by Matt Lincoln
“That means the bottles were laced at the factory, then,” Junior asserted. “If the seals were intact, then that means the drugs were added before they made it to the store.”
“Which means that a lot of planning and premeditation went into this,” Nelson replied. “It also means that we now know for certain that there are bottles of over-the-counter medicine circulating around Las Vegas which contain lethal substances. What do we do about that?”
The seven of us fell silent. We needed to let the public know what was happening to prevent them from accidentally taking the drug. To do that, we would need to have the company issue a recall.
“I don’t want to cause a panic,” Wallace sighed. “But I’m afraid that the best course of action here would be to hold a press conference. We need to get this information out as quickly as possible to keep people safe. Chapman and Hills, I’m going to have you head out to each perp’s home to look for and retrieve the bottles as soon as I get the list of addresses from the police. Nelson, schedule a press conference for as soon as possible. Gardner, I need you to begin tracking down the stores the bottles were purchased from and the supplier that each store uses. Patel and Castillo, stand by until we get more leads. I have a feeling we’re going to get busy as soon as word of this gets out.”
After issuing orders to each of his agents, Wallace retreated to his office to make a phone call. Nelson similarly headed into his own office to begin the preparations to hold a press conference.
“Guess I’m off too, then,” Fiona sighed as she plucked one of the doughnuts from the box on her way to her office. “Thanks for these, by the way.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I parroted as I took one of the doughnuts and a cup of coffee. Despite Miranda’s earlier aggressive treatment, they all appeared to be in one piece. The coffee had cooled off a little, but the surge of caffeine was still welcome.
“Why would someone do this?” Miranda muttered as she snatched one of the doughnuts out of the box and began to tear pieces off it. I’d never seen anyone eat a doughnut that violently before. She looked equal parts shell-shocked and furious.
“No one ever figured out who was behind the Tylenol Murders, either,” Junior replied as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Some people speculated that it was a way to murder someone without the police being able to pin down a single suspect. The perp killed his real target, then poisoned a bunch of other people to make it look random.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happening here?” Naomi asked as she delicately took one of the doughnuts out of the box.
“I don’t know,” Junior shook his head. “It was only ever a theory, after all. In the end, no one was ever charged, and the case is still considered unsolved.”
“We can’t let that happen,” Miranda fumed before taking a long swig of coffee. “We can’t just let whoever did this walk away scot-free like what happened in the eighties.”
“We won’t,” I assured her. “We have better technology than we did back then. Fiona’s in her office right now tracing where those bottles came from. And we have better investigative techniques. We’ll find who did this.”
I was so angry I could barely conceal my rage, but I knew I needed to keep it together to do my job.
“Hills, Chapman,” Wallace called as he left his office and reentered the bullpen. “I have the list of addresses here. Go and collect the bottles and get them back here as quickly as you can. The sooner we have all of them, the sooner Agent Gardner will be able to triangulate where the bottles came from.”
“Got it,” I replied as I finished my doughnut and stood up to take the printed list of addresses from him.
Junior and I headed out of the office and down to the parking lot in silence.
“The closest address is Adrian Gooden’s,” Junior informed me as we got into Junior’s work car. “He’s the seventeen-year-old student who attacked his teacher.”
“Jeez,” I sighed as Junior inputted the address into the GPS. Now that we had confirmed that the drug was hidden inside bottles of medicine, we had to contend with the fact that all of these people were victims as well as aggressors. Adrian Gooden had just been an innocent kid, and now he was dead.
Gooden’s home was only about five minutes from our office, in a luxurious residential area of Las Vegas. The house we pulled up to was large, with a sprawling, manicured lawn across the front of it and what looked like a pool peeking out from around the back.
I stepped out of the car and waited until Junior had as well before walking toward the front door. Before I could knock, however, a door at the side of the house burst open, and a woman stepped out.
“Can’t you jerks just leave us alone?” she screamed as she lifted something off the ground. I realized it was a hose the instant she turned it toward me and turned it on at full blast. I brought my hands up to shield my face as I was hit by a painful stream of water. “Don’t you have any compassion?”
“Ma’am, please stop!” Junior yelled. I took the opportunity to retreat out of the reach of the hose’s spray. “We’re federal agents! We need to speak to you about what happened to your son.”
All the color drained from the woman’s face as Junior spoke.
“You’re not reporters?” she asked weakly. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. They’ve been coming all morning.”
She turned the hose off but then froze as if remembering something.
“Well, whoever you are,” she huffed, “I don’t want to talk about my son. Please go away.”
“Wait!” Junior shouted as she moved to close the door. “We know why he attacked his teacher. It wasn’t his fault.”
“What did you say?” she asked as she dropped the hose in surprise.
“He was drugged,” Junior replied calmly. “Without his knowledge. That’s why we’re here. We believe he took some over-the-counter medicine that had been laced with a lethal dose of illegal drugs..”
The woman stared at Junior as if he had just grown a second head. Then, suddenly, she fell to her knees.
