Stormrise

by Knizley, Skye

  “Other than the fact she looks like her stomach was torn out like the others, no,” Ryan said. “But there may be mercury residue in the water. The lab techs are taking samples to send to Zhu and his boys down at the morgue.”

  From her seat at the table, Raven looked up and waved Levac over. She had been rifling through the victim’s purse, which contained a wide variety of cosmetics and toiletry items, as well as a large wad of cash. Raven held up the bills and showed them to Levac. “Do these look familiar?” she asked, holding up the folded and ironed bills.

  Levac took one of the twenties and held it up to the light. “Yeah, it looks just like what we found in Nathan King’s apartment.”

  “And look at these,” she said, holding up a cardboard box of nausea pills. “These are the same kind we found in both King and Laveau’s apartment. Gel caps.”

  “So? So what?” Levac examined the box. "You think maybe Hellsey had the same stomach flu or something?"

  Raven rolled her eyes and took the box back. With great care, she pushed one of the capsules through the foil packaging and held it up. It contained a pale grey powder that did not resemble any anti-nausea pill she had ever seen. After a moment of thought, Raven said, “Fire in the hole!” and flicked the capsule at the distant wall.

  The resulting explosion was not huge, but was enough to startle everyone in the room and scorch a chrysanthemum shape into the wall. When the smoke and noise had cleared, Raven looked up at Levac and said, “I’m pretty sure we’ve found our murder weapon. Imagine what that would do to someone if it went off in a small space, such as the stomach, intestine, or esophagus.”

  “I don’t think we have to imagine it,” Levac said, edging away from Raven and the offensive gel caps. “I think we’ve seen it and it isn’t at all pretty.”

  A search of the rest of Taylor Hellsey’s belongings, as well as the rest of the room, turned up only another five thousand dollars in unmarked twenty-dollar bills and a code-locked smart phone. Raven turned both items over to the crime scene technicians in hopes they would be able to either track the bills or crack the code on the phone. She and Levac then returned to the district station house, where Levac went to complete the background search on Hellsey. Raven then plopped down at her desk to complete a search for the pharmaceutical company that was turning out explosive medication.

  The local company turned out to be named BioCyte, a division of the much larger German corporation Deva Pharmaceutical Technologies. Raven perused the board of directors and was surprised to find that several prominent vampires, who also happened to be enemies of her mother, were on the board of directors. She was making a note to ask Francois if he was familiar with any of them or the company when Levac returned holding a computer printout.

  “I’ve got Hellsey’s background check,” he said, dropping the dot matrix printed pages on Raven’s desk. “Not too much to go on. She was born in ’84, graduated from Du Sable High in 2003, and worked at Club Purgatory and the Black Lake Drive-In outside the city. Her mother is JoHanna Hellsey, father is unknown.”

  Raven leaned back in her chair, frowning up at Levac. “What about her bank records?”

  “That’s where things get interesting,” Levac replied. “Her bank account shows small cash deposits, usually in the neighborhood of three hundred bucks, until about two months ago when she deposited five grand, then again last month. Both times in cash.”

  “So our average girl from the south side of Chicago is making ends meet by working two jobs and then starts depositing large sums of cash in her account,” Raven said. “The money we found in her room is her latest payoff.”

  “The question is who’s paying her off and why?”

  “We find that out, we may find our killer,” Raven said. "I’m willing to bet both Nathan King and Taylor Hellsey were being paid off by the same person: our friend with the aluminum foil fetish.”

  “What about the King connection?” Levac asked. “The pic of Taylor with King?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that yet,” she said. “It was obviously before she started being paid off…did we get her medical records yet?”

  Levac shook his head. “No, not yet. Zhu put through the requests, but you know how it goes. Why?”

  “Nine months from the date the photo was taken, our friend Taylor starts getting a cash payoff wrapped in aluminum,” Raven replied. “Maybe she was being paid off for a child.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Levac said. “There’s nothing in her file about having a baby, but that doesn’t mean much if she was being paid to keep it quiet.”

