Heated Conspiracies

by Aiden Bates

  “You guys aren’t reporters, are you?”

  Kaleb’s eyebrows raised. “What makes you say that?”

  Ziegler scoffed, his nasally voice rising half-an octave in an accusational tone. “Well, you look like a cop if ever I’ve seen one. And you,” he added, leveling his gaze at me. “Look like you’ve just joined the witness protection program.”

  He had us. I guessed he wasn’t as much of an idiot as we’d initially thought. I was ready to cave and go home immediately, but Kaleb stood firm.

  “Mr. Ziegler, we’ve come a long way to speak to you,” Kaleb told him. “We weren’t lying about being interested in your company—you’re obviously doing some brilliant work here. So. Humor us?”

  Ziegler hesitated. “Well… I don’t know…”

  But as he took us in, something in his Omega chemistry clicked in just the right way. Kaleb was a tall, strong-looking Alpha—and either Ziegler was into Omegas, or he’d sized me up for an Alpha as well.

  “Oh, what the hell. We don’t get many visitors—especially not ones looking like you two. Come on in—but no funny business, okay?”

  Kaleb and I exchanged a flash of a smile as Ziegler moved aside to usher us in. In Ziegler’s case, horniness prevailed over common sense, it would appear.

  The inside of Ziegler’s home was messy and difficult to navigate through. Between the cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, the beakers of unknown chemicals on nearly every free surface, and the exceptional number of action figures crowded everywhere that Ziegler’s science equipment wasn’t, it felt more like walking into an episode of Hoarders than it did entering a lab.

  “So much for his mom’s garage,” Kaleb muttered beneath his breath.

  “Oh, no, my mom moved in with her boyfriend in Florida about a year ago,” Ziegler informed us conversationally. “So we kind of, y’know. Took over the house for the rest of our operation after that.” As we walked past a room filled with three of Ziegler’s associates crowded around a flat screen, Ziegler rolled his eyes and closed the door. “Don’t mind them. They’re just trying to speed run Doom. Come through here—the lab is this way.”

  Amongst the half-eaten bags of Doritos and empty cans of Monster Energy in the kitchen, we found Ziegler’s lab. There was a centrifuge perched atop the microwave and several cultures growing right alongside a suspiciously furry bowl of what looked like it was once Top Ramen, but if the patent burning a hole in my pocket was to be believed, this was where Ziegler Dynamic had cooked up the batch of chemicals that had sent the lives of Omegas across the country spiraling into hormonal disarray.

  “So.” Ziegler leaned up against his fridge, a cocky smirk on his lips. “You boys are interested in the ol’ Zieg-machine, huh?”

  “Zieg-machine?” Kaleb repeated, blinking in disbelief.

  I cut him off before he could say anything that would get us thrown out—not that it would be exactly unwelcome, considering the faint scent of body odor that seemed to linger in every room. But before we took off, we had answers to drum up.

  “We’re interested in your work with hormones,” I told him, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the patent. I handed it to him, repressing a shudder as his clammy fingers brushed tenderly against mine. “That one in particular. Eurphoriaphedamine. You guys created it?”

  Ziegler’s eyes scanned the paper as his smirk broadened. “We did, yeah. Took us a couple of months, but, ah…” He licked his lips like Kaleb and I were two Dorito-dust-encrusted fingers. “It would have taken anyone else a couple of years. Guess you could say we work pretty fast around here.”

  “I’m sure,” Kaleb grunted. “Once you were done with it, you sold it off to Bicroft Pharmaceuticals, I take it? Bet these energy drinks don’t buy themselves.”

  I shot Kaleb a dirty look. For a detective, he wasn’t exactly being cunning about his line of questioning.

  “Not, uh. Not exactly.” A bead of sweat appeared on Ziegler’s brow. “I won’t pretend that they didn’t want the patent. But I told them no. We don’t deal with Big Pharma. There was a lawsuit. We won.”

  “But then…” Kaleb led.

