Kitabı oku: «The Memory Killer»

3

I awoke an hour before my 6.00 a.m. alarm and jumped through the shower, pulling on jeans and a blue Oxford shirt, grabbing a coral linen jacket to keep the shoulder-holstered Glock from startling citizens at stop lights.

I went beneath my home, stilted to ride above storm surges, and climbed into a fully outfitted Land Rover Defender originally confiscated in a drug bust. Colleagues called me Sahib and Bwana, but having the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country, I laughed it off.

I turned on to Highway 1. An hour and two coffee stops later I entered Miami-Dade General and elevatored to a room in the Intensive Care section. Doc Morningstar was leaning against the wall and studying reports, her dark and shoulder-length hair fallen forward. She was slender and athletic and appeared taller than her five ten, the effect of improbably long legs currently hidden under khaki slacks. Her blouse was a silky purple, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her only ornamentation a pair of small enameled earrings, purple coneflowers to match the blouse.

Morningstar glanced up, brushed back the errant hair, and nodded, any potential smile damped by the patient centering the room, a young man, late teens to early twenties, blond, with sunken and lifeless eyes and flesh so pale as to seem blue. A mask covered his nose and mouth, so many tubes and hoses running to the mask it appeared a mechanical octopus was clinging to his face.

I gave the doc a What’s-up? look.

“Name’s Dale Kemp,” she said quietly. “Hikers found him three days ago near the Pahayokee overlook in the Glades. He’s been raped, semen found, but nothing in the database.”

DNA sampling used to take weeks, but recent technology made it a matter of hours with one of the new machines, and we’d recently added one to our arsenal. But if there was no match for the perp in the database, it was still a dead end.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Morningstar set aside the reports. Her eyes were huge and the kind of hazel that seems pale one moment, dark the next.

“An overdose seemed indicated, but nothing showed. The attending physician, Dr Philip Costa, knew I had a sub-specialty in toxicology and called yesterday. I suggested a more complex series of tests, initially thinking scopolamine or atropine, and my preliminary tests found a massive quantity of datura stramonium in his blood, among other things.”

“Datur-strama … what?”

“You might know its plant source: Jimson weed.”

My mental Rolodex whirred. “Also called Loco weed?”

She nodded. “I also found robitin, a phytotoxin from Robinia pseudocacia, or black locust tree. When it’s ingested by animals, they become stupefied, unable to recognize their surroundings. They often die.”

“Jeee-sus,” I said.

“There’s probably more in this crazy cocktail, Ryder. But the datura and robinia seem the main components.”

“What’s the effect of the Loco weed?”

“In controlled quantities, datura has medicinal uses. Larger doses create delirium and fearful hallucinations. It can result in odd behavior, such as stripping off clothes, picking at oneself, staring into space. A person dosed with datura can look in a mirror and see a complete stranger. Or a cow. Or nothing at all.”

Hallucinations atop stupefaction. “Where was he last seen, anyone know?”

“He was ID’d via Missing Persons at Miami-Dade PD. Last sighting was at a Miami Beach bar. He didn’t come to work the next day.”

“When’d he disappear?”

“Ten days ago. There’s something else I wanted to show you. Take a look at his back.”

We gently rolled Dale Kemp over. I saw bruises and scratches and an odd pattern between his shoulder blades: a pair of coupled circles etched into the skin, as if a tenpenny nail had been drawn across his flesh hard enough to welt, but not break, the skin. Two vertical lines fell below, the tops of the lines touching the ovoids. A horizontal line fell between the verticals.

“A figure eight,” I said. “On top of some lines.”

“Or, looking from below …”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “A freaking infinity symbol.”

We rolled him back. I looked between the kid and the readings on the monitor. “He’ll always be like this?” I asked. “It’s permanent?”

“There aren’t a lot of field trials to draw from, as you’d expect.” She nodded at an array of prepared syringes on the bedside table. “The robinia inhibits protein synthesis, so we’ve concocted a treatment to enhance reactions. It also contains physostigmine, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.”

“Uh …”

“Sorry. The first to reduce toxic effects of the black locust, the second helps reduce the hallucinations.”

I found it odd Morningstar used the word we’re and us, as if Kemp were her patient. The only course recommended for Morningstar’s standard “patients” was burial or cremation.

“Where could you get these plants, Doc?” I asked.

“Jimson weed grows wild across the country. Black locust grows in most states east of the Mississippi.”

I made a pouring motion. “What … someone just dumped twigs and leaves into a blender and made this stuff?”

“The active chemicals were likely extracted from the plant sources and concentrated. That would take a knowledge of chemistry. But probably basic.”

“As basic as jurisdictions?” I said, growing puzzled by Morningstar’s request that I be here. A rape, though horrific, was not reason to call me, the FCLE’s specialist in psychotics, sociopaths and other mental melt-downs.

“Jurisdictions?” she said.

“You said Kemp was found by Miami-Dade cops, was in their Missings file. Why did you call me, Doctor?”

Morningstar walked to the window and gazed down on the parking lot, forlorn in its dawn emptiness. Not only was I uncertain why I was here, I was also puzzled at her involvement. When she had solved the toxicology problem, her work was over, time to return to the dead. She seemed more like an attending physician than a pathologist.

Morningstar turned back to me. “I, uh … it’s not a typical case, is it, Detective? The combination of substances seems so calculated and cold that it feels … evil.”

Another anomaly. Evil was not a word normally used in the clinical halls of Morningstar’s pathology department. Had the bizarre methodology of the case unsettled the usually imperturbable pathologist?

“So you’d prefer the FCLE to investigate? Me in particular?”

“It’s your world, right, Detective? Who else but a psychopath might, uh …”

Words failed and she stared at the body motionless amidst the tubes and wires, his thoughts turned to nightmares and even the nightmares burned away, perhaps forever, by a combination of toxins you might find in your own backyard.

“Who else but a psychopath might turn common plants into Satan’s private date-rape drug?” I said.

Morningstar nodded. “I figured you’d have the right words.”