  Raven was about to reply when her desk phone rang. Recognizing the number as Dr. Zhu’s, she scooped it up and said, “Hey, Ming, what’s up?”

  “Detective Storm, I have some information for you,” he said in his thick Indian accent. “Please come down to the morgue as soon as you can.”

  “I don’t suppose you can just tell me over the phone…” Raven said.

  “Of course not, detective,” Zhu replied, ending the call.

  “Marvelous,” Raven muttered. “I bet he wants to show me something gross.”

  IV

  The morgue was not one of Raven’s favorite places. The building it was housed in dated back to the 1920s and had originally been one of the city’s famous slaughterhouses. No amount of scrubbing and bleaching could remove the decades of blood and offal that had dripped into the walls and floor, and the ancient miasma always made Raven feel nauseated. This combined with the darkness of most of the old, green-and-white tiled corridors and the constant hum of the freezer units served to make the detective quite uncomfortable, and she had developed a reputation for not being able to hold her lunch during autopsies. She was hard pressed to explain it wasn’t the entrails that bothered her; it was the decades of blood ground into the cement and the dirt beneath. Even the drains exuded the coppery smell of old blood. The smell caused a strange sensation of nauseating hunger and Raven hated being anywhere near the place.

  She parked the Shelby in one of the spots marked “Police Only” and looked up at the old building with a frown.

  “You aren’t going to puke on me, are you, partner? I’ve heard about you and autopsies,” Levac asked half jokingly.

  “Probably not,” Raven replied. “That was only the one time and I bought Frost a new pair of shoes as soon as I felt better. Come on, let’s go see Ming.”

  The pair entered the building a few moments later and Raven reflexively covered her sensitive nose with one hand. Ignoring the look on Levac’s face, she led the way down the stairs to where Ming Zhu kept his personal lab and offices. Anything he was working on would be ‘down in the dungeon’.

  Dr. Zhu and his staff had made some effort to spruce up their office space; the walls had been painted a light pastel pink, the floor was covered in a beige carpet, and potted plants sat in odd corners, wilting in the cold, lightless hallway. Their efforts hadn’t improved things; a morgue was a morgue no matter what you did to it, but they had tried and it probably made them feel more like they were working in a doctor’s office.

  The forensic office was located at the end of the hallway, next to Ming Zhu’s lab. As always, the fluorescent light just outside his door flickered like something out of a bad Frankenstein movie and buzzed at odd intervals. Raven knew for a fact that both the bulbs and the fixture had been replaced several times, to no avail. Within a week, the light had malfunctioned. Zhu blamed it on bad karma and ignored it. Others said it was because he was Chicago’s very own Dr. Frankenstein.

  Seeing that the office was empty, Raven moved unhappily to Dr. Zhu’s lab, where she found him bent over the lifeless remains of Taylor Hellsey.

  “Ah, Detective Storm and…company,” he said in a happy voice. “It’s good to see you. Please, grab a gown and come closer. I don’t want you to get blood or anything on your nice clothes.”

  Fighting to maintain her composure as the smell of blood filled her nose, Raven tossed Levac one of
the spare coveralls and donned one herself. The two then joined the diminutive Zhu, who was weighing Hellsey’s brain and documenting his findings. Raven gagged at the additional smell of grey matter, but managed to hold on to her half-donut breakfast.

  Levac popped a bubble from the gum in his mouth. “It’s just a brain, Storm. No need to raise such a fuss.”

  “Shut up, Rupert,” Raven replied. “Or I’m going to kick your ass. Let’s just get this over with. What do you have for us, Ming?”

  Zhu, who was several inches shorter than Raven, peered at her over his glasses and then nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said, putting the woman’s brain back into her skull. “I’m sorry to be so distracted. Here…” He indicated the clipboard next to him but, knowing how Raven’s stomach could be in his sanctum, did not pick it up. “Per protocol, we ran a rape kit on the deceased. Some of the evidence was damaged due to immersion in water; however, it’s very clear that Ms. Hellsey had intercourse a few hours prior to her death.”