“Thank goodness,” she sobbed into her hands.
Junior glanced back at me in confusion, and I just shrugged and attempted to pull my jacket closer around myself. My clothes were soaked, and the chill in the air felt bitingly cold.
“Ma’am?” Junior asked tentatively as he approached her.
“Everyone was saying he was a criminal,” she cried. “They were all calling him a druggie and saying that it was his own fault that he overdosed. I kept telling them they were wrong, but no one would listen, not even the police. As soon as his autopsy came back positive for drugs, they all started acting like he deserved to die for what happened.”
I suddenly understood why she’d seemed so relieved a moment ago. All this time, she’d been trying to defend her son’s memory, and now she had proof that he hadn’t been in control of his actions that day.
“Why don’t we speak inside?” Junior suggested as he helped her up off the ground. “It’s a little cold out here.”
“Alright,” she nodded before turning to look at me. “Oh, my word. I can’t believe I just did that. Here, come inside. I’ll fetch you a towel.”
She scurried off into the house as Junior and I stepped inside. It was warmer inside the house, but my clothes were still sticking to me uncomfortably. I peeled my coat off and hung it on a coat rack by the entrance. I felt a little bad about dripping water all over this woman’s house, but then again, she was the one who’d put me in this state.
“I am so sorry about this,” she apologized profusely as she returned, a large, fluffy blue towel in her hands. “I thought you two were a couple of reporters. They’ve been showing up in droves since last night when a news station aired the names of all the attackers. Finally, I’d had enough and started spraying them down as soon as they got near my porch.”
“It’s not the worst home defense system I’ve ever seen,” Junior snickered. I shot him a glare as I attempted to dry myself with the towel. “And
I’m afraid that’s likely only going to get worse. Our director is going to be holding a press conference this afternoon to announce that the assailants were all victims themselves and to warn others not to take the same drug inadvertently.”
“That’s alright,” Mrs. Gooden smiled bitterly. “Everyone will know now that Adrian was innocent.”
“Just keep hosing them down if more show up,” I suggested. “Under Nevada’s Castle Doctrine, you’re allowed to defend your home from trespassers if they refuse to leave.”
She smiled sheepishly at me.
“Oh, please have a seat,” she gestured toward the couch. “Don’t worry about getting it wet. It’s my fault, after all. And I have a teenaged boy, so I’m used to messes.”
Her face fell as she mentioned her son, and her eyes glistened as though she was about to cry.
“Mrs. Gooden,” Junior prompted as he took a seat on the couch. “We wanted to talk to you about what happened that day.”
“Of course,” she nodded as she wiped at her eyes with the palm of her hand.
“Did Adrian take any medicine that day?” he asked. “Was he feeling sick?”
“He was, actually,” Mrs. Gooden responded. “He woke up with a bit of a sore throat, but he had an important science test that day and didn’t want to stay home from school. He took some cough syrup and-”
She suddenly cut herself off as the horrible realization dawned on her.
“No,” she muttered weakly. “You said that you thought he might have taken something that was laced. Did you mean here? It was in my home this whole time?”
“We need to see that bottle, ma’am,” Junior stated calmly.
She nodded blankly as she slowly stood up off the couch and headed further into the house. She returned a minute later carrying two bottles.
“I’m not sure which one he took,” she informed us nervously as she handed Junior the bottles. One was a generic discount brand, but the other looked exactly like the ones we’d found in the Evans and Montague homes.
“We’ll take both of them in, just in case,” Junior replied.
“Is that the reason my baby’s dead?” She whimpered as a tear rolled down her cheek. “Some evil monster spiked a bottle of medicine, and now he’s gone?”
Junior fell silent, clearly unsure how to respond to the woman’s anguished question.
“Ma’am, we need to know where this bottle came from,” I said. She looked so helpless and lost that it killed me to have to push her, but we came here to attempt to track down where the bottles were coming from, so I needed to ask.
“I-I don’t know,” she stuttered. “I think he was the one who bought it. I’m so busy with work, he would help me out when he could. Pick up groceries and such, now and again. He was such a good boy. Probably the grocery store? I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”
Junior placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as she broke into a fresh wave of tears.
“I’m sorry to have upset you,” I muttered awkwardly. In the end, we hadn’t come any closer to figuring out where the medicine was coming from, and all we’d done was upset a grieving mother.
“No,” she croaked. “Don’t apologize. Because of you, I can prove that my Aiden was a good boy. He wasn’t out doing drugs, like everyone said. Thank you for that.”
It felt wrong to receive thanks from the mother of a victim when we still weren’t anywhere close to solving the case, but I smiled and nodded graciously anyway. We’d figure it out eventually, and if we’d managed to bring comfort to this poor woman, I’d feel satisfied.
10
Fiona
I bit my nail nervously as I watched the press conference on my computer. Wallace was addressing the press over what we’d ascertained regarding the case just this morning, and things were beginning to get chaotic.
