by Lisa Regan
“What kinds of rumors?” Josie asked.
“Oh, I’ve heard it all, but basically no one believes she drowned, so people are saying her body was badly beaten when it was pulled from the water or that her skull was crushed in. I even heard one rumor that she wasn’t found in the pool at all—that she was brutally murdered—but the powers that be at the university don’t want bad press, so they’re just saying she drowned. I didn’t know whether to say anything or not. I saw her, but it seemed wrong to talk about it.”
Josie fought the urge to roll her eyes. Rumors and death were never a good combination. “I think keeping quiet for now is best,” Josie said. “Regardless of what you say to set the record straight, rumors will still spread. None of them are about drugs though, huh?”
Trout walked up beside her chair and nudged her hand. She scratched between his ears.
“No,” Patrick said. “I guess that’s weird, considering you found that sticker. Can you show it to me?”
“I don’t see why not,” Josie answered. “I know Chief Hahlbeck showed it around campus.”
She pulled up the photo on her phone. He studied it a long moment, pursing his lips. Josie said, “You’ve seen it before?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, and yet, something about it is familiar. It’s pretty gruesome though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Josie said. “Listen, Pat, if you’ve been using drugs, it’s okay to tell me—”
He held up a hand to silence her. “Please, don’t. You don’t have to worry about me. Believe me, even if I was doing drugs and knew something about that—” he motioned toward her phone just as the screen went blank and the sticker disappeared. “I would say something, especially since people are dying—well, almost dying. Is that firefighter still alive?”
“As of this morning, yes,” Josie said.
“So what are we talking about here? A date rape drug? If I knew anything about those, I’d report it.”
“I’m glad,” Josie replied. “But not date rape drugs. Something like those drugs in the sense that after taking them, people wouldn’t remember anything that happened. What we’re looking for is to see if anyone here in Denton has been using a drug or giving a drug to other people that—I’ll spare you the scientific version—makes them compliant, docile, and extremely suggestible.”
The oven timer went off. Patrick stood and grabbed an oven mitt, pulling the pizza out and leaving it on the counter to cool. He tossed the mitt back into a drawer and returned to his seat. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a drug that puts a person into a state where you can tell them to do anything, and they’d do it. Anything at all, from something as simple as telling them which direction they should walk to telling them to harm someone, maybe even themselves.”
He frowned and pushed a shock of dark hair off his forehead. “But not necessarily hurting someone?”
“No,” Josie said. “Not necessarily. The drug we’re looking into basically wipes away a person’s free will. Also, I’m told they wouldn’t remember anything afterward. Used with ill intent, as I’m sure you can imagine, it could be extremely dangerous.”
He nodded as she spoke. “There were these videos circulating last year on campus. Right after school started.”
“Circulating how?” Josie asked. “Via social media?”
Patrick shook his head. “Text message. Only people on campus. No one knew where they originally came from or who took them. Even the people who were in them didn’t know, mostly because they didn’t remember having done the stuff they did in the videos. There was like this unspoken thing where you didn’t post them anywhere, but people on campus were sending them to each other.”
“What kinds of videos, Patrick?”
“The first few were just really dumb stuff. Like one of them was of this guy—he was a senior last year—walking through the middle of campus, late at night. Whoever was taping him was following him—it was a dude’s voice. He would tell him what to do, and the guy would do it. He said things like ‘act like a chicken’ and the dude would start clucking and waving his elbows. He told him to lay down in the middle of the street and so the guy did. Stupid shit like that. Do handstands—which the guy clearly couldn’t do. Then you heard the person taping say something like, ‘The police are coming, run!’ and the video ended.”
“Did the student who was being taped seem disoriented? Was he stumbling? Slurring his words? Anything like that?”
“No. He seemed totally normal. Actually, when the video first started going around to people’s phones, they were like, this is all fake. I guess it was supposed to be, like, ‘look what I made this dumb drunk guy do,’ and everyone who watched it was like, ‘that guy’s not drunk!’”
Josie said, “What about the other videos? How many were there?”
“Four.” Patrick stood and grabbed his and Josie’s plates, going to the counter to get them both two slices of pizza. Beside Josie, Trout gave a low whine, and she told him to go lay down, which he did, finding his bed in the corner of the kitchen and giving a heavy sigh as he plopped down on it. Patrick set the pizza down in front of her but neither of them ate. He said, “I only remember four. There was one of a girl sneaking onto the roof of one of the athletic buildings in the middle of the night and doing some cheers—I think she was a cheerleader for the football team—and the guy taping had her strip down to her bra and underwear and do a cheer he made up about how sports suck. It was kind of funny. Except then she almost fell off the roof, and the camera dropped and went out. I think she got in trouble with the cheerleading squad, but she said she must have gotten drunk and done it because she didn’t remember. They put her on probation, or something like that.”
“But didn’t kick her off the squad?” Josie asked.
“I don’t think so, but everything I’m telling you, I heard second and third hand. Rumors. I don’t know if any of what I heard is even accurate.”
“I understand,” Josie said. “What about the last two videos?”