  Ziegler’s shoulders slumped forward in a sigh. “Yeah, okay. A guy approached me after, sweetened the deal. Promised me approval for a huge grant if I’d just give him whatever we had on hand. Wanted to reverse engineer it. Said it was for fertility treatments, not a big deal or anything. And who am I to stop hot, hard Alphas and sultry, sensual Omegas from getting it on, making babies, right?”

  The longer I was here in Ziegler’s house, the dirtier I felt. Not just because of the science experiment growing on that bowl of Top Ramen, either.

  “You were blinded by money,” Kaleb said, nodding like he understood. “So you handed it over.”

  “I didn’t think they’d be able to reproduce it like they did,” Ziegler admitted. “But…do me a favor and don’t tell the guys, okay? They know about the whole birth control scare.”

  I watched Kaleb’s eyebrow twitch. “And you know that your synthetics were probably involved.”

  “I’m a shut-in, not an idiot,” Ziegler said, clenching his fist. “But they don’t know that. Yet, at least. We might not be the kind of Omegas that necessarily need birth control…but solidarity, right? We’re as upset about it as anyone. Believe me. I made a bad call, but…but we’re not the bad guys here. I swear.”

  “Right.” Kaleb glanced over at me, not looking entirely convinced of that fact.

  Which meant that it was my turn to step in.

  “How does it work?” I asked gently, seeing the anxiety welling up in Ziegler’s eyes.

  “That’s the thing.” Ziegler gave Kaleb a tentative glance. “We designed Phoriaphedamine to stimulate the receptors that trigger Omega ovulation. It makes, uh, makes the chemical environment of the body more amicable to impregnation.”

  “Would it make someone, you know. Lose control?” I asked.

  Ziegler could hardly take his eyes off Kaleb—this time, because he looked half terrified that Kaleb was going to beat his face in. “No. Absolutely not. We weren’t trying to make a date rape drug or anything. We were trying to help people. Whatever Bicroft or whoever else did with it, whatever was in those pills, it’s been modified significantly. No patent on it, either. I checked.”

  Kaleb and I looked to each other again.

  “Bad business sense,” I said.

  “But it tells us a lot,” Kaleb countered. “Whatever this chemical is, it’s something that someone doesn’t want found.”

  “You guys aren’t gonna…beat me up for this or anything, are you?” Ziegler was sweating like a bomb pop in the middle of July. “I mean, I’m not gonna say no if you want to rough me up a little bit, but—”

  “Thanks for your help,” I told him—before he started getting any more ideas.

  “Yeah, yeah. Any time.” Ziegler licked his lips again as Kaleb and I turned, heading for the door. We were nearly through it when I heard him call after us. “Hey! You guys want to stick around, play some games or something? We’ve got pizza rolls! We’ve got—”

  As Kaleb shut the door behind us, I felt it reverberate as he thumped his fist against the frame.

  “That was infuriating,” Kaleb grumbled. “He took that money without even a thought about why it was being offered to him.”

  “He thought he was helping,” I said gently—more for Kaleb’s benefit than Ziegler’s.

  “No one goes through that kind of trouble just to help someone. As for Ziegler—slimy little fucker couldn’t decide if he wanted to fuck us or was afraid of being fucked up by us. Fucking hated how he was looking at you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. That was new. Growly was Kaleb’s default, especially when he was dealing with something that pissed him off as much as Ziegler had. Possessive, though? That was a little more unlike him.

  Not that I minded. In fact…I could probably get used to that.

  “He did give us our next lead, though,” I pointed out. �
��Or…kind of one, anyway.”

  “He gave us more work to do. But yeah, you’re right,” Kaleb agreed, slipping his arm around my waist again to guide us back toward his car. “If this was about money, Bicroft would have patented their revisions on Ziegler’s formula.”

  “Right. Why not patent something that you could potentially make millions off of? Even if it does go illegal down the road, that would take time.”

  “When you can’t follow the money, you have to look at what else might be at stake. Something more valuable to Bicroft than cash.”

  “We know this is all connected to the AFF somehow. Think it’s politically motivated?”

  Kaleb held my door open for me. “Only thing that’s better than actual capital is political capital. If working in DC has taught me anything, it’s that.”

