Dark Alchemy (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 5)

by Sarah Lovett

  "I picked it out for him to pick out."

  "Good plan."

  "When are you going to pick up your wedding dress? They finished the alterations two weeks ago. Mrs. Trujillo called twice. And Rosie's getting a little panicked, I think."

  "You're right." Sylvia looked surprised. "I'll drop by today."

  "This is important, Sylvia." Serena placed her hands on her hips and tipped her head to one side; the posture made her look eleven going on twenty. "I need to see it on you."

  "I want you to see it on me, too, make sure it fits. I absolutely need your approval on this." Sylvia turned toward the mirror and found herself looking past the damp woman in the blue plaid bathrobe straight into Serena's huge brown eyes. "What?"

  "You're getting married next Saturday."

  Another pang. She ignored it for the sake of her foster daughter.

  "I have the feeling you've got something to say." Sylvia pivoted, resting her butt against the vanity, crossing her arms. "Shoot."

  "Well . . . " Two bright red roses had appeared in Serena's cheeks; she blurted it out: "Are you and Matt going to have a baby?"

  Sylvia felt the wave wash over her—not tidal, but a decent-sized sneaker wave—and she was praying she looked calm and cool at the same instant she could still taste the birth control pill she'd swallowed just five minutes earlier.

  "We're thinking about it," she said, feeling the lump in her throat. "Why are you asking, honey?"

  "Sometimes that's why people get married, because the wife gets . . ."

  "I'm not pregnant, Serena. Not yet." Sylvia perched on the edge of the tub, guiding Serena to sit beside her and wrapping an arm around her foster daughter's shoulders. "Matt and I think we're going to try to have a baby." She saw the concern on Serena's face and asked, "Why do you look so worried?"

  "I want you to have a baby." Serena brightened. "It would be like having a little sister or brother." There was the slightest hesitation. "Wouldn't it?"

  "It would." Sylvia searched Serena's face, trying to read the rainbow of emotions visible in the eyes, the mouth, the set of the chin. She saw uncertainty, eagerness, a little bit of fear, and strength.

  "You know, if we do have a baby, we'll love you just as much as we do now. You'll always be my eldest daughter, wise and beautiful. I love you so much. That will never, ever change."

  "But you're not really my real mom."

  "No, but you and I are connected as much as any mother and daughter. Just in a different way. We're connected through fate and love."

  "Destino," Serena said slowly.

  "Destiny." Sylvia nodded.

  "Sometimes I dream about her . . ."

  "Your mother?" Sylvia prodded ever so gently. "She comes to you in your dreams?"

  Serena nodded. "She always tells me she misses me and she's sad she had to go away to heaven and leave me behind, but she's very very proud of me." Serena looked up, her eyes wide with wonder. "She calls me her angelita."

  "Her little angel."

  Serena set her shoulders back and said, "I hope that you and Matt have a little angel, Sylvia."

  Sylvia caught her breath—something about the yearning in those young eyes. She felt her eyes begin to tear.

  And then the moment was over, broken by Serena's matter-of-fact voice saying, "Okay," as she reached down to button her purple sweater. "My field trip is this weekend."

  "And tomorrow night I'm talking at your school, I know," Sylvia said, noticing how grown-up her foster daughter looked. The school had planned a two-day field trip to the observatory at White Sands. "Do you want to stay at your dad's tomorrow night?" She stood, moving back to the vanity, where she picked up a yellow comb. "That way you're closer to school and the buses on Saturday morning."

  "And he can pick me up at the auditorium after your speech."

  "It's settled, then." Something clicked in Sylvia's brain. "Shouldn't you be in school?" she asked slowly.

  "Yes."

  "Who's driving you?"

  Grinning, Serena pointed a finger at Sylvia.

  "Oh. Oops."

  Hurriedly, Sylvia gathered sunscreen and lipstick, but she stopped in her tracks when she felt—felt as clearly as a tap on the shoulder, although Serena hadn't moved a muscle—one last question. She swung around and held out her hands.

  "Do you ever wish you were my real mom?" Serena blurted out.

  "Yes," Sylvia said, nodding. "Oh, yes."

  "Me, too. I wish that sometimes."

