, I grabbed one of the new bottles from the machine and did the same thing. Nothing leaked. I finished uncapping it and took a drink. It smelled and tasted fine.
“They’re on their way,” Gabriel told me. “Are you sure nothing in your room has been disturbed?”
“Yeah, just the wet spots on the floor,” I answered.
“Are you drinking that?” He suddenly looked horrified.
“It is one of the bottles from the machine. Do you know how hard it is to tamper with them? They lay on their side all the time they are in the machine, plus they fall, which shakes them up. If they were poisoned, we would know it before we opened it. They would leak some of their contents out.”
“I’m gonna take your word for it, but if you die from poisoning, that will make me very cranky.”
“Me too.” I dug my phone out. “However, I think I have a solution for you.”
When you get here, Gabriel is convinced his room is full of bad juju. Needs a cleansing. Just found soda that might have been tampered with in my room, most likely at the store. Tell Lucas.
“Did you just text Fiona?”
“Bad juju in your room. She can get it out. Probably left by an angry maid.”
OMG! Don’t drink it! Was the response I got back.
Yeah, did not figure it would be one of the smarter lifestyle choices if I did, I responded.
Twelve
My sleep had been fitful. Our serial killer was no longer a serial killer if he was tampering with things like soda. It even moved him above the status of mass murderer. I hadn’t been around for the great Chicago Tylenol Tampering case, but it was impossible not to at least know about it. That had led to tamper-resistant packaging, massive recalls, and it had been about more than just killing people.
Mass murderers were supposed to climb to the tops of buildings with sniper rifles or walk into a busy restaurant with a fully automatic weapon. They were not supposed to go around injecting bottles of soda with belladonna.
Lucas looked like I felt. Dark circles had formed under his eyes, his skin looked pale, and his eyes were hollow. He had no doubt been searching his memory banks during the night to figure out other tampering cases. We didn’t have official confirmation of it yet, but it was going to be a nightmare if I was right.
“It’s got to be a man,” Lucas finally said. “Women do not do this sort of killing.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why isn’t a woman, who history tells us is more likely to be a poisoner, incapable of such a thing?”
“Children,” Lucas answered. “Killing your own kids is one thing, but killing other people’s children is another. We feed soda to our children. It just doesn’t seem likely that a woman would risk killing a bunch of children.”
“She could hate children,” I commented.
“She could, but even then, killing them is extreme. Five hundred years ago, not such a big deal; modern day, they’d be calling for a lynch mob.” Lucas shook his head. “What about the tall man?”
“There is not a tall man boogeyman,” I said. “It is a modern creation and while that does not exclude anything, it is also unlikely to be our serial killer.”
“Besides, we talked to all of them, none of them were at the bar,” Fiona added.
“Really? None of them?” I looked at her and then at Lucas.
“Not a one,” Lucas confirmed.
“Then I take it back, modern construct or not, we may have our serial killer, if we can find him.” I began texting furiously on my phone. My mom was still giving me updates on Malachi.
“What part of we didn’t find him did you fail to understand?” Fiona asked.
“None of it, that is why he just moved to the top of the suspect list. Amber Braun is a bartender and waitress. Well, she was. Anyway, part of what makes a good waitress or bartender is having an eye for detail as well as being friendly. Plus, she was dating an extremely tall man. She was not going to make a mistake on his height or his appearance,” I said.
“Xavier keeps texting me about getting you down to autopsy.” Lucas held up his phone as it went off again.
“I know, he keeps texting me too, but I do not want to go.”
“What if he needs help?” Lucas asked.
“I know very little about belladonna.”
“But, by the time you got to the morgue, you could know everything there is to know about it, including its chemical structure. Is this about Malachi?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe or maybe I just get tired of being around dead people.”
“Well, you aren’t real fond of being around living people either, so...” Fiona frowned at me.
I stood up, nearly knocking my chair over. It wasn’t about Malachi. It was about the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach. The photos kept drawing my attention, not the new ones, the old ones. The pictures of bones in the mass grave with smiling people pictures connected via marker to them. One looked vaguely familiar to me, but that was impossible since I didn’t know anyone in South Dakota. I kept wondering why.
“Okay, I will go, but only on one condition,” I told them. “Take this photo and overlay it on Nyleena. I do not know why she looks familiar, but she does. Maybe her bone structure reminds me of my cousin or something.”
