Murder Feels Crazy

by Bill Alive

  …was it all just a bunch of triggers?

  Like your tongue going moist when you smell a steak? Automatic craving?

  Could all these sensations really add up to meaning?

  My mind flooded with flashbacks, a near-death-style review of all the girls I’d ever obsessed over. With every single one, it came down to patterns… and now, as they whipped through my mind in a ghostly parade, each was strangely broken with some imaginary, added flaw… nothing brutal, just a roll under the chin, or a wrinkle at the lips, or a smudging of the eyes… that was all it might have taken to spoil the spell.

  Spell.

  I glanced back across the store, at Ceci slouching in that chair all haggard and exhausted… and it just broke me, how Ceci couldn’t trigger all that for me, that rush. She never would. Not like this. Neither could almost all the women in the world.

  So instead I’d keep chasing this high, a robot dog barking after its next meal. Because the high couldn’t care less whether the girl was, say, also in emotional crisis and about to have a baby alone, or if she also might have drugged her ex to death. It was sheer craving. Malware installed in my brain.

  At least a robot dog wouldn’t fancy itself a romantic. It wouldn’t blather on about “finding the One” when it was actually terrified of commitment, knowing deep in its metal gut that the high could never last.

  But it couldn’t. The high would always pass. Even a hurricane can’t last forever.

  But maybe… maybe that was okay.

  Maybe it might suggest a life plan that was less like: Find the Perfect Princess who will ALWAYS make you WAY more high than anyone else…

  …and more along the lines of: Accept a lifetime of Random Attacks of Hotness.

  You think you’re sober, and you are, but then you get on the bus, and there’s a model in leggings, and you’re buzzed and craving for the next half hour.

  Oh well.

  So what?

  It doesn’t have to mean anything.

  It passes. Move along.

  And speaking of sober…

  In that moment, for the first time ever in my supposedly super-sober life, I felt a wave of real sympathy for addicts.

  All addicts.

  If I could build a whole stupid philosophy and life goal around the beauty rush, what the hell must it feel like to get ravished by drugs? Or power, or cash, or anything else?

  Staying sober must feel dead. At least at first.

  From that new mental angle, I looked up and saw a wide, wide, unthinkably enormous world, with billions of people in pain. And me with no core numbing addiction to guide my path.

  It was terrifying.

  But also free.

  “Pete?” Rachel said. “You okay? You with me?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “That is my nurse friend. Ceci. You should meet her. She’s amazing.”

  Rachel’s face closed. The glow died.

  I turned away, waving Ceci over and dying inside, and terrified I’d change my mind.

  “Don’t make her get up,” Rachel said. “I’ve got to go, I just wanted to say thanks.” She gave a polite wave and smile toward Ceci, who was just now rising from her chair, and then she booked it for the door.

  I guess I wasn’t ready for her to really be gone. I ran after her, and caught her right at the threshold.

  “Wait, listen,” I said. “I know it’s none of my business, but maybe you should call Jocelyn. I saw her the other day. She was crying pretty hard.”

  Partly, I really did feel bad to see her going off to have that baby all alone. But it’s also true that I might have hoped for one last surge of warmth.

  That didn’t happen.

  Rachel went ice cold.

  “They already came by once to try the grandma thing,” she said. “I’ll pass.”

  And she left.

  Slowly I walked back toward Ceci, who had sat back down in the break room and somehow looked even more drained. Vivian was gone, maybe to the bathroom.

  “Congrats, Pete,” Ceci said, tired but sincere. “She seems nice.”

  “That’s not… we’re not…”

  “Pete, please, it’s fine,” she said. “I don’t care who you date.”

  “I care who you date!” I said. “He practically tried to rape you!”

  “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “That’s not his way.”

  “What are you talking about?” I snapped. “He tried to trap you at his freaking isolated mansion!”

  “He knew I could call a ride, Pete. He didn’t try to stop me. I’m not saying it’s okay, it was manipulative and scary, exactly the kind of clever bastard move that’s still not illegal. I never want to see him again, apology or not.” She sighed. “But it’s also true that I knew where he was going by the first date. It was my choice to keep saying yes, going out with him every night.”

  I felt sick. “Every… night?”

  “Yes, Pete. Every night. Past midnight, talking and laughing and eating amazing food I could never afford. He was funny and flattering and he made me feel spectacular.”

  “You seriously have been out with him every night?”

  “Yes! Why is that so critical?”

  “Because you’re his freaking alibi.”

  Ceci frowned. In a very different, serious voice, she said, “What are you talking about, Pete? You didn’t actually think—”

  “Of course we did! But if you were out with him every night… damn! He would have been the perfect guy to go shoot Golitsyn. But the time of death for that was before midnight.”

  “Pete! Dear God, the man’s not going to shoot someone!”

  “He just tried to hook you on opiates in revenge! Because you wouldn’t sleep with him!”

  “He prescribed me a medication. He’s still a doctor.”

  “Why are you defending him?” I demanded.

  Somehow that got her. She blanched a bit, and frowned… and she looked scared. In a small voice, she said, “I don’t know.”