  “A birth control company and a birth-obsessed foundation in bed together.” I rolled my eyes as I got into the car. “Opposites attract, I guess.”

  “Like cops and federally wanted men,” Kaleb said as he got behind the wheel. “This isn’t any affair, though—it’s a ménage à trois.”

  I laughed, raising my eyebrows. “You want me to go back and give Ziegler your number, set something up?”

  Kaleb groaned. “Not with you and me, dummy. AFF and Bicroft. They’ve got Carver Media in the mix with them as well. We need to look at all three of them more closely now. Figure out what they’ve got in common. There’s gotta be some place where all of their interests intersect. Wherever that is, there’s almost certainly a someone—or several someones—at the center of all of this, pulling the strings for their own gain.”

  “Smart work, Detective,” I purred, placing my hand on Kaleb’s knee.

  He glanced down at it, then grinned as his hazel eyes met mine. “I might not be a chemist, but I get by.”

  14

  Kaleb

  “He’s one fringe scientist, Kaleb. Sounds like a real nutjob of one, at that.” Harper was grumpy as ever as he sat at the kitchen table, arms folded across his chest as I regaled him of what Derek and I had learned in Charlottesville. “Even if you could get him to stand up in court—and from the sounds of things, I reckon he’d about piss himself if he tried—Bicroft’s lawyers would poke holes through him like a pincushion.”

  “Not to mention…well, he didn’t even say for sure that it was one of Bicroft’s men that he handed the Phoriaphedamine over to.” Nick rubbed Harper’s shoulders from behind, giving Derek and I an apologetic look. “Not to be the bearer of bad news, but…”

  “It’s a start, though,” I pointed out. “And between this lead in Virginia, Josh’s leads in Georgia, Derek’s intel from the labs in Nevada… We build up enough bits and pieces that we can hand this thing over to an FBI agent, we can take Josh’s murder out of the Fort Greene police department’s hands. They won’t be able to keep trying to cover it up now that we know this whole thing crosses so many state lines.”

  “We know that Josh pissed off these Carver Media people,” Harper said with a sigh. “But as far as we know, Bicroft has nothing to do with them. Something specific got Josh killed. This four-ee-yuh-whatever stuff came after. We’re losing sight of what we’re trying to do here, Kaleb.”

  “Not for Nick, we’re not,” Derek said softly, looking up from his mug of tea. “Or for any of the other Omegas whose lives were affected by Bicroft’s pills.”

  Harper frowned, then tilted his head back to look up at Nick. “He’s right. Sorry, darlin’. I’m being an asshole.”

  “Yeah, but you’re my asshole.” Nick smirked. “Or, well, something like that, anyway.”

  “So it’s something other than the chemicals that Josh uncovered,” I said, redirecting the conversation away from Nick’s intimate areas and back onto topic. “Something that we’ve overlooked.”

  “Nick and I have been through the box that we got from Wells.” Harper reached up to squeeze Nick’s hand. “And I’ve gone through Josh’s cloned phone a hundred times. Nick’s tracked down everything he can on social media too. If there’s something there, we’ve missed it.”

  “Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but…” I tilted my head in Harper’s direction, knowing how annoying what I was asking would be for him.

  Harper groaned. “Do it again. I know. Maybe this new info will shed some light on something.”

  “I’ll make some more tea,” Nick offered, patting Harper on the back and heading for the kitchen.

  Harper, Derek and I spent the next few hours poring over all of Wells’ intel again, supplied with as much tea and snacks as we could manage by Nick. Harper and Nick had done good work on Wells’ files already. The various notes, pages and articles that we emptied out of the box had an index written down in Nick’s careful hand, along with reference notes pinned to each highlighting what the document was and any questions it might have raised.

  “Here,” Harper said, waving me around the table toward him. “This is a list of American Families First’s financial contributors. Garrison Bicroft among them.”

  “That’s one connection,” I said with a nod. “Though what a man who owns stakes in the biggest birth control company in the States would want to do with a bunch of looneys who want birth control abolished…”

  “Carver Media’s on there too,” Nick supplied, coming out of the kitchen with a pan of nachos, still steaming hot from the oven, held in his mitted hands. “They’re all donating to the same fucked-up cause.”