  Sylvia made it across town to the school on upper Canyon in twenty-six minutes, which meant Serena was only thirty minutes late. The return trip took two hours because the truck needed gas, and then Sylvia stopped by the feed store for a forty-pound bag of dog food and twenty pounds of birdseed. She even dashed into the grocery store, where her mind made it three items down the mental list (milk, toilet paper, miso soup) before her cell phone rang.

  "This is Sylvia."

  Silence. A distant humming noise. Wrong number or bad connection.

  She was about to slide her phone into its case when it rang again.

  "What?"

  "Exactly. What color azaleas do you want by the altar? Pink, lavender, white, or assorted?"

  "Oh, fuck. Assorted."

  "That's what I thought. Fuck assorted. It's so nice to hear your voice," Rosie Sanchez added with mock sweetness.

  "It's great to hear your voice. I wasn't sure you were still speaking to me after I ran out on you. Oh, Rosie, I'm such a mess."

  "I can tell, jita. Are you suffering from PMS, jet lag, or panic?"

  "Assorted."

  Rosie laughed. "Can I help?"

  "Mmm . . . did you and Ray fight before your wedding?"

  "Like cats and dogs. Where are you? Can you meet for coffee?"

  "I just dropped Serena off at school. I'm running a few errands before I settle in to work. I need to focus—"

  "Work? You're getting married in a few days, jita. What's going on?"

  "London was problematic—I've got this profile to finish, then I'll be able to concentrate."

  "I mean, what's going on with the wedding plans?" Rosie snorted. "You're going to be one of those women who's on the cell phone when they wheel her into the delivery room and she's in labor, screaming, Just let me file this report!"

  "I know, I know." Sylvia sighed, aware of the fact that Rosie had unwittingly hit upon the dangerous topic of childbearing. Psychic connections. She said, "Two more days of work and then I'm done. I am. Really!"

  "I didn't say anything."

  "I tell you what, order me a bouquet while you're at it—and something for my hair. A—what do they call it—a halo?"

  "A floral garland," Rosie said, clucking her tongue. "Sylvia, is there something wrong?"

  "I think I ruined everything. I told Matt the worst lie."

  "You lied? About what? Jita—not another man!"

  "Of course not." Sylvia almost laughed. "Oh, damn, I forgot to pick up the wedding dress. I love you, I'll call you—bye."

  She hung the dress in her bedroom closet. She pulled it out again and tried it on. She stood in front of the full-length mirror, studying her reflection. The silky fabric was the palest shade of lilac, almost white in certain lights. The neck was scooped, the waist long, lean, and flattering, the knee-length skirt bias cut with graceful flow. It was a terrific dress—and it made her look terrific, according to Bessie Trujillo, the seamstress who'd done the alteration. Sylvia needed Serena's approval and Rosie's. She swung around, watching the skirt swirl. There was surprising and seductive comfort in the ritual of a wedding. She slipped out of the dress, still staring at herself as she stood naked in the bedroom.

  First you use work to escape marriage, then you use marriage to escape work—then you can't make up your mind about one of the most important questions in life: children. Way to go, Sylvia.

  "I just want to forget about life for a few hours," she told her reflection.

  She let the dogs out into the ya
rd, giving them each a rawhide bone, then pulled the shades, turned off the ringer on the house phone, and set her cell phone on vibrate. She brewed a large pot of Assam tea, made wheat toast, and rummaged through the cupboard for jam. Finally she found a package of Reese's peanut butter cups hidden in the cookie jar.

  Now she was ready to focus.

  She sat down at her computer to begin the preparation.

  Profiling, the wild, questionable, flashy little sister of criminal investigation. Pure profiling, the painstaking approach developed by the FBI, consisted of overlapping stages: data collection (police and autopsy reports and crime scene photos); an attempt to classify the crime based on available data; reconstruction of the crime; and finally, the basic hypothesis, the attempt to define the psychological and physical, behavioral, and demographical identity of the offender.

  She had a stack of notes on Christine Palmer. She had video. She had hours of tape stored in her brain. Now came the task of putting raw data into some order, creating some hypothesis that law enforcement could actually use. And it had to be ready by 9 A.M. sharp the next morning, when the feds were scheduled for briefing.

