Beg Me

by Lisa Lawrence

  “I got better,” I said. “Are you going to be around at this number in an hour or so?”

  “Yes, but, Teresa, how can you possibly get a list of their—”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll call you back.”

  Since it seemed I had patched things up more or less with Simon Highsmith and he was so concerned about my well-being, I thought he was ripe for a favor-plucking. He had the right intelligence contacts to put through a circuitous request to sources inside America’s Food and Drug Administration—or whoever grants the permits for such things.

  Simon impressed me by calling back in the early afternoon, and I scribbled down a whole collection of names I could barely pronounce and certainly couldn’t spell without help.

  “How are you holding up out there?”

  “I’m okay,” I said evenly.

  “Teresa, I have to be in Paris next month. If you’ve wrapped up your business by then, maybe we can hook up in France or I can jump on the Eurostar….”

  I didn’t know what to say for a moment. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  We had never been a long-term couple, and God knew we had clashed over ethics more than once. But somehow, just like a good boyfriend, he recognized my noises.

  “Ah, a definite maybe!” he teased. “Listen, do you need me out there?”

  As in wet-work-kick-ass-beat-the-baddies need, not the lover-in-Nigeria-guarding-against-bad-nightmares need.

  “You’re still hunting Bishop.”

  “He’ll keep. Say the word.”

  “No,” I sighed. “At least not yet. It’s nothing personal, Simon. I told you, this case is grim. I can’t have…extra complications.”

  In the background at his end, I could hear a train departure being announced in German. I didn’t bother to ask where he was and what he was doing.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “If you change your mind, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Thanks.”

  If Simon impressed me with a list yanked off an anonymous computer screen in a bureaucrat’s office, then Allen was even more blown away by my magic divining skills. I fumbled through the pronunciation of chemicals and could tell he was jotting them down. “Stop,” he interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Say the last one again.”

  “Safrole.”

  “Safrole,” said Allen. “I think you have a winner, my dear.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Comes from a plant in Asia and Australia—sassafras. You said you think this bug-spray plant is a cover for something else, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You use safrole to make piperonyl butoxide, which is for pesticides. But it’s also one of the main ingredients you need for methylenedioxymethamphetamine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He chuckled softly, enjoying my ignorance. “You’ve heard of it as ecstasy.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Noooo,” his musical voice sang again.

  So much for the heroin angle. They must have forgotten all about a Nigerian pipeline when they came up with this idea. No need for middlemen at all.

  “Their bug factory’s a perfect cover, like you thought,” said Allen. “You cannot simply walk into a manufacturer and say, ‘May I please have so many gallons of this stuff?’ Once upon a time they used it as a food additive, but it’s got carcinogenic properties, so there you go. And when this whole silly E thing got started…”

  “It’s brilliant,” I said. “They buy the safrole legitimately and must truck it down to their lab somewhere close. Allen, how easy is it to make ecstasy?”

  I heard him blow air out of his cheeks. “In my day we made LSD—the fun was in actually making it. We didn’t take the fool stuff! We just wanted to see what we could get away with. To answer your question, it’s easier than you think—but bloody dangerous too. We are dealing with chemicals here, and people have tried doing this in their basements with standard equipment. Do it wrong, and you can poison yourself. Or fumes could kill you, or you could blow yourself up.”

  “Lovely.”

  “What you get in nightclubs and on the street isn’t always the real thing, of course. Your detective friend Carl’s told me they sometimes put in caffeine, ketamine, stuff from cough syrups like dextromethorphan in huge doses, which is just criminally stupid—”

  “Why?”

  “These chemicals can cause hallucinations, drastic increases in body temperature, sweating…. But if the villains you’re after are using safrole, they must be going for some kind of, ahem, quality control. It’ll be sophisticated stuff. ’Course, that doesn’t mean they won’t mix it with some other fool thing.”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  Ecstasy. Manufactured right in New York. No smuggling from Holland, no bringing it up from labs in the backwaters of South Carolina.

  “Oh, this is bad,” I mumbled to myself. “This is very, very bad.”

  It also made me go over Anna’s rescue of Jimmy in the house while Isaac and Danielle were away. Allergic reaction, my ass.

  When no one else was around, I went through a list of Staten Island hospitals in the phone book. I phoned each one, pretending to work on behalf of that quintessentially American creature, an HMO. Oh, man, how Americans put up with no proper national health system has got to be—well, I won’t start in on that one.

  I said I was following up an insurance claim for a young man (first name James…yes, address is at…) brought in by one Anna Lee to the emergency room, and this happened—Oh, you do have him? Yes, that’s right, palpitations, respiratory distress, profuse sweating—

  Ecstasy. Jimmy had helped himself to the product, which was probably a no-no for Isaac and Danielle.

  And Anna, who would have sat in a waiting room for hours while they brought Jimmy back from the edge of death, might have been told the results by the doctor who treated him.

