Drift (37 page)

Before we got started, I put the Mycozene pills on the table and told Sorenson what they were and where I got them.

He eyed them suspiciously. “This is what you gave the girl?”

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure whatever she has is the same thing that’s filling up this hospital. This is the cure.”

He gave the bottle a little shake, rattling around two dozen or so pills inside. “I don’t think that’s going to be enough.”

I could see why Stan Bowers didn’t like the guy. “I’m pretty sure the Dunston police have fifty kilos of the stuff in the evidence lock up. They thought it was heroin; then they thought it was flour. It’s a drug called Mycozene, distilled from genetically engineered corn.”

Sorenson gave Agent Lionel a nod that spun him on his heel and sent him from the van. Then Sorenson turned back to me and held up the pill bottle again. “And you’re sure this stuff will cure this disease you’re telling me about?”

“That’s what the evil genius told me.”

“You know, if it’s not, you could be looking at another murder charge.”

I laughed. “If it’s not, my legal troubles will be the least of our worries.”

*   *   *

For the next eight hours, we tried to piece it together.

I told Sorenson almost everything. When I finished, I asked him to check on Nola for me. He ignored that and asked me to tell the story again. When I finished the second time, he left for ten minutes. When he came back, he brought me a soda. Then he asked me to tell the entire story again.

I thanked him for the soda; then I told him I wasn’t answering any more questions without an update on Nola’s condition.

He looked at me like he was trying to decide which would be easier, breaking out the enhanced interrogation techniques or calling the hospital. He turned his back and mumbled into his phone. A moment later, he turned back to face me and said, “Critical but stable.”

“Thanks,” I said, sipping the soda. “I also need you to check on a kid named Carl Squires. Accidental death, drug overdose a couple of days ago. Pruitt found him under the Stony Creek Bridge. Looked like he got high and fell off the bridge. I think it might have been murder, and it might have been Levkov and company.”

Sorenson raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything.

“I think they caught him stealing some of their magic apples and they killed him. Dosed him up and tossed him off the bridge. Pruitt said he had a lump on the side of his head and the back of his head was smashed in where he landed. I’m wondering if the pathologist can check the blood in the contusion on the side of his head, see if it has the same level of opioids as the rest of him.”

Sorenson frowned. “Why?”

“Cause of death was the fall, but the theory was that he fell because of the drugs. If the contusion is clean, that means somebody thumped him, then dosed him and tossed him off the bridge.”

Sorenson nodded to the other agent, Durand, and he slipped outside. Then Sorenson turned back to me. “One more time.”

When I finished that time, Sorenson disappeared again. Twenty minutes later, he returned with a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes from Branson’s. Moose was right; the meatloaf was good.

As I ate, Sorenson shared some information, on the condition that I not tell anyone else. They had found some of Rupp’s notes and were still going through them, probably would be for years, but parts of the story had begun to emerge. I’d already figured a lot of it out, but I was impressed with how quickly Sorenson was able to fill in so many of the holes.

Rupp grew up just outside Dunston as Jason Gimble. Poor, fat, and socially awkward but very smart, he was a bully’s dream classmate, and one of those bullies, coincidentally, was Dwight Cooney. Gimble took his grandfather’s name, Rupp, when he left town. After his spectacular success and failure in academia, he tried legitimate business. He thought he had struck it rich when he created Mycozene, but the FDA refused to approve his wonder drug for wide use, saying the minor risk of elevated liver enzyme levels were not justified by the innocuous diseases it cured. Having failed to make his fortune legitimately, Rupp tried a different approach. The opioid-producing apples were his first attempt at making an illegal fortune. It was an impressive scientific accomplishment, but not the world-changing moneymaker he hoped it would be.

According to Rupp’s notes, the apples were potent, but the trees lacked vigor and required a lot of care. He couldn’t just license them, either, because the people who would be interested in licensing them would also be interested in killing him and taking them. That meant he had to be involved in production, and that meant he had to deal with people like Levkov, who started out as his drug middleman but quickly took over the operation.

Rupp probably could have made millions with those apples. But he didn’t want millions, he wanted billions.