  She was concentrating, settling deeply into her work, so that she almost didn't register the faint vibrational hum of the phone as the call came in. When she recognized the incoming number, she picked up.

  "Where are you?" Edmond Sweetheart asked.

  "Thinking about an asp." She'd understood the question to mean, where was she in the evolution of the profile, was she making progress?

  "Ass, or asp? As in Cleopatra?"

  "Cleopatra, exactly." She walked past her desk, ignoring the blinking cursor and the text-filled screen, to gaze out the window. Three of Mrs. Calidro's cows had found their way into her lower pasture. They were grazing on fall grass and the last of the summer's wildflowers. Closer to the house, a flicker had settled on a dying branch of the old piñon near the road. The bird fluttered to another branch, and the gorgeous sunset flame of its wings and breast brightened the gray day.

  "The queen's alchemists were busy," Sylvia said softly. "Cleopatra had them in the royal kitchen, whipping up concoctions of henbane and belladonna."

  "Atropa belladonna and Hyoscyamus niger."

  "She tested the poisons on her slaves, but the pain they suffered frightened her." The flicker took off from the piñon, leaving a trail of fire against cloud with each wing stroke. Sylvia watched until the bird was out of sight, then said, "So she tried strychnine—"

  "Strychnos nux vomica," Sweetheart murmured.

  "—on Egyptian prisoners, but the convulsions were horrible and the corpses were ugly." Sylvia was quiet for a moment before she followed her train of thought. "But the venom of the asp was a different story."

  She released the catch and opened the window just enough to feel the sharp bite of cold in the air; she closed and locked the window again.

  "Of course, Cleopatra tested death by asp on her human guinea pigs," she said. "And those test subjects turned out to be the lucky ones: they died quickly, with little time for pain, looking presentable."

  Sylvia walked to the love seat, where she stretched out and closed her eyes, resting her cheek against the handset. "The queen was no altruist, she didn't test poisons for the sake of increasing the body of alchemical knowledge. She had an end goal in sight, a selfish goal: a quick, painless, almost pleasant death. She wanted a good suicide—and from all historical accounts, that's exactly what she got."

  Sylvia opened her eyes, propping herself on one arm, gazing at the encyclopedia of poisons that lay open atop a pile of books.

  "Science is about testing hypotheses; the research is geared toward proving or disproving. The poisoner is a researcher, too; the poisoner has an end goal." She was comforted by the seashell sound of her breathing near the mouthpiece.

  "Choose your poison," Sweetheart said.

  "If you're Dr. Christine Palmer and you've chosen exotic, virtually invisible neurotoxins . . . where does that lead you in the end, to what goal?"

  "Did she use her father and lover as guinea pigs?"

  "Perhaps. Or perhaps one of her goals was a painless death, an end to their suffering." Sylvia frowned, rubbing her forehead with the palm of her hand. She felt the first hint of a headache. "There's got to be a relationship between Palmer's individual murders—the poisonings over the years—and her work in laboratories, her scientific research. I don't mean the obvious—access, accessibility of toxins—I mean a psychological relationship." She sighed, frustrated by her lack of clarity.

  "You're working with missing pieces."

  "I know what I'm missing: what is the exact nature of her research—at BioPort, at the Dutch labs, at LANL?"

  "You want missing pieces," he said. "At Porton Down, Project Nicander focused on neurotoxicologic aspects of the microorganisms—responses to toxins in tissue cultures and animal models, preclinical trials. At Los Alamos, within the scope of Project Mithradates, the research has been geared toward molecular genetic studies, genetic identification and characterization of toxins from two or three of the rogue species. The BLS-three labs are there for a reason—cultures and toxin samples have been generated at LANL infrequently, but we know that lethal toxins are handled and stored on-site."

  "Right. Go on."

  "The Dutch labs had the task of examining the mechanisms that support toxin expression by the dinoflagellates. The research has been ongoing."

  "Who's funding such a massive series of projects?"

  "Who isn't? The British and U.S. military have participated in their respective government projects. So has the national and international private sector."

