Elementary, My Dear Watkins (46 page)

In the meantime, she busied herself by cleaning up last night’s mess, since Consuela was tied up down at the hospital and none of the part-timers worked on the weekends. As Jo vacuumed the areas where the police had stomped around, tracking dirt, she thought about what it would take to put together a small but elegant wedding.

The only problem she could foresee in their plans was an immediate one: the seven weeks that still remained of Danny’s internship in Paris. He had already said that he was willing to give that up, but now that this current crisis was being resolved, there was really no good reason for him to have to make that sacrifice—no good reason except that she couldn’t bear for them to be apart that long! When they were tossing around potential wedding dates earlier, they had settled on a Saturday afternoon in late August, which would be tough to pull off in such a short time but not impossible. Still, Jo wondered, how could they coordinate a wedding so soon if Danny was thousands of miles away during most of their engagement?

“You’ve looked better,” Danny said to Bradford, taking in the various bandages and bruises. “Must feel pretty rotten too.”

“Get out of here, Danny, or I’ll yell.”

“I’ll get out of here as soon as you tell me what I want to know. Trust me, Bradford. Yelling is not in your best interest.”

“Why should I talk to you?” Bradford asked, trying to reach for the call button but barely able to move his arm.

“Maybe because I’ve figured out a few things,” Danny said. He pulled up a chair and then sat, making himself comfortable. “You see, I heard your little story about the night you played the big hero in Newark, with Alexa. But unlike everyone else, I was having trouble believing that you
just happened
to be driving through that part of town and
just happened
to see a teenage girl slumped on the side of the road. You were such a big man and all, saving her like that. Funny, but I’m not buying it.”

“I have no idea what you mean. Alexa had a stroke. She needed my help.”

“Sure she did, but let’s get real. You didn’t
just happen
to see her at all. You were waiting for her when you saw her fall. Waiting for your little delivery of amphetamines.”

“What makes you think that?”

Danny hesitated, not wanting to reveal that his source was Alexa herself.

“I’ve done some looking around,” Danny said nonchalantly. “And now that I know about all of your nasty little habits, particularly your, uh, business venture with Alexa’s mother, I just can’t help but think that there are others who ought to know about all of that as well. The cops, Jo’s dad, your immediate supervisor at the pharmaceutical company…”

“No,” Bradford whimpered.

“Feels pretty scary to be so helpless, doesn’t it?” Danny asked, hating being cruel but not knowing what else to do. “Kind of like how Jo feels not knowing all the facts.”

Bradford shook his head back and forth.

“I told Jo everything I know.”

“Oh, I don’t think you did.”

Danny lifted the receiver from the telephone and began dialing.

“I wonder if Jo’s dad has his cell phone on. I think I’ll start with him. Too bad you’ll have no chance of ever working for Bosworth Industries again.”

“Okay, okay! What do you want to know?”

Danny hung up the phone.

“We can make this quick, Bradford. Let’s start with your conversation in New York with Jo. The way she describes it, getting any real information out of you was like pulling teeth. Makes me think you probably had something to hide—and you were trying to tell her just enough to keep her safe while not having to incriminate yourself in any way. Am I warm?”

Bradford just looked at him, sweat starting to bead up along his brow. Finally, he gave a slight nod.

“So, let’s see. What could be your big secret?” Danny continued. “Maybe that you were involved in the threat on Jo somehow? Maybe that you were double-dealing and triple-dealing behind the scenes and somehow started the ball rolling that put Jo in danger in the first place?”

“Why do you think that?” Bradford asked, averting his eyes.

“Because the terms of her grandfather’s trust were completely confidential, Bradford. However, you knew what Jo stood to inherit if you married her because her parents told you. My theory is that when all was said and done, you blabbed that information to the wrong person.”

The room was quiet for a long moment, and when Danny looked at Bradford, he was surprised to see that the man had tears in his eyes.

“I love Jo,” Bradford said. “I don’t want her to die.”

Seizing the opportunity, Danny leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“If you love her,” he said, much more kindly, “then tell me what I need to know to keep her safe. Someone tried to kill her again yesterday. Nearly electrocuted her with a toaster.”

That seemed to be what Bradford needed to hear to finally make him talk.

“It was my big mouth,” he admitted, closing his eyes. “I blabbed. I told the wrong people that the gravy train might be coming to an end.”

“The gravy train?”

“Yeah. If Kent Tulip gets his way, the Fibrin-X studies will eventually be squelched completely. There goes all of the funding for poor Alexa’s fancy new lifestyle. To make matters worse, if Neil is correct in saying that such a move would spell financial disaster for the pharmaceutical company, then not only would they go out of business, but I’d lose my job, and I’d no longer have access to the Trephedine. Goodbye gravy train for everybody.”