  We sat together in silence, just Ceci and me and the little gurgle of the fake fountain in the back corner of the store.

  Then the front door swung open and some burly customer walked in, a stranger. But not as strange as this woman I’d thought I knew. All over Ceci’s face, tiny fresh wrinkles and sags whispered a weariness I’d never thought I’d see in her. When I met her eyes, she looked lost.

  I wondered if I’d ever find her again.

  Chapter 48

  That night, back at the cabin, Mark and I called a council of war.

  By which I mean, Mark was typing away in the corner with his home-made shelf of monitors, and I grabbed one of our cruddy kitchen chairs and sat where I could hassle him.

  “Now what?” I said. “That stupid doctor has Ceci, of all people, as his alibi. We’ve still got nothing on him, and every other suspect’s either innocent or has an alibi. I mean, there’s Luther, he’s still missing and he was mysteriously out of town for all three deaths. But if the guy was going to sneak back in and shoot anyone, he’d have shot Dr. Paul…”

  Mark smiled at his biggest screen.

  “What? What is it?” I said.

  “Did you forget the keylogger?”

  My chest surged with hope. “Did you check it?”

  “Just finishing the download now. Shall we?”

  With an oddly dramatic flourish, he clicked open a file…

  …and the huge screen filled with a meaningless sea of text.

  Mark frowned. He switched to another folder, and he pulled up a window with hundreds of thumbnails. Screenshots. An endless stream of screenshots from the pain clinic’s computers, dreary and monotonous…

  I drooped. My forehead started to implode, like I was staring at a chalkboard of algebra and feeling the gravitational pull to put my head on my desk and sleep till it was over.

  “Crap,” I moaned. “This is going to take forever.”

  On a smaller side screen, a chat window opened. It read:

  thekid:
hey guys.

  “The Kid?” I said. “Is that the guy from your Linux group? I made that name up!”

  “And he reads your books, remember?” Mark said.

  “Oh yeah. While I’m still writing them…”

  The chat window blinked with an update.

  thekid: any thoughts on your theoretical results yet?

  “Oh, great,” Mark muttered. He typed a response.

  mark: Please don’t tell me you’re actually getting a copy.

  The Kid’s reply was almost instant. Seriously, it was freaky that anyone could type so fast.

  thekid: theoretically, a teacher might analyze the data from a student project. very exciting data.

  Mark sighed, and typed…

  mark: Ok, fine. Theoretically, what are we looking at?

  The chat window popped up a separate message that the Kid was sending us spreadsheets. As Mark opened the files, he said, “I should have known those guys would be all over this.”

  The chat window updated…

  thekid: of course we would

  “Wait, what?” Mark snapped. “You’re still listening on Pete’s phone? What the hell? Is this constant surveillance?”

  thekid: chill. the scan was waiting for you to say ‘keylogger’. promise. (hope that’s not ceci’s safe word)

  “I’ll kick your ass—” I growled.

  “I’ll help,” Mark said. “But wait till he shows us all this.” In a louder voice, he said, “Where do we start here?”

  thekid: open these spreadsheets: index_abyss_ingrate_0A14.csv and expiatory_summer_flavorful_CX78.csv

  “Okay, okay, hold on,” Mark said, clicking around and frowning. “You really do have weird naming conventions.”

  The chat window blinked with multiple updates.

  thekid: you’ve never seen diceware?

  thekid: no no don’t open that one

  thekid: never mind

  Suddenly Mark’s screen exploded with images. He jolted back, releasing the mouse, but the images arranged themselves on their own.

  “You prick!” he yelled. “Get out of my computer! I have client stuff on here!”

  thekid: shush

  “I don’t believe this!” Mark griped, as the images lined up as if by a ghostly hand. “This is fricking Linux, I just updated everything.”

  thekid: don’t blame yourself, it’s a kernel vulnerability. you’ll be fine on the next update. wrote the patch myself.

  “They let you touch the kernel?”

  On the left edge of Mark’s screen, the first image suddenly maximized.

  thekid: exhibit A. this is a bank statement for an account belonging to a certain milton paul. in switzerland.

  “Switzerland?” I said. “For real?”

  thekid: note the regular deposits. the amount varies randomly, but it always hovers around a few hundred dollars… and it’s always the same payee.

  The base of my spine went cold. “Who?” I said. “Who’s paying him?”

  thekid: an obscure marketing company

  The chill in my spine eased up. “A marketing company? That’s it?”

  thekid: not exactly. it turns out to be one small node in a very large network of companies… a network that’s very well-disguised. rooting it all out took me almost an hour.

  “Don’t work too hard,” Mark said.

  The bank statement vanished, and another image filled the screen: a spiderweb of small, interconnected boxes. Each box had the name of a separate company.

  There were at least a hundred.

  thekid: i can’t emphasize enough how serious these people are about their privacy. i strongly suggest you keep this map discreet.

  Mark was scanning fast, his eyes flitting back and forth. Then he caught his breath, and his face went scared and still.

  “What? What do you see?” I said.

  He rasped, “Look in the middle.”

