Donovan and Eleri both nodded to fill in the space. "She showed us," Eleri offered.
"Well, there's a corner table that was hers. She liked to tinker."
"Oh!" Donovan said,. "That was the corner where the fire extinguisher sat?"
"Yes," Kaya grinned. Madisyn and Emersyn chimed in then, discussing how Johanna had given them all knitting lessons, but Emersyn complained that she was the worst at it. It was Cage who admitted to being the second worst, and they all said that Joule was the best.
Donovan sat back for a moment and watched the table. He knew Eleri had been looking for hints and clues, but she had signaled nothing to him. They were sitting next to each other and had agreed that a tap and under-the-table point would direct them. But now, as he almost physically pulled back from the conversation to watch and listen, he saw that Marshawn had done the same thing. He and Nate Mazur weren’t very participatory tonight and Donovan—though he didn’t signal Eleri—decided to keep an extra eye on them throughout the meal. Though if either man was capable of murdering someone his children so loved, that would put him in a different realm than what Donovan was expecting of this killer.
“Do you remember when we took all the drones out?” Madisyn chimed in. “When he took us to the park to fly them?”
“I didn’t get to go,” Emersyn, the youngest, almost pouted, and Donovan was surprised to see that behavior from such intellectually mature kids. But as Eleri reminded him, it didn’t matter how smart someone was, they were still human.
So their killer might be smarter than all the rest of them put together, but his human instincts would likely get him caught. Donovan looked at each adult around the table. Marshawn, LeDonRic and Maggie, the Mazurs … and then he looked at the kids and wondered if one of them might have killed their friends …
27
Donovan and Eleri met up for lunch the next day. They still hadn't managed to carve out time to look at what was on Marat Rychenkov’s hidden USB or even try to crack the code in the notebooks. Eleri had sent pictures of the pages to Wade and to GJ Janson—another agent who’d cracked a code for them before—but that was all they had managed. There had been more pressing work last night, and now there was work that had to be done during the daytime hours. Maybe tonight they would get to it.
Today, he was following Greg Whitlow, and Eleri was following Jivika Das. The job of trailing someone unnoticed was always difficult. It was even harder when everyone in town supposedly could recognize you, so there was no space for a stakeout or anything like that.
He followed the man to work, taking a sharp right in the other direction as Whitlow pulled into his office building. Though he couldn’t prove the physicist had gone to his office or even to his building, it was the best Donovan could do and still maintain his cover.
He’d seen patients at the clinic. All but one had been local residents. Though he’d tried to memorize names and faces, it wasn’t his strong suit. Thus, there was a greater chance of someone recognizing Dr. Naman than there was of him recognizing them. So he took the turn and watched as well as he could.
They needed to put tracking devices on the three cars, but hadn’t been able to get to them this morning. He had two in his pocket, just in case the opportunity arose. Two hours later, it had not—but he did see Whitlow leave. Donovan pulled into traffic several cars behind him. He watched as Whitlow met up with a friend and went into Michelangelo’s, an Italian restaurant.
It was a dead end for Donovan, since following the man into the restaurant would be too much. So he turned the car around and met up with Eleri at the Atomic Diner. Donovan ordered the Hawking burger, the fully loaded one, while Eleri went for the LHC Rap.
“Oh, didn’t see this last time. I have to order it because the name is so funny.” She grinned down at the menu.
“Why is the Large Hadron Collider Wrap funny?” He didn’t get it, but that was a normal feeling in Curie.
“Google it, but R-A-P rap. Not like a sandwich.” Eleri watched while he pulled up his phone and watched some very funny but not musically talented scientists sing about what the LHC experiments did.
“Got it.” He looked up and lowered his voice. “Whitlow went to work this morning. He then went to lunch with Keyoor Vergheese."
“Like yesterday," Eleri said. "I mean, it could just mean that they're friends."
"Yeah. I walked close by him yesterday, El," and he waited for his tone to catch her attention. "Vergheese's like me," he said, and watched as her face transformed, her eyes opening and her mouth becoming a small O.
"You mean—like Wade?" She didn't want to say the word there in the diner. It didn't appear anyone was listening in, but God forbid they were. Donovan nodded.
"He's a … physicist?" Eleri asked with an extra push on the last word.
Donovan, catching her snarky code, smiled. "Yes."
"Are there more here? Of that kind of phycisist?"
"I haven't encountered anyone. I mean, I can tell more by looking than I used to."
"So can I," she mused. "I just thought he had. . .“
She trailed off, but Donovan knew what she meant. There was a bone structure to the face, to the shoulders… Once the signs were understood, it might be possible to tell just from looking at a person. Donovan had known enough to get closer and breathe in slightly as he passed the man on the street. He suspected GJ Janson was better at the visual identification than either of the two of them, but Donovan had never had to rely on that. He could smell the wolves, and Vergheese smelled like one of them.
She sighed and leaned back. "Damn. I had hoped this would just be … normal." There was a brief hitch, as she had probably intended to say “a normal case” and caught herself.