Trephedine? The only “Trephedine” Danny had ever heard of was a nasal decongestant that was sold over the counter at drugstores. Not wanting to communicate his ignorance and call his own bluff, however, Danny focused on the first part of what Bradford had said instead.

“Who are the ‘wrong people’ that you told?”

“My business partner and her boyfriend.”

“Business partner? Alexa’s mom, you mean?”

“Yeah. Misty. And her on-again-off-again loser of a boyfriend, Rick.”

“What did you say to them?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I was a little drunk. I told them all about the disagreement in the company about the Fibrin-X and the way the trust is laid out. I said that if I could get Jo Tulip to marry me, the money might keep flowing, but without my influence in the matter, then unless Jo were dead, the well was going to dry up. Like an idiot, I actually said that. Unless Jo were dead. I was speaking theoretically, but I’m afraid Rick decided to handle things literally.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because word on the street a week later was that he’d been asking around about Jo Tulip. The guys at the lab told me that Rick had even wondered aloud how you could kill someone and make it look like an accident.”

Jo put down her book, surprised at how dark it was getting outside. Where was Danny? He’d said he’d be gone a few hours, but this was pushing it. Since he left, she had bid the police hello and goodbye, given Chewie a bath, done her nails, and read four chapters of a novel.

With a strange, uncomfortable feeling, Jo realized that after several days of extra security and round-the-clock bodyguards, she had now swung to the other extreme and was here in this giant house all alone. The thought was unnerving. At least Chewie was with her.

But were the doors even locked downstairs? Jo thought she and Chewie ought to check and make sure. Halfway down the stairs, she realized that at least there was still one person around, the guard in the little hut at the end of the driveway. Her hands shaking, when Jo reached the kitchen she looked up the phone number for the hut on a list on the counter and dialed. She was comforted to hear him answer the phone and assure her that he’d be there all night if she needed him.

“In fact,” he said, “you’ve got a car coming up the drive right now.”

Jo thanked him, hung up, and went to the window, hoping to see Danny’s rental car. Instead, it was the old junker driven by Alexa’s mother’s boyfriend. Feeling relieved to have someone here with her, Jo opened the door as the car came to a stop in front of the house.

Danny dialed Eleanor’s house but got a busy signal. Hanging up, he tried Jo’s cell phone, but there was no answer. He decided to finish his information-gathering from Bradford before trying again.

“Did you confront Rick?” Danny asked Bradford. “Did you tell him about the rumors you heard?”

Bradford shook his head miserably.

“I tried. But he sort of comes and goes. When I went to talk to him, he had disappeared. That’s when I started getting nervous. Misty said he went back to his apartment across the river for a few days to pack up some of his stuff in preparation for moving in with her. But I thought maybe he had gone to Pennsylvania, looking for Jo. I couldn’t take that chance. I knew I had to tell her the truth.”

“Why didn’t you just call the police?”

Bradford looked at him and took a labored breath.

“Why do you think?” he asked. “Because of the Trephedine.”

“Yeah, what do you think the cops would do if they knew about all that?” Danny asked, hoping his question was vague enough to lead somewhere.

“Well, let’s see. For starters, I’d go straight to prison for a variety of offenses.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know, forged documents, establishing a front company, using circuitous routing for the delivery of pharmaceuticals—the list goes on and on. Misty and Rick would go down for possession and distribution of precursor chemicals. They’d probably both squeal, which would expose the truth behind the entire meth lab at the Grave Cave. It’s like dominoes, my friend. Everything would topple against everything else. And all because of a few thousand units of cold medicine.”

Lapping at the edges of Danny’s memory was an article he had read once about the production of methamphetamines in clandestine meth labs. From what he could recall, the first step in creating the drug was often accomplished by taking an over-the-counter product that contained ephedrine or psuedoephedrine—which must be what Bradford was calling “precursor chemicals”—and boiling it down into a concentrate. That was why, the article had said, that many states were starting to limit the amount of such products that any one customer could purchase.

“I thought it was illegal to buy more than two or three packs of drugs like Trephedine at a time.”

“Yeah, duh,” Bradford said, “but I work for the company that
makes
it. It was all Misty’s idea. She and Rick hooked in with a bogus Internet pharmacy, and all I had to do was set up an account to which I sell Trephedine in bulk. Individual customers may be limited to three packs at a time, but the retailers aren’t. So far, it’s proven to be a very lucrative side business. The guys at the lab pay us well, Misty and Rick serve as the middlemen, and I get a commission on the sales.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” Danny said, shaking his head, wondering how Bradford managed to sleep at night.

“It’s a real sweetheart deal, all right. Unfortunately, to Rick at least, the profits are worth killing for.”