Fiona did as I asked. The two had nothing in common, facially. Their eyes were in different spots, their cheekbones were completely different, their mouths weren’t the same shape, and their noses were different sizes, which meant I still had a feeling I had met th
e dark haired woman, but I had no idea why. It didn’t make me any happier.
“Where is our boss?” I suddenly realized that I had not seen Gabriel all morning.
“Glaring at scientists.” Lucas stood up and started looking at the picture. “He’s waiting for the test results from your soda bottle and he decided the best way to do that was to be at the lab. I’m sure some chemist is currently in the process of trying not to have a meltdown while Gabriel stares over his or her shoulder.”
“Does she look familiar to you?” I asked the large man.
“No, but that’s a Xavier thing. He is more intuitive in facial recognition than I am. If she looks like someone the SCTU has dealt with in the past, he’s the one to ask.”
“Fine,” I yanked the photo off the white board and headed to the morgue.
Morgues are dreary places with great lighting. The lighting is to assist with the autopsies performed in the cheerless spaces. To me, it felt wrong. It should be lit like a bar, but that was just me. The color scheme was white and stainless steel.
The morgue was only a block from the US Marshals building. I had walked it at a brisk pace, mostly because I hadn’t stretched today and could feel my calves starting to tighten up as a result. I would get Charlie horses tonight when I tried to sleep if I wasn’t careful.
“About damn time,” Xavier said as I walked into the room. “I want you to look at something.”
“I am not ready to see gross things.” I looked at him, trying to ignore the body that was cut open on the table. An organ was on a scale, a bone saw was at his elbow, and the body of Amber Braun looked like a dissection dummy with real blood.
“You’re gonna want to see this.” Xavier held up an organ. It was small enough to fit in his hand, but I couldn’t identify it. He moved it around like some serial killer’s trophy.
“I give up,” I said.
“It’s an ovary.” Xavier looked at it with a smile. “It’s deformed because of a tumor. Judging by the drugs in her system, I’d say it was cancerous. Everyone that has died, has been either sick or was taking medications that enhanced the effects of the belladonna.”
“You say that like it is good news.”
“It is. It means the belladonna doesn’t have to be as potent as originally thought and there are probably scores of people that have gotten sick from it, but didn’t know it. Considering he targeted people at a bar, they probably just thought they got really drunk.”
“What about those that got it from soda?”
“I don’t know yet, but no one has shown up at the hospitals reporting strange symptoms, so I’m guessing, they are just ignoring it as being ill or something. But this is good news; it means that the poison isn’t as lethal as we originally thought.”
“You are right, that is good news,” I frowned at him. “Would you please put that back into the body now?”
“Sorry.” Xavier put the ovary back in the body. “Why are you holding a picture of a dead woman?”
“Oh yeah,” I held it up. “Does she seem familiar to you?”
“Meh,” Xavier cocked his head to the side and stared at it. He cocked it to the other side. “A little, around the eyes and the cheeks.”
“Well, she died in the 1990s. That means that we did not cross paths with her directly, at least, I did not. So, who does she look like? It is not Nyleena. I had Fiona overlay their faces, but she looks like someone.”
“Have you ever seen the movie Firewalker?” Xavier asked.
“Yes, but she does not look like Chuck Norris.”
“No, I was thinking she kind of looked like the guy that played the Aztec warrior. He was also in Predator. He had the real deep laugh,” Xavier said.
“I think you just stereotyped all Native Americans as looking alike.”
“Maybe,” Xavier shrugged. “They don’t though. I was just thinking that she and he had the same eyes.”
“Holy shit!” I turned the picture to face me. “She looks like Alejandro!”
“Yeah, I could see that.”
“Where was he from?”
“A reservation in the southwest,” Xavier told me.
“Oh, she still looks like him. Maybe they were cousins.”
“Then he probably killed her. Alejandro’s elevator did not reach the top floor even before his dumbass had a run in with arsenic. He came to the SCTU because he nearly beat a man to death.”
“We get some of the best people in the SCTU. Alejandro, John, me...” I batted my eyelashes at him.
“That was creepy.”
“That was the plan.”
“So, she might look a little like Alejandro. The only thing I can say is that he’s tall. He most certainly isn’t matching the witness descriptions otherwise.”
“I am not saying he’s our serial killer.”
