by Lisa Regan
“You think I didn’t notice, Quinn? After the last two days? What’s your point?”
“I’d like to get Mrs. Lamay’s permission to have Dan’s blood samples tested for scopolamine,” she said. “I know it’s a long shot based purely on speculation, and that we haven’t even talked to your DEA contact yet, but if somehow what happened with Dan today is related to what happened to Nysa Somers and Clay Walsh, we’ve only got a narrow window of time, from a toxicology standpoint, to test Dan’s blood. If I can get her permission, we wouldn’t need a warrant, and in this instance, I’m not even sure we could get a warrant. We’ve got an opportunity here. If it turns out to be nothing, the only cost would be an extra lab test.”
“Fine,” Chitwood said. He started to walk away but stopped. Turning back to her, he said, “Quinn, if Dan’s incident today is somehow connected to Somers and Walsh, and we’ve got someone going around this city giving people an unknown drug with a half-life so short it doesn’t stay in their system long enough for medical professionals to test for it, this whole thing is going to be hard as hell to prove.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quinn, you do love uphill battles, don’t you?”
“Those are my favorite kinds of battles, sir,” she answered.
He gave her a strange look and then a slow smile spread across his face. Josie’s breath stopped in her throat. It was only the second time she’d ever seen him smile, and no one was there to witness it.
Chitwood said, “Keep me posted on Lamay’s condition, would you?”
She nodded and watched him leave.
Josie spent the rest of the afternoon in the hospital, monitoring Dan’s condition. Dan’s wife readily agreed to a test for scopolamine. The only problem was that Denton Memorial didn’t have the capability to perform such a test. It would have to be sent to an outside lab, which was going to take two to three days at the most. Noah, Gretchen and Mettner worked the rest of the day, splitting up to cover as much ground as possible. They maintained a group text message thread to keep one another informed of who had been interviewed and whether any leads popped up.
Mettner found out that Dan had stopped at a local mini-market that morning for gas, coffee, and a pastry. Josie asked him to bag anything that remained at Dan’s desk and send it to the state police lab for analysis. Mettner also pulled footage from the mini-market for the few hours before Dan came in until after Dan left, but so many people had bought coffee and pastries that morning, it was impossible to tell if anyone had tampered with anything. Interviews with the mini-market employees turned up nothing. Mettner even pulled footage from the station lobby where Dan was usually posted to see who had been in or out and if any of those people had acted suspiciously. He found nothing. Gretchen and Noah continued to provide their own updates throughout the day as they each worked their own list of people from Clay Walsh’s life, trying to find connections between him and Nysa Somers as well as him and Brett Pace. They turned up nothing. They had also shown Brett Pace’s photo around beneath the East Bridge, but no one had ever seen him before, or if they had, they wouldn’t admit to it.
Just before dinner time, after being assured by the medical staff that Dan was just fine and that they’d keep him overnight for observation, Josie returned to the stationhouse, exhausted and no closer to figuring out what the hell was happening in her city. She dropped into her seat and threw her feet up onto her desk. Gretchen straggled in, followed several minutes later by Mettner. Each of them looked just as worn out as Josie felt.
“Where’s Noah?” Josie asked.
“A couple of last-minute interviews,” Gretchen said. “I don’t expect them to turn anything up though.”
The door to the Chief’s office banged open. “Quinn!” he barked. “Get in here! Now!”
Josie stood, smoothed her Denton PD polo shirt—the one she’d borrowed from Gretchen still—and khaki pants and walked into the chief’s office. “Sir?”
He motioned toward the door behind her. “Who else is here? Get them in here, too.”
Josie called for Mett and Gretchen, who joined her. They gathered around the Chief’s desk, and he punched a button on his desktop phone. “Josh?” he said. “You still there?”
A voice answered, “Yeah, Bob. I’m here.”
“I got my people here. Can you tell them what you told me?”
“Sure thing.”
Chitwood looked up at his detectives. “You’re talking to DEA agent, Josh Stumpf. He’s been with the agency over twenty years. Seen it all. We worked on three task forces together. He knows his shit. I called him and talked to him about what’s going on around here. Rather than repeat everything he told me, I figured I’d just have you talk with him directly so you can ask any questions you have. Josh?”
“Hey there,” Josh said. “Who’ve I got on the phone?”
Josie, Gretchen, and Mettner introduced themselves.
“All right then,” Josh said. “Bob sent me a photo of the sticker you found. I ran it through our database, talked to a few people. It’s not something we’ve ever seen before. Bob also told me you were looking into the possibility of a street drug that would make a person suggestible, docile, and pliant but without completely incapacitating them. He also mentioned that one of you had brought up the drug scopolamine. Turns out there is a street drug that’s very similar to scopolamine. It’s called Devil’s Breath.”
Josie looked at Mettner and Gretchen. Both were taking notes—Gretchen in her trusty notepad and Mett on his phone app.
“We have a fair amount of drug activity here,” Josie said. “And Detective Palmer worked in a major city for fifteen years. We haven’t heard of Devil’s Breath before.”