  “The question is, why?” I scratched my head—only to hear another scratching noise behind me, nails against cardboard.

  I turned to see Derek, shoulders-deep in Wells’ now empty box of goodies, as the scratching continued.

  “You digging for gold in there, sunshine?” I teased. “Or do Harper and Nick have a mouse problem they need to sort out?”

  “Sorry—it’s just… There’s something in here, I think.” Derek’s voice was muffled by the cardboard of the box as he continued to scratch at it. “It’s lodged between the flaps at the bottom, but I’ve almost…just about…ha!”

  Derek emerged from the box victorious, holding up something so small I had to come right up to him to make out what it was.

  “Micro SD card. Huh.” I squinted, hunching over to get a better look, then looked over to Harper. “That’s new then, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t seen it before,” Harper admitted. “Hand it here—I’ll pop it into one of my burner phones and we can see if anything’s on it.”

  Whatever cell service had been on the card had obviously long since run out. There were no messages stored on it to be read. But a quick dig through its files on Harper’s part turned up one item of interest—the only file on the card at all, in fact.

  “Do you know where your children are when they go out to play?” A stern, deep male voice asked as a video rolled.

  The footage was of a sad little boy, no older than four or five, sitting on a swing set, hanging his head despondently.

  “Who will cook them dinner when they get home from school?”

  The shot zoomed in closer as the boy half-heartedly scooted himself back in the swing, making no motion to kick his feet and swing higher.

  “Who will push them on the swings, kiss their bruises, dry their tears?”

  Slowly, the little boy raised his head to look at the camera, revealing a dirty face, wet cheeks and red, puffy eyes.

  “Where is your Omega father at, little boy?” the voice asked.

  The little boy let out a dramatic sob, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he whimpered. “I don’t know anymore.”

  The video cut to a still of the Delaney campaign slogan: Delaney For Governor. Family Values. American Traditions.

  “Ugh,” Nick said, recoiling as he caught sight of the end shot on the screen. “I remember those ads. They made my blood boil.”

  “Still won him that election, though,” Harper pointed out. “He’s still got two more years in office, too.”

  “Two
more years of trying to take South Carolina back to the 1950s. You should see the one he ran for women,” Nick warned Derek. “He wants them all in high heels and aprons, baking apple pies and calling their husbands sir.”

  “Kinky,” Derek deadpanned, sounding unimpressed.

  “And gross. We all voted for the other guy, Jameson.” Harper leaned across the table to grab a clump of nachos smothered with guac and melted cheese. “Not that it mattered. Nineteen-Fifty-Shades-of-Grey still won it by a goddamn landslide.”

  “Question is, what’s it doing in here with all this?” I asked, musing aloud.

  “Draws a line from Bicroft to AFF to Delaney, though,” Derek pointed out, grabbing the clone of Joshua’s phone from off the table. “Josh and Adrian wouldn’t have put this in here for nothing. What we’re lacking is context. We need a conversation, a note, something that brings all of this together.”

  “Harper and Nick have already looked through his messages, Derek.” It was sweet that Derek was trying to help. Frankly, the fire in his eyes as he scrolled through the files on Josh’s phone was as hot as anything I’d ever seen. But there was beating a dead horse, then there was saddling it and trying to ride it into town. Looking for any more clues in what we’d already covered was a fool’s errand if I’d ever heard of one. “If there was something in them, we would have found it already.”

  “I’m not looking through his messages,” Derek said, furrowing his brow and swiping his thumb across the screen. “I’m going through his pictures. When I knew him, he was always snapping photos of things, people, buildings…” Derek paused, his thumb hovering over a photo of an air conditioning unit lodged in an old window frame. “Huh. That’s…well, it’s something, anyway.”

  “Looks like someone’s AC to me,” I grunted, not following.

  “Not the picture. The date. August 28.” Derek’s sea green eyes locked on mine. “This is from the night Josh was killed.”