“Director Wallace!” a young reporter cried out enthusiastically. “Is this being treated as a terrorist attack?”
“We are carefully considering all possibilities before making any conclusions,” Wallace answered diplomatically.
“You’re doing great, boss,” I mumbled to myself. The press conference had only been going on for a few minutes, and already people were lobbing him difficult and sometimes outright hostile comments and questions. Wallace had maintained his composure the entire time.
“How widespread is this issue?” A different reporter shoved her way toward the front of the crowd. “Is it only affecting Las Vegas, or is this nationwide?”
“Our agents are working on determining that at this very moment,” Wallace answered calmly. I realized with a jolt that I was the one who was supposed to be figuring out the answer to that question. I suddenly felt as though a considerable weight had been dropped on my shoulders, and I quickly switched off the stream.
Charlie and Junior had called to say that they’d found identical bottles in all the assailants’ homes, and they were on their way back now. I’d run a search on the initial two bottles and had managed to trace them both back to a small, locally-owned shop in Las Vegas. What was curious is that the serial numbers on the bottles indicated that they were shipped from a factory on the east coast, which wouldn’t make sense considering there were much closer pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in Nevada.
I leaned back in my chair and sighed. Until Charlie and Junior got here with the rest of the bottles, I wouldn’t be able to do any further research to figure out what was going on. On the plus side, I couldn’t find any similar reports of sudden, unprovoked violence anywhere else in the United States. Hopefully, that meant that this probably wasn’t a very widespread issue yet.
I got up from my chair and headed into the break room for a cup of coffee. The office was eerily silent. Wallace was out, Nelson was in his office fielding questions from the press and law enforcement, and all the field agents were out busy with their own tasks. I didn’t like how empty and cold the office felt.
I was just finishing up a pot of coffee when I heard the office door unlock.
“Hello?” Junior called uneasily a moment later. “Wow, I’ve never seen the office so empty in the middle of the day. It’s creepy.”
“It is,” I agreed as I stepped out of the break room with my cup of coffee. “You guys got those bottles?”
“Right here,” Charlie answered as he held up his bulging work bag. I could see plastic evidence bags peeking out over the top as they threatened to overflow.
“Excellent,” I nodded as I took the bag from him and headed into my office, carefully balancing my coffee in one hand. “There’s fresh coffee in the break room if you guys want. I’ll get to work sorting through these.”
I vaguely heard them respond with something that sounded like confirmation, but I was already focused on my task. I quickly examined the expiration dates, serial numbers, and shipping codes of each of the bottles. The serial numbers were all exactly the same, which indicated to me that they had been falsified.
“That is so unlikely,” I muttered to myself as I ran another search just to be certain. Sure enough, all the bottles had been purchased at the same tiny store in Las Vegas, and all of them had, supposedly, been shipped here from a supplier all the way in New York.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I mumbled aloud.
“What doesn’t make any sense?” Charlie suddenly appeared at the door of my office. He and Junior were both there, each holding cups of coffee.
“According to what I’ve found,” I explained, “these bottles all came from the exact same batch. As in, they were literally all purchased from the same store. The odds of that alone are ridiculously low, but then there’s the fact that they were all apparently produced in New York.”
“Why is that weird?” Junior asked.
“Why would they make such a long trip?” I asked. “There are hundreds of drug manufacturing companies between here and New York. Dozens on the west coast alone. It would make way more sense for the store to have received their shipment from one of the plants here in
Nevada. I’m not even sure stores get a choice where their merchandise is shipped from. That’s all up to the drug company. Financially, it wouldn’t make any sense to ship a batch of medicine all the way across the country when there’s a plant just a few miles away.”
“Unless that particular batch was shipped there deliberately,” Charlie asserted.
“That’s the only explanation,” I nodded. “I haven’t found any reports of violent attacks similar to the ones we’ve observed here anywhere else in the country, and as far as I can tell, only Las Vegas has been affected by these tainted bottles.”
“How did they pull that off, though?” Junior asked. “There wasn’t any evidence of tampering on the bottles we found, so we determined that the bottles were laced during manufacturing. How could someone do that to ensure that the bottles would only end up at this one specific store?”
“We need to find out,” Charlie declared as he took a long swig of his coffee. “Let’s head to the store and see what the owner has to say about it.”
“I’ll send you guys the address,” I replied as I turned to my computer to forward the information to them.
Junior nodded, and a moment later, the two of them headed out. I felt an odd mixture of relief and anxiety as they left. I was relieved that we no longer had to worry about this being a widespread issue, but I also felt worried about the careful planning that had gone into this. Someone had gone through a lot of effort to ensure that this specific store in Las Vegas would end up with tainted bottles of cough syrup, which meant that we weren’t dealing with some careless two-bit criminal.
I had my doubts that the drugs had actually been shipped here from the east coast plant the serial number seemed to indicate, so I decided to spend more time researching. If nothing else, it would keep my mind busy and prevent me from worrying.
11