“Because it’s taken on a kind of mythological status,” Josh explained. “Here in the U.S. it’s considered an urban legend. It’s mainly found in South America. Colombia, to be exact, although we’ve had reports of it being used in Europe and Thailand. Comes from the flowers of the borrachero shrub which is found, guess where?”
“Colombia,” Josie filled in.
“Right. There’s a chemical process used on the seeds, turns them to powder, and leaves you with burundanga, which is extremely similar to scopolamine. There’s this myth—you can google it—that offenders are able to put the powder on a business card and hand it to you. Once you touch it, the burundanga absorbs into your skin and you lose your memory and your free will. Wake up a day or two later naked in a strange place with no idea what happened to you. The other legend is that an offender would blow the powder into your face with the same result. Hence the name Devil’s Breath. That’s the urban legend part. It’s much more likely that an offender would slip it into your drink. It’s odorless and tasteless so it’s easy to slip to people without them knowing it. There is a real problem with it in Colombia and when I say problem, I mean cases of people coming into emergency rooms for burundanga overdoses. Symptoms include rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils, confusion, hallucinations, heart failure, seizures, psychosis, that sort of thing. So while Devil’s Breath is, as I said, a bit of an urban legend, it is certainly real and being used with regularity in South America. Down there, they use it sometimes to facilitate sexual assault, but mostly to rob people.”
Mettner said, “It’s used to rob people?”
“Yeah. Guy goes to a club, gets approached by a beautiful woman. When he’s not looking, she slips it into his drink. He wakes up with no memory of anything at all—sometimes no memory of even going to the club—but turns out the woman convinced him to go to the ATM machine and withdraw every cent he’s got to give to her. And they’ll find video of themselves going to the ATM and taking out the money. They’ll track down people who saw them the night before and those people will say, ‘Hey, man, you weren’t out of it or anything. You said you were going to help this chick out by getting her some cash from the ATM.’”
Gretchen said, “But there are no known cases of Devil’s Breath being used here in the U.S., are there?”
“No, not in that capacity that I’m aware of, but here’s the thing: it only stays in your system for about four hours. So if someone wakes up twelve hours later, disoriented, with no memory of the night before and they go to the hospital to have blood taken, doctors won’t find anything. Also, standard tox panels here would only test for the usual suspects like roofies, ketamine, and GHB. Blood wouldn’t be tested for burundanga or even scopolamine unless someone specifically asked for a test and even then, I’m not sure hospitals would be prepared to test for it. That’s outside of my purview.”
Josie asked, “If you wanted to get Devil’s Breath here in the U.S., how would you do it?”
A sigh came over the line. Then Josh said, “Well, the easiest and most direct way would be the dark web. Or you could try making something similar to it using scopolamine. It’s also found here in the U.S. in jimsonweed. That stuff is everywhere. I guess if you knew what you were doing, you could make it from one of those two things. It would be hard, and dosing would be an issue as well, but I guess if you’re making this stuff with the intention of doing harm to people, you don’t much care whether you give them too much or not. That help?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “Thank you.”
Chitwood thanked Josh and they hung up. He looked at Josie. “Happy?”
“Not particularly,” Josie admitted. “This is going to be hard to prove, just like you said. We’re only speculating that we’re dealing with a drug that could be either some sort of homemade scopolamine concoction or actual Devil’s Breath—or some derivative—bought from the dark web. We still need proof of the drug. We know they’re very similar which means that they’d both have the same or similar adverse effects, but we need actual evidence.”
Mettner said, “We should try to get a warrant to have Clay Walsh’s blood samples tested for scopolamine, Devil’s Breath, or some derivative of it—if they have anything left from the blood samples they took when he was first brought in. We can have it sent to the same outside lab Denton Memorial is using to test Dan’s sample.”
Gretchen said, “I can work on that.”
Mettner continued, “When I checked Dan’s desk today, I bagged a half a doughnut and a quarter cup of his coffee. Hummel took it into evidence and sent it to the state lab for analysis. I can give them a call and ask them to test for burundanga or some derivative. We’ve also still got the brownie crumbs from the bag in Nysa Somers’ backpack. They went out to the lab on Monday. Now that we know what to look for, we can alert the lab and maybe they’ll find something.”
“Which lab?” Josie asked. “Do you know?”
Mettner looked at his phone, scrolling through his notes. “The one in Greensburg.”
“I have a friend there,” Josie said. “Someone who owes me a favor. Let me give her a call and tell her what’s going on. She might be able to speed up the testing process.”
Chitwood was still seated behind his desk. He patted a stray piece of white hair down onto his scalp. “If what happened with Dan today is connected to Somers and Walsh, we have a real problem. We need to move as fast as we can.”
Something in the back of Josie’s mind shifted, calling attention to itself. “The hospital,” she muttered.
“What’s that, Quinn?”
“Both Shannon and DEA agent Stumpf said that scopolamine and Devil’s Breath overdoses could cause dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, psychosis, hallucinations, and seizures.”
“Right,” Gretchen said, flipping the pages of her notebook.
Josie continued, “The day of Nysa Somers’ death, I called Dr. Feist to see if she’d had a chance to do the autopsy, and she said the Denton Memorial ER had been inundated with seizure cases and heart attacks.”