  She let the information sink in—some of it was new, some of it they'd already discussed. Then she said, "I'm still missing the common denominator when it comes to her victims. I don't mean the obvious fact that they were researchers, scientists, peers. There's a deeper connection. They interconnect, I know they do, and they're not what the published papers and the lab spokespersons say they are."

  She waited, restless, balancing the odd sensation that Sweetheart was about to reveal some additional and crucial bit of information—she sensed that he was caught in a struggle—but the moment passed. If he had information, he was keeping it to himself.

  She shook off her frustration and began to move again: to the bookshelves, where she ran her fingers across the spines of countless volumes on philosophy and psychology and history, to the window. Just in time to see the silver Mercedes pull up in her driveway.

  The driver's door opened and Edmond Sweetheart climbed out. A cord dangled from his ear, the only sign he was speaking into a telephone.

  "I had no idea you lived in the wilderness," he said, only half joking. She could barely see his lips moving as she heard the words through the speaker.

  "Now that you're here," she said, "you might as well come in."

  "You like wood," Sweetheart said, setting the steaming mug of green tea on the Craftsman side table. They had settled in the living room, where the wide windows offered a view of the road, the pasture, and distant calderas.

  "Yes."

  "And stone."

  "Yes."

  "Your father and mother?" he studied the black-and-white photograph in the small pewter frame on the table.

  "They were on their honeymoon."

  "Ah," he said, nodding, as if this fact explained much more than a detail of the photograph.

  "Did you come to talk about interior decorating?" she asked flatly.

  "The clash of old and new—it is a clash, not a blend—I like that. It tells me about you. I've been curious about you, Sylvia." As he spoke, he was taking everything in—cataloguing her possessions, the titles of her books and CDs, the vintage film collection, Matt's collection of monochromes, and of course the furniture and decorative aesthetics—and at the same time, he was speaking, just beginning to unravel a thread that would inevitably lead him into the recitation of a narrative. He turned to look into her eyes.
"You're a clash as well, not a blend. That's why you're struggling when it comes to melding your two worlds, work and family."

  She remained silent, watching him, knowing he would make his point.

  "Let's take a walk," he said somewhat abruptly.

  She frowned, studying his face. "I'll get my jacket."

  Outside, as they walked down the path, Rocko and Nikki galloping ahead, he began to speak slowly. "You asked for the missing pieces," he said. "I can't help you as much as I'd like. What is ultimately revealed or kept secret—" His gaze took in the acreage, the ridge back, the endless sky, but he wasn't seeing them, not fully. He said, "I can't choose freely."

  "Then who chooses?" Sylvia whistled for Nikki, who was almost out of earshot, but she was watching Sweetheart.

  He looked at her, his eyebrows arching slightly, but he waited long enough to speak so that she knew he wouldn't answer the question. Instead, he said, "MI-6 has lost track of Paul Lang."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Their surveillance failed," Sweetheart said brusquely. "But we think he boarded a flight to the states."

  "Is he in New Mexico?"

  "Almost certainly."

  "What does that mean—to us, to the project? How will it affect us? Did he contact you?"

  Sweetheart turned around, heading back toward the Mercedes. As she followed, he handed her a palm-sized digital base unit. "Press the green button."

  She did, raising the small speaker to her ear. Paul Lang's voice—calm and conversational—was clearly audible: "Did I wake you?"

  "Lang," Sweetheart had confirmed.

  "One of these days I may be in your neighborhood. Thought it would be rude not to call."

  "I appreciate the courtesy. MI-6, the feds, everybody's looking for you."

  "Tell them I just want to set things right."

  Thick clouds rolled in by 7 P.M. Thursday; the sky turned dark and a wind kicked up leaves. Sweetheart had been gone for hours. Sylvia woke to find herself curled up on the couch in her study with Rocko in her lap and Nikki warming her feet. The stacks of pages and books on the floor had grown. To walk was to navigate an obstacle course.

  She still had a lot of ground to cover on the profile.

  She took a break at eight to go to the gym. She needed to work up a sweat and clear her head, and it was too late to run under the ominously dark skies. The combination of jet lag and the faint, anxious hum under her heartbeat left her needing fresh air and the chance to stretch her muscles, even briefly.