Patrick leaned his elbows on the table and swiped his hands over his face. “I’m trying to remember now. I don’t remember the third video that well, other than that some guy was stumbling around a little bit. It was, like, him going around licking stuff.”
“Licking stuff?” Josie said. “Like what?”
“Like anything. The pavement, telephone poles, door knobs. Anything that would make you cringe. But that guy really looked drunk. That one was probably the one the students on campus found the funniest. I mean, it wasn’t funny in the sense that it’s never funny to make a drunk person do stuff they wouldn’t normally do, but that one got forwarded more than any other one. I think it did. It seemed like more people saw that one. I’m saying that anecdotally, by the way. It’s not like I’ve got data.”
Josie laughed a little. “You sound like Mom. How about the last one? Do you remember it at all?”
Patrick grimaced. “Yeah, that one wasn’t funny at all. It was kind of sad. It was actually a freshman girl. I didn’t know her but people in my dorm did. I think Brenna might have known her. We weren’t dating then but after we met, the subject of the videos came up at a party once, and Brenna got really upset and said that the last video wasn’t funny because it almost ruined that girl’s life.”
The pizza, which had smelled so delicious earlier, now seemed completely unappetizing. Josie picked at the crust. “Tell me about that video.”
“The girl was walking down the street. It was dark. The guy taping was following her. She had on a dress and heels, like maybe she was out at a party or something. It was really creepy though, ’cause you couldn’t tell if she knew the guy was following her or not.”
“Could you tell where they were?” Josie asked.
“I don’t remember. It didn’t look like campus. I just assumed it was somewhere in Denton, though. Anyway, she gets a little way down the street, near this streetlight, and he tells her to stop walking and just like that, she does. Sh
e doesn’t even turn around, she just stops. Then he has her do all this dumb shit, like five squats, and jump on one foot, and it was like she was a robot.”
“Did she seem intoxicated?”
“No. Well, at one point you could see her eyes up real close and her pupils were huge. So she must have been on something, but she wasn’t stumbling around or anything. The video goes on, with him telling her to do progressively dumber shit, like look up her own ass—which made him crack the hell up. He couldn’t even keep the camera steady.”
“This was all in public?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “You could hear people in the background who must have walked by either laughing or asking the girl if everything was okay, and she’d always answer yes. The guy taping would say they were drunk and just messing around.”
“But he took it too far, didn’t he?” Josie said.
“Yeah,” Patrick sighed. “He did. He told her to take off her clothes. All of them. She did it, too. No hesitation at all. Then he made her do more stupid shit. It was really painful to watch at that point. For his finale, he made her get up onto the hood of someone’s car and urinate.”
“Good lord,” Josie said. “Did the videos come to your phone?”
He nodded.
“Who sent them?”
“One of my friends got them from someone in one of his classes who had gotten them on a group text, and then my friend blasted it out on another group text which included my number. No one really knew where they were coming from, but they still shared them.”
“Do you have any of them still?”
“No,” Patrick said. “I didn’t keep them. I wasn’t even that interested in them except everyone was talking about them. The last one really made me sad. It was hard to watch, and it felt… wrong, you know? To watch it? Like, it wasn’t funny. It was disturbing.”
Josie gave him a pained smile. “I know,” she said. “You’re a good kid, Pat. Do you know whether any of them were ever posted anywhere online?”
“I don’t think so, but it’s not like I looked or anything.”
“Do you know or remember any of the names of the students in the videos?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“No idea who took the videos?”
He shook his head.
“There were only four?”
“That I know of, yeah, but I think that really was the last one. Most people who saw it were pretty upset by it. I reported it to the campus police.”
“What did they say?” Josie asked.
“That they’d ‘look into it’ but that they didn’t even know whether the girl in the video was a student or not and that unless she made a complaint herself, there wasn’t much they could do.”
It sounded exactly like something that Hillary Hahlbeck’s predecessor would have said. The man had been incompetent and lazy and a constant source of frustration for Denton PD, who often ended up investigating the crimes that he dismissed, and then when Josie’s team asked for campus police assistance, he would block them at every turn. Hahlbeck had been a welcome change.
“Do you think anyone you know might still have one or more of the videos that I could see?”
“I doubt it, but I can ask around.”
“You said you thought Brenna might know the girl in the last video? Do you think you could talk to her for me? Try to get a name?”
“I can try,” Patrick said. “But she’s really weird about it. Protective. I got the sense that the girl in the video’s been through so much that Brenna doesn’t want to add to it.”
“Understandable,” Josie said. “And I’ll definitely talk to the new campus police chief to see if she can find out for me without the need to go through Brenna. But Pat, we’re working some cases right now where a lot of people could be in serious danger. If the person who made those videos was slipping that drug I told you about to those people to get them to do whatever he said and we were able to locate him, it could crack the case. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t extremely important. We’re not exactly neck-deep in leads. Any small piece of information could help.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “I get it. I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Hey, where’s Noah?”
Josie checked her phone. He should have been home hours ago. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll text him.”