  She would have asked questions. She might even have posed some hard ones to Jimmy when he was conscious again. And the experience was probably enough to shake her faith in the temple. Especially if Danielle and Isaac had told her to stick to the “allergic reaction” lie. It wasn’t Jimmy’s got a problem, let’s help him. It wasn’t Jimmy went off the rails and made a mistake taking E. And just where did he get it, by the way? It’s your attitude, Anna. Just forget about it, Anna.

  But she didn’t forget about it. And after she had saved the good, obedient sub’s life, they decided they had to take hers and shut her up for good.

  They took away her good name too.

  Her boyfriend Craig Padmore’s murder was about something else, some threat to Isaac’s credibility. I’d unravel that one when I dug up more, but for now the best thing to do was to follow the drugs. And my next step was to find the actual lab.

  11

  Before I could play “find the lab,” I had to invest a few hours in the old game of “lose the tails.” It’s much more fun when you can make it clear that you know they’re behind you, and then they know that you know. (You shouldn’t really get cocky or practice mischief with surveillance, but boy, it is fun.) But this wasn’t like a job I had in Paris where a fool got bumped into the Seine or that crazy bicycle chase I had in San Francisco a few years back. Just as before, the princes had to feel incompetent more than suspect I was clever. I had to be patient. So I let them watch me shop. I pushed things a little by hanging out in the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue, tucking into books from the Spirituality section, of course, the ever studious me—they had to stay well back, knowing they could be spotted all too easily in the store.

  And then after a short subway ride, I was strolling into an office block in midtown, its roster of office names all doctors. I had scouted on the web for just the right block, full of gynecologists and OB/GYNs. And as the elevator doors closed on me, I saw the one girl on the surveillance detail going for the next car. She obviously hadn’t thought it through. Even if she arrived on the floor an instant later to see me walk into o
ne of the offices, she would gain nothing by following me in—at worst, it would make me notice her even as she went through the motions to set up an appointment with the receptionist.

  Now let’s see how clever the boys are, waiting down in the foyer. If they were smart, they’d trust the girl to advance in front when I came back down, and cover the revolving doors, the way I came in. They should be checking to see if there were alternative exits. And the very smart thing to do is wait across the street to pick up my trail again.

  Alas, they were not that smart. I had done my homework and knew there was a south set of elevators, which led down to a south foyer and another way out of the block. I suspected by now the girl who had followed me up realized her blunder, that she was totally exposed in an office hallway with no clear destination, and she would tap the button to go back down and regroup with the guys. I reckoned they’d figure it out in fifteen minutes.

  Of course, I might have given them a little too much credit. I was already walking near 50th Street and Park, heading for the subway.

  My guess was that Danielle and Isaac wouldn’t choose a spot anywhere near the mansion and probably not even on Staten Island. In this, I was right. No isolated, out-of-the-way house—hey, too many drug dealers and couriers have been brought down thanks to bored, nosy neighbors spotting a parade of trucks visiting at odd hours. Or a Cessna landing on a beach in off-season.

  Ah, but let’s see what’s on the list of properties owned by their corporation. Here we go—nice innocuous office block in the South Bronx.

  Aha, you’re saying. That’s got to be a mistake, right? It would draw a clear line of culpability to the criminal enterprise. I thought so too, until I stood across the street from the address and spotted their “out.”

  A real-estate agent’s sign hung outside, and I just bet they went through the motions and turned down every offer that came their way, keeping the place forever on the market. Their lawyers could argue they had left the block empty and that ruthless dealers were squatting there without their knowledge.

  The people who went in and out of that block were all dressed well. No suits that were too flash, the girls in somber skirts and sneakers, just like the commuting women on the subway. I recognized one or two from the mansion, but I hadn’t learned their names yet.

  I recognized Gordon going in.

  And Trey.

  And Miss Baker.

  The operation was slick. No big dumb oxes of security lookouts at the door who gave away what they were all about. I spotted three cameras directed to cover the door, the approach from the front and the one at the back. So I scoped out the place by climbing up the fire escape of a neighboring building.

  In my bag were Violet’s field glasses, which she used to spot deer in the country. They did very well for peeking in on the princes and princesses fooling around with beakers, tubes, other equipment I couldn’t even guess at.

  “This is very bad,” I mumbled to myself, not for the first time.

  I would need to get in there to help myself to a couple of samples of their wares.

  Fiddling with the security cameras would tip them off. And this wasn’t the movies, where I could cliché my way in, as I liked to call it, making a huge bluff that I was one of these lab workers or something. Forget the front and back doors. Then how? I looked over the street. There were a couple of lower-middle-income brownstones nearby, the schoolyard of PS 100, and something, a large office block that was a printer’s…hmm. I mulled for a moment. Then I got inspired.

  And I went shopping.

  I came back two hours later. Hunch number two worked out—my notion that if Danielle and Isaac were using their devotees from the mansion, these people had to come back to the house to keep up appearances. It was macabre how Gordon, Trey, and the others all filed out at five o’ clock, like they were finishing a normal day at the office. I heard banter and discussion of hitting a bar to have a quick drink. I think I understood their rationale. Put too much security, have too many people ’round the clock, and in this type of neighborhood you’d actually prompt people to start asking questions about what’s going on in there. So business hours and that’s all. I waited a good half hour to make sure the coast was clear, and then I got down to business.