“But he would be a good one,” Xavier interrupted. “You seem to have forgotten how well he took to you. Alejandro does not like women. Not just, women are a pain in the ass, kind of dislike, but a deep-seated hatred. His own tribal council had to tell him to stop beating up women when he was a teenager. How he got a badge is beyond me. He once told me that serial killers that preyed on women were doing the world a favor. However, he is fine with the male of the species, so while he would be a good serial killer, he would not be good at this kind of random killing. Plus, he’s more of a hands on kinda guy.”
Thirteen
I had hoped that some idiot had snuck into my hotel room and filled my six-pack of soda with belladonna. That was not the case. Gabriel had actually gone back to the store where I had bought it and picked up several more. Three had tested positive for belladonna, along with the bottle of soda I had saved.
Now, we were assembled in a huge room in the US Marshals building. The head guy of the field office was looking irritated as he and Gabriel talked. They were about to issue a tamper warning to a room full of reporters. I wasn’t sure who was angrier about it, Gabriel or the head guy. It wasn’t as if we had brought doom and gloom to their fair city, but it did feel that way.
As we stood waiting for the press conference to begin, millions of bottles of soda were being removed from shelves all over Sioux Falls. It wasn’t just Mountain Dew or Pepsi products, they’d found it in Coca-Cola and 7-Up, proving that the bottles had been tampered with after they arrived in stores. Our next job was to start reviewing security cameras looking for suspicious people hanging around the soda areas. I was pretty sure this was going to be everyone that stood in the soda aisle. Even I had trouble deciding between Mt. Dew and Coke on occasions. I avoided Pepsi. It just didn’t have the bite that I enjoyed.
I was still struggling with the idea that someone was evil enough to poison soda. There were better things to poison. I wasn’t sure what yet, but I’d come up with something eventually.
“At 10:30 a.m., a massive recall of all bottled soda and sweetened drinks began. A state lab has confirmed that traces of the poison, belladonna, have been found in some of them. At this time, we are not sure of the scope of the contamination. However, it does not appear to be brand specific...” The head guy of the South Dakota US Marshals Department continued to talk. I failed to listen. We were going to have thousands of people rushing the ERs to see if they had ingested the poison. Thankfully, Marshals with ER guard duty were more personable than I was. Meaning, I was too rude to do the job. I’d get to go through security videos instead.
Towards the back, one guy caught my attention. He was very tall and he was white. I tried to get Lucas’s attention. He frowned at me as I tried not to make a scene. As casually as possible, I gestured to the back. Lucas’s frown deepened, I was guessing that was a no on the recognition scale. He moved closer to me. Gabriel watched the two of us and he also moved in.
In a strange game of Charades, where I couldn’t actually move, I attempted to communicate that I wanted to sneak around the back and talk to the guy. However, my attempts gained me puzzled looks. Then Xavier noticed and attempted to lean toward
s us and figure out my coded mini-gestures.
I gave up and glared towards the general direction of the tall man. Gabriel gently stepped on my foot to stop it from tapping. As a petite woman, I was the least obvious of the group. No one was focused on me anyway. I pulled my foot out and stepped backwards a couple of feet, until I had disappeared behind a curtain. I hoped my exit wasn’t as obvious as it felt.
The corridor was crowded and noisy. An outraged public was demanding answers, answers no one had or would give. Moving into the back of the conference room was going to be impossible. There were way too many people. Instead, I jostled and pushed my way through the outraged citizens of Sioux Falls, South Dakota and into the sunlight.
The street was just as crowded and even more outraged. Their fears were justified, at least to some degree. No one wanted to be poisoned, especially not while enjoying their favorite sweet drink. Also, it was the age of bottled water. Drinking tap water was unfashionable. However, we couldn’t guarantee that even bottled water was safe. Of course, a person would taste belladonna in water, as long as they weren’t adding stuff to it.
Suddenly, I realized exactly what the problem with society was. It wasn’t our lust for sweet drinks. It was our lust for sweet drinks with no calories. I wasn’t a fan of diet sodas because they tasted exceptionally sweet, and had a bit of leftover flavor that clung to the uvula. In diet soda, I could not be sure anyone would notice belladonna. It was syrupy sweet, like artificial sweeteners mixed with high fructose corn syrup or the crap people sprayed into water to make it taste better, which happened to be filled with the same syrupy sweet artificial sweeteners.
The public had a right to be outraged. Our most sacred liquids were now tainted with a poison that just enhanced the flavor. We were all back to drinking tap water without any flavorings and no one wanted to drink tap water.