"I don't think it means anything, at least not yet," Donovan said, but he was in agreement. This had seemed more like their first case, more like where things were just people gone astray and not the craziness they'd been encountering in their recent investigations. Not the craziness Nightshade was known for. "Then again," he said, putting his hands out on the table, "is there anything about this town that is normal?"
Eleri had the decency to shake her head. He'd certainly shifted his definition of normal a long time ago, and he'd shifted it again when he joined Nightshade. Now his working definition was “things he could state honestly in a court of law.”
They'd met up for lunch in an attempt to not appear as though they were following the respective people they were. "Jivika went to work this morning," Eleri said softly. "She's been there all day. She's in the think tank, too. The one Marat used to be in."
"Did you get a list of her projects?"
Eleri nodded. "Well, Bennett has them. We need to go by and pick them up."
Donovan shook his head. "I think we should have Kate deliver them. We can't keep going to his office, and we're going to have to go there for certain things. We need them to deliver to us as much as possible."
He quit talking abruptly as the server came back with the drinks, interrupting himself to thank her and hoping it didn't look like he was hiding what he was saying. He waited until she had left to talk again. Surely, some people around here had national security clearance, so their conversation wasn’t that odd.
"I got the results from the CDC and Bennett has the information from Curie PD," he said, "from their interviews with three chemists in town."
"Did he email it?" Eleri asked suspiciously. He’d felt the same way.
"When Bennett asked how I wanted them, I told him again that we needed paper." Even that call was sketchy, but he figured that listening in on a phone call would be much more difficult than hacking an email. At least temporally, the phone call disappeared once it was done.
"And what do we have so far?" Eleri asked as she leaned across the table, her voice still low. She now had a fake smile on her face, as though they were discussing something silly and casual.
"First, the CDC checked if there was anything other than our short list of chemicals that
smelled like butter or dairy products, and there wasn’t. Bennett verbally confirmed that the chemists agreed with that. Next, given that the CDC did rule out streptococci milleri, I had them test for the three chemicals we figured out. Luckily, it was a task the CDC could do quickly. The smell on Johanna Schmitt was confirmed as butane-2,3-diol," he said.
"Does that tell us something?"
"Not yet that I'm aware of. But it gives us something to work with and find specifics."
"Well, let's see if we can get Kate over here to join us for lunch," Eleri said. "Is it okay to be seen with Kate?"
"I don't know, but we can say she's helping you look for work. I think we need to add to our cover story that you’re an old friend of Bennett’s or the daughter of a friend. It will explain things if anyone notices we see him a lot."
"Good idea. We can say we just didn’t want to tell people we were friends with the Mayor or look like we were getting special treatment. But if anyone asks, that’s what all of us will say."
Thirty minutes later, as they were finishing up their meals, Kate walked into the diner. Like a good agent, she sat at the counter for a moment, then swiveled around and acted as though she was just seeing them. She has skills, Donovan thought, possibly better than either mine or Eleri's. For a moment, he wondered if that should worry him—or if he should recommend her for a position with the Bureau.
"Hey, y'all." She sat down next to Eleri as Eleri scooted over and made space for her. Then she leaned in, a smile on her face, her hand waving as though she were brushing off some comment. Yes, he thought, she has mad skills.
"I have some paper results, and I can give them to you. In fact, what I'm going to do, Eleri, is just slip them into your purse."
"Can you tell us?"
"Mm-hmm." Kate smiled, waved a hand again, and shook her head. Then she delivered confidential information from a police investigation as though she were telling a joke. "They think—that is the PD thinks—from their talks with the chemists that there’s one likely chemical that would create that smell. The chemist told them he would suspect the butane one. Butane-di. . . There's some numbers. Shit, I don't remember," she said.
Donovan waved her away. It was okay, he and Eleri did remember, and interestingly enough, the chemists had come up with the same chemical that Johanna Schmitt had tested positive for. He was listening much more closely now.
"The other two chemicals on the list are related to cleaners or solvents, and while they would likely kill a person in high enough quantity, they wouldn't subdue them. Those chemicals would probably cause seizures, something like that.”
“And they would have shown a cause of death,” Eleri added with a smile as though Kate’s story was funny.
The assistant nodded and continued. “This one, the butane number thing, is not a chemical that anyone knows, but the chemist did point out that it's related to GHB."
"Oh shit," Eleri said. "Is it one of the breakdown products?"
Kate shook her head. "No, I do remember that part. It's not, but the notes mentioned one chemist suggesting you might get it if someone was making their own GHB and fucked it up. . .“
"Or they were making an alternate variety?" Donovan wondered aloud, not putting any of those possibilities past the residents of Curie. They could easily be cooking up their own drugs. “If they made a similar drug, they could get different breakdown products."
"That might explain the lack of any defense from Marat and limited defense from Johanna," Eleri said.
The server interrupted them then, asking if Kate wanted anything, and she opted for a milkshake. "They have the best ones here," she said, at a slightly higher decibel level than the things she'd previously stated. Luckily, they were in the last booth, and no one was in the booth behind them or the table beside them. The servers coming in and out of the kitchen were their only worries, but they seemed legitimately busy.