  I had bought a surgical mask—because I planned to take no chances with their ideas of safety precautions—plus some heavy-duty gloves that would hold up even if I accidentally touched mild acidic liquids. I’d also stopped in at one of those shops for climbing equipment and picked up some basic belay and camming gear. All that practice in a climbing gym out in Sutton was about to come in handy. And, oh yes, I bought myself a baseball.

  What was the baseball for? I could just see Jeff Lee poring over my expense receipts and questioning that one.

  I did say there was a schoolyard nearby, didn’t I?

  Before returning up the fire escape of the building next door, I dirtied the baseball to make it look good and used and then hurled it through the lab window.

  The tinkling crash was thankfully less noisy than I’d expected, and I had made a hole big enough to reach through and undo the lock. If anybody was good at geometry, they might have questioned the fluke angle all the way from the yard, but they probably wouldn’t refute the sad little ball abandoned in the corner.

  Okay, ball was in. Now I had to get me in there.

  The buildings were close enough that I could toss my grapnel onto the roof of the lab and do this insane pirate swing into the brick near the window. Not something I want to do again for a long time. I was fairly safe from exposure, mind you. It’s New York. Only the tourists ever look up, and I had swung over from another closed office block. The window I was using was one down from the roof. Standing on the sill, it took me four minutes of arm fiddling, but I managed to loosen the grapnel from its bite into the rooftop and yank it down. I would get out the same way. Toss the grapnel to the other side and then scoot down the iron fire escape.

  Now inside, I didn’t want to take my time. I wanted to get in and out fast.

  My phone conversation with Allen had impressed on me that I didn’t know a thing about chemistry, so I ignored the raw materials of powders and liquids and even the textbooks lying open to references of molecular weights. I passed equipment and couldn’t reckon its purpose. Didn’t care either. No, I was busy looking for the actual pills.

  And then I found them. They were sitting on cookie sheets of all things, yellow and embossed with a crown monogram. Princes and princesses. Naturally. Another set of pills was orange. I saw boxes loaded for imminent disposal and open boxes half filled, their packing interrupted by the end of the working day.

  “This is very bad,” I whispered again. Nerves.

  I had a half-empty aspirin bottle in my purse, and I scooped up samples of both the yellow and the orange. Maybe they were the same and the color was no big deal, just for variety’s sake. But I thought I should err on the side of thoroughness.

  Another small mystery presented itself: On the wall was a map of New York City, with felt marker circles on specific spots on the grid.

  If I was reading this right, then the sarcophacan temple was about to distribute its ecstasy right into the heart of Chinatown.

  Hmm. So all those bigoted speeches about Asian men and Asian culture were hypocrisy after all.

  I copied down locations in a hurry. The marker pen had made sloppy wide ovals, so I couldn’t get too precise about specific corners, but hopefully what I had would be enough.

  The tricky part was crawling out of the open window, suspending myself from the climbing rope again, and then carefully locking the window behind me. Without breaking any more of the glass to screw up my staged scenario.

  That was enough rope for today. Let’s hope none of the guys feels like tying me up this evening.

  I caught the ferry and made it back in time for dinner at the mansion. That evening I listened to the many voices and I watched dishes of food pass back and forth at the long table, a
nd I knew my heart wasn’t in these communal meals anymore. The fantasy of this double life had to end soon.

  Violet was there, and I wished it were just the two of us now. She stole a look at me once or twice, but she was pretty discreet. I tried not to blow it, by ignoring her most of the time and focusing my attention on Danielle. I watched the Queen Bee’s interaction with the others.

  Now, those were baffling dynamics. You can read a lot in a look, but almost every guy at the table shot Danielle an occasional glance of…what? Not affection, that’s for sure. More like a strange mix of inside joke and fond remembrance. Not your houndlike up-and-down piece-of-meat male assessment, but eye to eye. Intimate.

  We’re talking a second or two, of course, never long enough to offend Isaac or the princesses at the table. And the table was the place for impeccable manners. A prince never ordered a girl here, always asked her for things and said, please pass this, excusing himself quietly. And nobody dared get up to answer a ringing phone. We were eating. Whoever it was would have to wait. It was like my grandmother had taught them all.

  Isaac had his place at the head of the table, and by un-spoken design this or that girl accepted her turn to sit at his right. I did one evening. He was well behaved when it came to meals. He didn’t monopolize the conversation with me or with any of us. And he didn’t lapse into one of his signature paranoid monologues at dinner. If he made a joke, it was instantly hilarious to the group, but that was boss tribute, nothing special—not Duke of Sarcophacan Temple obeisance.

  The girls. When it got right down to it, he had created a harem and actually convinced a bunch of women this was a good idea. Okay. But I didn’t spot a single girl giving him a look like the princes fleetingly offered Danielle now and then. And even if she were the power “behind the throne,” she’d be shrewd enough to let him have a bit on the side, wouldn’t she? Didn’t see any currents of heat flowing his way.

  That evening after a bunch of us watched a DVD, I screwed up the nerve to privately ask Violet if she had ever slept with him.