Before I Wake (43 page)

“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 still 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.

He changed the subject before Franklin could ask. “I know you’re just getting started looking over the notebooks found at the cabin. Can you tell me anything at this point about the designer drug they were trying to create?”

“Nothing here tells us much about the new drug. It does tell me this cook was the one who designed the rave-party drug that killed the twelve kids. But we don’t have the current notebook he’s using, and that leaves a big gap.”

“Anything you can tell me based on the precursor chemicals that were out in the cabin?”

“That gets a bit more interesting. There was a legal prescription drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease found in bulk powder, like prescription tablets had been crushed. It’s the same drug that causes a very small percentage of its patients to become gambling addicts overnight. It gives a very nice high. I think that is a key component to this new drug. We found prescription sedatives, a smaller amount, but also in a crushed powder form. And one thing very strange.” Franklin pulled out the lab report in his in-box.

“He’s using something called Vytribit, a man-made synthetic drug taken straight out of the rattlesnake venom family. It is used in the drug-manufacturing world like salt is used to preserve meat. You see it in the more sophisticated meth production batches out east. He probably picked up the technique there and was trying to cross-promote it here. It turns out, even in low doses, to have paralyzing properties to it when improperly heated. I doubt he intended that side effect.”

“He’s figuring this formulation out fast if he’s down to tweaking those factors.”

Franklin nodded. “He has a working designer-drug recipe that is close to being perfected, and if Rae is right about the chocolate, a very difficult delivery system to beat. If you can’t find this guy—Nathan, he can open a Web-based chocolate store and ship product around the country and look totally legit.”

Nathan rubbed his face. “Franklin, the drug could be mailing now for all we know. At best we may have found the cabin after he was finishing his last test batch. The kid who died—he was the extra hands helping with a larger production batch. The first time something like this expands in higher quantities and volumes is always the most dangerous. Something went wrong and the kid got a face full of the product without realizing it.”

“I don’t have toxicology yet, but I’m hoping the boy died of enough of the drug, was in a deep freeze of snow for the night, that his body is going to still have measurable quantities available. I’m going to know that in about twenty-four hours.” Franklin smiled and nodded. “About the time they are working on properly dealing with that arm.”