  Levac picked up the clipboard and thumbed through the pages. “Was there any viable DNA?”

  “Alas, no. Some form of protection was used and we only found the spermicidal residue,” Zhu replied. “Whomever she was with was very careful not to leave anything behind on her.”

  “So you think she may have been with her killer?” Raven asked.

  “I think it’s possible,” Zhu replied. “There’s no indication that it was nonconsensual—she has no bruises or other marks on her—so it is reasonable to assume she may have known her killer. I would guess that she was with a man no more than five hours before her death.”

  “What about the mercury fulminate?” Raven asked. “It’s obvious she got it from the pills she was taking, but how long would it take for one of them to dissolve or explode in her system?”

  Dr. Zhu shrugged. “It would depend on several factors: body temperature, how acidic her stomach was and if there was any impact. In a normal person, perhaps twenty or thirty minutes.”

  “So Ryan was right,” Levac said. “She died within minutes of us getting there. Damn it! We could have saved her life!”

  “Ming…is it possible someone force-fed her the explosive? Or injected her with it somehow?” Raven asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “However, the compound is highly unstable, as I heard you discovered at Elysium. I assume your killer knows that and would not want to risk being present when the explosion occurred.”

  “What if there is no killer?” Levac rubbed his chin and looked at Raven.

  Raven turned and cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if this is some strange screw up with the medication and not a murder case at all?” Levac replied.

  “I think that’s unlikely,” Dr. Zhu said. “You have three victims all connected in some way and they are the only ones we’ve seen who suffered this particular fate. If this had been happening with all of the patients who take this medication, it would have been heard of before now. There would be dozens of injured all over the city.”

  “I agree,” Raven said. “If it was just an accident, Boone wouldn’t have been paid off to steal Victoria’s body and make it look like a voodoo ritual gone wrong.”

  Levac nodded. “Okay, I concur; I just wanted to throw that out there. All of our leads are turning up to be dead ends and dead bodies.”

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” Raven said. “We’ve got the distributor of the medication the victims were taking and we can go back to Elysium and run the video. If Hellsey was with someone around five this morning, maybe he’ll show up on the security cameras.”

  “I’ve got an appointment on another case out that way,” Levac said. “I’ll finish up Hellsey’s background and take the video if you want to go shake down BioCyte.”

  “Works for me,” Raven replied. “Thanks, Ming!”

  “Of course, detectives. Good hunting!” Dr. Zhu said. Raven caught a glimpse of Zhu reaching again for the brain he had been holding and she ran for the stairs just ahead of another wave of nausea.

  V

  Raven Storm sat on the hood of her cherished Shelby, a half-eaten apple in her hand. She was enjoying a quiet lunch in an empty lot across the street from the BioCyte building, watching employees come and go like worker ants in lab coats.

  The building itself was a nondescript four-story square situated no more than one hundred yards from Quartz Lake. It and the empty warehouse she was parked in front of were the only industrial buildings in an otherwise pristine wilderness area just outside Chicago, and Raven was hard-pressed to understand how a chemical company had been allowed to build on the site. Up until five years ago, Quartz Lake had been a nature preserve built around a quarry lake left over from the forties. Dozens of local groups had fought long and hard to keep it a pristine piece of nature in an otherwise commercialized city.

  Raven continued to watch the activity across the street until she had finished her apple. She tossed the core to a pair of squirrels who had been watching her with anticipation and slid back behind the wheel of the car. A few minutes later, she pulled into the BioCyte parking lot. She chose to park in a reserved slot near the entrance and walked through the main doors, her heels clicking loudly.

  The lobby of BioCyte was much like she had expected it to be: two stories with one wall made entirely of windows that looked out on the shimmering blue lake, a mixture of slate tiles, and plush blue carpeting that make her feel like she was in a fish tank.