She fired off a message. His answer came back less than a minute later. Still chasing leads. Don’t wait up.
Josie tried not to wait up, but her brain wouldn’t shut down. Patrick left once his wash was finished, and his absence only made things worse for her. Her mind wouldn’t let go of the case. The thought that someone was deliberately giving a drug to people that made them so pliant chilled her blood. She kept imagining Noah wandering around, drugged, at the mercy of someone who was so cold and cruel they’d tell a swimmer to drown herself and a firefighter to set his house on fire.
Time to be a mermaid.
Time to be a match.
Lamay was the outlier but still, it was awfully coincidental that he’d had such a strange episode so close in time to what happened to Nysa Somers and Clay Walsh. What if the person responsible for the drug was now targeting random people and giving them no instructions at all? Alone in bed, the events of the last few days went through her mind again and again on a loop. She got up and turned on both nightstand lamps as well as the overhead light. Trout whined and tried to burrow his head beneath one of the covers. Josie took her phone off the charger and checked it for notifications, even though she would have heard it chirp had there been any. As she expected, there was nothing.
At eleven thirty, she punched in a text message to Noah. Please come home. I need you.
She stared at the words for a long moment. Naked on the screen. She bit her lower lip, erased the words ‘I need you’ and pressed send. His response came back a few seconds later: On my way. Her relief was so profound that a gasp escaped her lips. She ran down the steps and stood before the front door. Disgusted, Trout stayed in bed. The sound of Noah’s vehicle in the driveway made her heart skip. He unlocked the door and stepped through it. Josie was relieved to see his easy smile and that his pupils were normal size.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I got caught—”
Josie threw her arms around his neck. “I don’t care,” she said, and pulled him down to her in a hungry kiss.
Thirty-Two
Josie and Noah’s first stop the next morning was Denton Memorial Hospital to visit Sergeant Dan Lamay. He was alert and sitting up in bed with the television remote in his hand. When Josie and Noah entered, he tossed it aside and beckoned them closer. They both hugged him, and Josie was stunned by the stress that immediately lifted from her shoulders knowing he was okay.
“How do you feel?” Josie asked, as she and Noah took up position on either side of Dan’s bed.
“I feel great. Just really ‘freaked out,’ as my daughter would say. I woke up here this morning. Had no idea what the hell was going on.”
“You don’t remember coming here yesterday?” Noah asked.
Dan shook his head. “Not at all, and before you ask, the Chief was here about an hour ago and he told me the whole story, and no, I don’t remember the bell tower or any of that either.”
“What do you remember?” Josie asked.
“I remember kissing my wife goodbye yesterday morning and walking out my front door and the next thing I know, I’m in this bed. ’Bout gave myself a heart attack when I woke up here. But they said all my tests are negative. I’ve got a clean bill of health, and I can leave later today.”
“That’s great,” Josie said.
Noah asked, “Did the Chief mention anything to you about how we think you ended up here?”
“Yeah, he said Josie thinks we might have someone peddling some kind of drug in the city somewhere. Maybe lacing people’s food with stuff. Like a poisoner, I guess. So I won’t eat or drink anything my wife doesn’t make me until you guys get this straightened out. I sure
don’t like losing time like that.”
“You don’t remember stopping at the mini-market, or anything you ate yesterday morning?” Noah asked.
“No, but it was probably the same thing I have every morning. Yogurt and granola at home and then coffee and a pastry from the mini-market on my way to work.” He laughed. “I was kind of hoping the wife wouldn’t find out about my mini-market habit.”
A knock on the door interrupted them. One of the nurses shooed Josie and Noah out so she could check Dan’s vital signs. Certain he was in good hands, they left the hospital and checked in at the station. Gretchen and Mettner weren’t due in until later in the afternoon, but the Chief was waiting with a list of updates. He stood in front of their desks, reading off a stack of pages clutched in his hand. Amber, who had been sitting at her desk, focused on her laptop, looked up as he talked.
“I talked to the hospital administrator last night. He wasn’t happy, but after he reviewed the ER records from Monday, he agreed that it was an unusual number of similar cases in a short amount of time. Before she left for the night, Palmer wrote up a warrant for the names of the seizure and heart attack patients who came in to the ER the day that Nysa Somers died. That’s been served. The hospital’s attorneys and compliance officers are looking it over. I’ll get Palmer to follow up on that later today when she gets here.
“Neither Mettner nor Gretchen found any connections among Nysa Somers, Clay Walsh, and Coach Brett Pace or between any of those three and Dan Lamay—other than the obvious connection between Somers and Pace. Fraley.” He raised his eyes to look at Noah. “You were out all day on interviews and here late, as I understand it, writing up reports. You didn’t find anything either, did you?”
“No, sir,” Noah answered.
“Right,” Chitwood said with a sigh, shuffling the pages in his hands. “The only good news I’ve got is that Clay Walsh is hanging on. He is in stable condition at the hospital in Philadelphia. I also talked with the Fire Chief this morning. The Walsh fire was set intentionally, and they want to know who the hell burned down the home of one of their most decorated firefighters.”