Donovan was sitting back, his thoughts churning. The GHB made sense. It was a common street drug and date-rape drug. It made the victim compliant, which made everything click into place: that might be why Marat Rychenkov had no defensive wounds at all, even from the bindings. It explained how he'd been easily tied up, when Johanna Schmitt insisted it was not a bedroom game they had ever played. A man had to be feeling a little off to let someone else tie him down while he was still alive—unless he thought there was fun involved.
Johanna, too, had been tied up, and as Eleri pointed out, while the blacklight revealed that she fought back harder than was visible to the naked eye, she had not fought as if her life was at stake. She'd left no scrapes, blood, or open wounds, as anyone normally would have, particularly if she had been able to tell that this was the way her husband had died.
GHB would explain why she fought back somewhat, but not as hard as she should have. GHB explained that she was awake—not unconscious, which had been an option—but malleable. Not a dead weight for the killer to have to haul around.
In fact, the GHB derivative explained all of it. Now the new question became: Who could either obtain or synthesize off-brand GHB?
28
Donovan sat at his computer, watching as Eleri practically paced a track into the floor.
"Well," she said, "Now, at least we know how they did it. Our killer drugged them using some kind of GHB or GHB-alternative, which explains why they didn't fight back. And then he tied them down and. . . Shit."
Donovan almost smiled.
Eleri rescinded her original statement, frustration coming through her tone. "Okay, so we don't know how. At least we know the first part of how. We know why they didn't fight back," she said. “We’re still stuck on the actual how. And we still need to figure out why.”
Donovan tapped at his keyboard a couple of times. "Come sit down. Let's watch this and hope the why is in here." He pointed to his computer screen.
They’d finally reached a spot of time where he could open up the information they had found in Marat Rychenkov's garage.
He and Eleri had gone their separate ways earlier in the day after meeting up for lunch. For the afternoon, Eleri had followed Greg Whitlow and Donovan went after Jivika Das.
She was boring to follow. If she ate with a friend, he didn't know, because she stayed in the building all day. She left promptly at five p.m. and headed straight home, where she lived alone. Donovan had tried to watch for a while, driving by as many times as he could before it became creepy. As best he could tell, Jivika watched the evening news and walked around her house a little bit.
On the route home, he’d sat at the light, waiting to get a right-hand turn into Copernicus Circle to take the cross road to come back to Pythagoras Point. He thought how desperately he wanted to be a regular agent again.
When they'd been in New Orleans, he hadn't been an acting agent, though he'd had the badge on him at all times. Eventually, he and Eleri had almost declared themselves back on the job—not that they had that kind of power. He'd not been in a capacity to act with the full force of the FBI behind him. Now, here he was again, only this time with the opposite problem. He was acting at the direction of the Bureau. He did have the full force of the FBI behind him. But that same FBI was demanding that he operate under cover.
All he wanted to do was storm Jivika Das’s door, flip open his badge, and ask her what she knew about Marat Rychenkov's death. But it wasn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon. Westerfield didn't seem to want to budge on the issue of the three of them maintaining their cover.
Wade had been a big help. He'd been interviewing parents surreptitiously while supposedly discussing their children's high school physics projects with them. But for everything Wade turned up, they all still felt as though they had five hundred puzzle pieces that belonged to somewhere between three and five hundred different puzzles. Some of the pieces had looked interesting but couldn't be connected to anything else. And, though in his off time he'd been working on it, Donovan not yet been able to crack Marat Rychenkov's code. Neither had Wade or Ele
ri.
"Let's open the files," Donovan said. He watched as Eleri managed to reign in some of her nervous energy and come plop into the chair next to him. For a moment, he wondered if somebody could have quietly hopped the backyard fence and snuck up to the window and could now be watching them. Could they see the computer screen through the window? Donovan hoped he would've heard them approaching, but with ordinary, human ears—without his ears changing—his hearing wasn't as sensitive as he would've liked. There was also the possibility that someone was watching in a less physical way—that they had somehow hacked his system.
Given that he was on his FBI laptop—not the show one he’d been given—and that the FBI had been through it several times, he wanted to have faith that hacking couldn’t happen. The Bureau tech team was supposed to have made it un-hackable. No one should be able to get into his system without triggering the FBI alert. That meant that if a hacker somehow were able to hack it, even read keystrokes or feed themselves video from his system, Donovan and Eleri would have been warned that a hack had occurred.
That had been something Donovan had trusted implicitly until he arrived in Curie and got to know these people. If anyone could hack around an FBI alarm, that person could easily live here.
Trying to ignore his concerns, he clicked a button, expecting this material to be encrypted as well. To his surprise, and apparently Eleri's as well, it wasn't. Though he was desperate for a file labeled “Why Someone Might Want to Murder Me,” nothing of the kind existed.
He was noticing the same thing as Eleri frowned and leaned forward closer to the screen. "It's all videos."
"Then I guess we watch." Once again, he expected to be thwarted, but he wasn't. He hit the play button and the video opened right up.
They watched as Marat, fully alive and almost as gleeful as a kid, looked toward the camera. "Johanna, is it on?"
"It's on." They recognized Johanna's voice, and Donovan felt his heart stutter. Despite his constant reassurances to Eleri, Johanna Schmitt’s death had been a failure.
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