  In the middle of the blue carpet oasis was a large, round reception desk behind which sat a tall, thin, porcelain-complexioned woman dressed in a too-tight dress and stiletto heels. The receptionist smiled, a gesture that animated her face, but never reached her pale blue eyes.

  “Good afternoon and welcome to BioCyte Pharmaceuticals, how can I help you today?” she asked in a singsong voice that set Raven’s teeth on edge.

  Raven pulled an empty box of antacids from her coat pocket and laid it on the desk beside her badge. “I'm Detective Raven Storm of the Chicago Police Department. I would like to speak to someone about this product.”

  The receptionist picked up the box, examined it for a moment and returned it to the desktop. “I’m sorry, detective. This product was discontinued some time ago. We no longer make any over-the-counter medications. Those are handled by our parent company, Deva.”

  “I see,” Raven said. “When was the product ended?”

  “That division closed last summer,” the receptionist replied. “You can pick up a copy of the press release in the guest waiting room if you like.”

  Raven shook her head and showed the box stamp to the receptionist. “No, thank you. Is there someone I could speak to? This product was made within the last month. It must have come from somewhere.”

  The receptionist smiled again and shook her head. “I'm sorry, detective; there’s no one here who had anything to do with that product. All over-the-counter medications are manufactured directly through Deva Pharmaceuticals.”

  “You sound like a broken record,” Raven growled. “This package is new. The expiration date is in three years. It was obviously manufactured within the last month. Someone around here must know where it came from. Who do I speak to?”

  “I’m sorry, det…” the receptionist began, her apology derailed by Raven’s glare and the creak of the desk where the detective’s hands were gripping the fake wood. “I don’t know,” she said instead. “As I said, this product was discontinued by our parent company, Deva. It could not have been manufactured since last July. The package you have must be a fake of some kind.”

  Raven nodded and released her grip on the desk, hoping the receptionist wouldn’t notice the faint impressions of her fingers pressed into the veneer.

  “Okay, who would I speak to about the possible theft of your company logos and trademarks?” she asked.

  “I believe I can help you,” a new voice said from above. Both Raven and the receptionist looked up to see a tall, ha
ndsome, Asian man who was leaning over the railing. “Please come up to my office, Detective Storm.”

  Raven exchanged a glance with the receptionist and then turned toward the nearby stairs. She took them two at a time and was met at the top by the tall gentleman, who extended his hand politely.

  “Christopher Wong,” he said with a charming smile. “If you'll follow me?”

  He led Raven through a pair of double doors, using a passkey to unlock them. The room beyond was a maze of beige and green cubicles, photocopiers, printers and ringing phones. Raven glanced into the cubes as they passed, making note of the various men and women hunched over their computers, typing away. Their bent heads and hushed tones did nothing to change Raven’s impression of a building full of worker ants doing the bidding of some hidden queen.

  Wong ushered Raven into his office at the end of the hall, and she noticed his name was on the door, but, unlike the cubicles, he had neither a location number nor a title.

  The office beyond was spartan, consisting of a large desk of dark wood, burgundy leather guest chairs, a matching desk chair, and a closed laptop computer. The heavy bookcases lining the walls were almost empty and there were no photographs or other memorabilia, which Raven found somewhat disconcerting.

  “Please have a seat,” Wong said, waiting for Raven to sit in one of the plush leather chairs facing his wide desk before taking a seat himself. “I understand you have a product you believe we manufactured?"

  “Yes,” Raven replied, placing the opened box on the desk between them. “I've found three boxes of this nausea medication paired with your antacids. They appear to have been made within the last three months; however, your receptionist tells me you discontinued the products over a year ago.”

  “That’s correct,” Wong replied. “Our parent company decided they could manufacture our over-the-counter medications more cost effectively in their native Germany. We’re a pure research facility now, specializing in biotechnology and nano-bot research.”