  I looked closer. The map was more of a maze, but now I noticed that although each company name sounded innocuous, each was followed by a phrase in brackets that gave the company’s true purpose. These had obviously been added by the Kid. The companies at the outer edges had bracket phrases like [Research] and [Recruiting], but as you moved closer to the center, the companies had brackets like [Heroin] and [Human Trafficking].

  In the center was a single word.

  [NUMB]

  “Holy crap,” I said. “You mapped out Numb’s business empire?”

  thekid: hello, discreet? you did note the [hacking] division? did my best to lock you down, but i'm not the only one who might invite himself into your phone.

  “My phone? Why mine? You don’t think these people could possibly—”

  “We can’t worry about that,” Mark said. “If he’s hacking Pete’s phone, we’re already done. So why’s he paying Paul?”

  thekid: check this out

  The bank statement came back up, this time with the date of each deposit highlighted. Then a spreadsheet showed beside it, and each row had a date that was also highlighted. Beside each date was a name.

  “Oh, my God,” Mark breathed. “That’s his patient list.”

  thekid: correct. see the dates? every single deposit date matches a date on the patient list. the date that patient gets no more meds.

  “He’s selling his patients to Numb?” I said.

  “Right when they go cold turkey,” Mark said. He looked sick. “The perfect leads for someone selling heroin.”

  “But why?” I said. “He’s a doctor, he’s got that mansion…”

  The screen fluttered with new financials. I couldn’t make sense of it all, but I caught words like OVERDUE and LAST WARNING.

  thekid: this guy is crazy leveraged. he’s already missed two mortgage payments on that mansion in the last six months. he’s almost in default on the jumbo loan he took to renovate that clinic, and he doesn’t even own the place. it’s a lease, the owner didn’t even really want him in there.

  “Why not?” I said.

  thekid: the owner’s got family in some town that went to shit over meds in west va. so there’s all these clauses in the lease if paul so much as breathes wrong.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That might motivate a guy to squash any bad publicity.”

  thekid: you think? meanwhile, paul just scraped together a huge down payment on a loan for a whole *second* clinic up towards northern virginia. he’s nuts. he’s one payment away from losing his house, the lease, or both. these one-off payouts are keeping him afloat.

  Mark frowned. “And he can’t pump his patients with expensive prescriptions forever, like the good old days of a year or so ago. The feds started watching the pill supply too closely.”

  thekid: right. but no one’s watching a swiss bank account

  “Every deposit means a new addict,” I said.

  And that’s when I felt the rage.

  Maybe the anger had been simmering ever since the stories first came out… the doctors who knew they were cashing in prescriptions that would wreck people’s lives… or the pharmaceutical companies who had spent years and millions engineering a culture shift to make opiates seem safe and humane, when we’d known since Homer they were crazy addictive and lethal.

  There were sales reps who’d been trained that if a doctor resisted their pitch to start prescribing legal heroin, they could hint at a future class action lawsuit. On behalf of patients everywhere who demanded the right to escape all pain.

  But it wasn’t just Big Pharma. The doctors had written those prescriptions. A few had even gone nuclear, spending all day, every day, writing “scrip” for patients they’d never even see.

  And now fifty thousand of us were dying every year. More than the annual death toll from car wrecks.

  Meanwhile, mad scientists were straining away night and day to make their potions even more insanely potent… you touch the wrong batch these days, and a couple extra grains could kill you. Hordes of victims were crashing and dying on new levels of addictive shit never be
fore seen by the human race. It made the meth that had wrecked Akina look like a wine cooler…

  Wait… Akina?

  Then I saw Mark, and I freaked out.

  I was vibing Mark’s rage.

  His face was flushed, his jaw was clenched, and he was reading and rereading the financials on the screen with eyes going bloodshot.

  He looked ready to kill someone.

  Tentatively, I said, “So how do we catch this guy?”

  The chat screen answered first.

  thekid: there’s the rub. technically, he’s just getting overpaid by a lame marketing company, that, officially, just sends a questionnaire to his patient. legally, he’s untouchable.

  “Legally,” Mark muttered.

  “Legally is important,” I put in.

  Mark seared me with a bloodshot glare.

  I flinched. Every so often, Mark shows his inner Mountain Man, the side of his character you’d rather not see if he’s, say, driving, or near any power tools. He has a select repertoire of looks that I’ve quickly learned to read.

  This one? This was Mountain Man reaching for his shotgun.

  PART 5

  Chapter 49

  A half hour later, we were back in Ceci’s living room, with me perched awkwardly on her normally cozy couch while Mark simmered in a separate chair.

  I couldn’t believe we’d been here only this afternoon. It felt more like a week.

  Then Ceci walked in from the kitchen, and it felt like it hadn’t been five minutes.

  She was carrying a tray with a teapot and cups, a cheerful little set with cherries and birds. But her face was as grim as if she’d spent the day at a hospice.

  She shuffled in and sat at the couch’s far end, closer to Mark than to me. “You didn’t say much on the phone,” she said, as she set the tray on her little table and began mechanically pouring out cups of welcome.

  “He didn’t say much on the drive either,” I put in.

  Mark snapped me a bloodshot look, and I squirmed. His metaphorical shotgun might not be cocked yet, but it was certainly laid across his lap.