Chitwood stood up. “I’ll go over there and talk to the administrator myself. This is going to be a nightmare in terms of privacy of health information. I’ll talk to him, and then one of you can draw up the warrants and see if we can get our hands on some of the names of these patients Dr. Feist told you about. I believe Mett and Palmer here are on for the rest of the evening. Quinn, you go home.”
“Sir—” Josie said.
He raised his voice to a shout. “Dammit, Quinn. Did you or did you not pull a grown woman out of a pool on Monday and try to resuscitate her?”
“I—yeah.”
“Did you or did you not rescue a five-year-old girl from a burning building yesterday, sacrificing your own damn car to do it?”
“I—I did, sir,” Josie stammered.
His voice boomed across the room. “Did you or did you not almost fall to your death getting Lamay out of that tower today—that’s right, Fraley told me what happened—well?”
“Sir, I—”
“Go the hell home, Quinn! Find Fraley, wherever the hell he is, and take him with you. And do not stop to save any drowning kids, lost puppies, or adults in distress, do you understand me? Call 911 like every other reasonable person, and wait for help. Now go eat and get some damn sleep!”
Josie stood up and wiped sweaty palms on her jeans. She turned toward the door but Chitwood said, “Wait.”
“Yes?” she said, looking back at him.
“Just don’t eat or drink anything you didn’t prepare yourself, you got that? Just, you know, for the time being.”
Josie smiled and left the room.
Thirty-One
Josie texted Noah but he said he was busy on an interview and that he’d meet her at home. Before she pulled out of the municipal parking lot, she called Misty to tell her to avoid any foods that she didn’t prepare herself until further notice. Misty gave a long, heavy sigh. “Let me guess, you can’t tell me why you’re making this bizarre request, can you?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Josie said.
There was a long silence, then another sigh. Misty said, “I’m too tired to argue with you about this. What about Harris?”
“I thought you packed his lunch,” said Josie.
“I do, but sometimes they give out snacks there. I’m asking if you if my son is safe at school, Josie.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “This is probably just me being overly cautious. I mean, I know it is. Just—indulge me, would you?”
“Fine,” Misty said and hung up before Josie could say more.
Josie fired up her rental car and drove home. It wasn’t until she pulled into her driveway that she remembered that she had invited Patrick to dinner and had not planned for it at all. “Shit,” she muttered to herself as she unlocked her front door. In the foyer, Trout raced toward her, throwing his fat little body at her, anxious for pets and belly rubs. As she knelt to give him attention and assure him that he was the very best dog in the world, she noticed the television in the living room was on. She heard the hum of her washer from the laundry room.
“Pat?” she called.
He poked his head out of the kitchen. “Hey, hope you don’t mind. I used my key.”
“Of course not,” Josie said. “You’re doing more washing?”
“Yeah, sorry,” he said sheepishly. “But I promise not to leave anything behind this time.”
Trout followed Josie into the kitchen, his nails clicking on the tile. Patrick stood at the kitchen table, peeling three paper plates from a larger stack of them and placing them where he, Josie, and Noah usually sat. The smell of pizza filled the air. Josie’s stomach growled loudly. She looked over to the countertop to see two large pizza boxes.
“I’m so sorry, Pat,” she told her brother.
“I know,” he said, cutting her off. “Work. I figured that when I got here and neither of you were home. I was going to head back to campus, but I brought my wash, so…”
Josie went over to the counter and opened one of the boxes. Cheesy deliciousness stared back at her. All slices were accounted for. She lifted the lid of the other box which was also untouched.
“I used your emergency twenty,” Patrick said. “For the pizza. But I also took Trout for a w-a-l-k.”
&nb
sp; “It’s fine. Thank you. Where did you get this pizza?”
“Girton’s.”
“Did you pick it up or have it delivered?”
He raised a brow at her. “What’s going on?”
“Pick up or delivery, Pat?”
“Delivery.”
Josie looked back at the pizza. She was so hungry. With a sigh, she picked up one box of pizza and took it to the trash bin, emptying the slices into it.
“What the hell are you doing?” Patrick exclaimed.
She got the other box and threw those slices away as well. Then she turned on the oven. “I’ve got pizza in the freezer. It will take twenty minutes to heat it up,” she told him.
He stood at her table with a pile of paper plates in his hand, looking mystified. “That was perfectly good pizza. What’s going on with you? Do I need to call Noah? Or 911?”
Josie took the stack of plates from his hands and put them away. She found two pizzas in the freezer and peeled their packaging off, preparing them for the oven. “I know it seems like I’m acting crazy,” she told her brother. “But trust me. I’ve got my reasons.”
Patrick sighed. “Are you going to tell me those reasons?”
Josie slid the frozen pizza into the oven and set the timer. “I’ll tell you as much as I can, but it stays between us, okay?”
“Sure.”
The two of them sat at the table, and Josie told him as much about the theory that Denton PD was working under as she could without giving away any details that could later get her in trouble. He already knew something was up with Nysa Somers’ death. Not only had he been there, but he’d been subject to rumors about her death since then, he said.