Mycozene was a breakthrough cure for fungal diseases; what Rupp needed was a fungal disease that was bad enough, deadly enough, and common enough that the drug’s health risks would be overlooked. Mycozene was one hundred-percent effective against common bread mold, which could become a deadly infection in immuno-compromised patients. So Rupp altered the mold, creating a designer rhizomycosis. Instead of affecting a handful of immuno-compromised Americans every year, it would infect millions.

The outbreak in Dunston was not part of the plan; that was the result of a failure in containment. Rupp had told me the same thing, but I kept quiet when Sorenson mentioned that, because I wasn’t sure how much of that failure of containment was because of me.

Rupp’s plan was to release the spores into the environment on the wings of the Monarch butterflies. There would be a few cases right off the bat, but not many. Rupp’s rhizomycosis was like anthrax; it was deadly, but it was not contagious, not from person to person. It could only be contracted by exposure in the environment. Unlike anthrax, however, it could readily grow and spread in the environment, on wet leaves or garbage or other welcoming environments. It would take a while, but the spores from the butterflies would grow and spread in the environment, and after a year or two the cases would start to mount. By then it would be everywhere, and the world would come knocking, happy to accept slightly elevated liver enzyme levels and willing to pay any price for another chance at Rupp’s wonder drug.

Levkov was bad news, but Rupp wasn’t some absentminded professor going along for the ride. Rupp conceived of the entire plan, endangering hundreds of millions of innocent people. And while Levkov did the actual dirty work—imprisoning migrant workers, testing the pathogen on them to make sure it was lethal, and then incinerating them in staged meth lab fires—it was Rupp who came up with that testing regimen.

“It was a sick plan, but brilliant,” Sorenson concluded. “It could have killed millions, and made billions. And it almost worked.”

“What about Rothe? Do you see him as being in on it?”

“Rothe? Who’s that?”

“The developer. He had some elaborate deal set up to buy all the land, to build a housing development on the land Rupp and Levkov were using.”

“You mean the Redtail Properties guy? I don’t think so. What do you think?”

“I don’t think so either. He was an unwitting accomplice. They gave him a great price on the land, but part of the deal was he had to start construction right away. Rupp figured by the time the rhizomycosis became an issue, Redtail would have bulldozed and built over any evidence.”

“Clever. And now the poor bastard is stuck owning a massive hazardous waste site.”

“What about Bricker? The lawyer?”

“I can’t say too much about that, because technically you’re still a person of interest. I don’t think she had any idea what Rupp and Levkov were up to, but let’s say she was probably a little less innocent, and it ended a little worse for her. Still, she was more of a loose end than conspirator.”

*   *   *

After Sorenson shared his information, he asked me to go over the whole thing one more time. As a cop, I knew there was a legitimate benefit to repeating a story, but it was a long story, and I had been through it several times.

“I don’t know how much more of this I got in me,” I told him.

“All right. One last question, though.” He gave me a steely look. “Where are those apples?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, the shed was empty when I went back to test them. When I started to suspect there was something up with the apples, I asked Rupp about it. The trees disappeared right after that.”

Sorenson grunted, eyeing me suspiciously for a moment. “A lot of money could be made with those apples,” he said. “Drug cartels, pharmaceutical companies, they’d love to get their hands on them, and on the technology Rupp used to produce them. So would we.”

I shrugged.

“You have any ideas, you let us know.” He leaned in closer. “We might not be able to pay as much as the drug companies, but there’d definitely be a big reward. And it would be the right thing to do.”

I nodded, and he seemed to let it go.

“I have a last question, too,” I told him. “How did you guys get wind of this?”

“Levkov’s been on our radar for some time. He was a major league asshole and we’d been looking for him, as have a half a dozen agencies around the world. When your friend Tennison ran a search on him, it got our attention, and we came looking. We had a file on Rupp, too, but we never expected anything like this.”

I smiled. Danny might have told me to leave it alone, but he still did the search for me.

“All right,” Sorenson said, standing up. “We’ll pick this up later.” He put a set of car keys on the table. “We’re impounding your truck out there, but here’s a loaner, parked out back, courtesy of the Federal government. We’ll be sending someone over to your house to get the car out of your garage. I don’t know if they’ll give you a loaner for that. Go home and get some rest. Don’t talk about any of this to anyone. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “and you can’t leave town.”

I smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I know the drill.”

“No, I mean you can’t leave town. Quarantine, a five-mile radius. If you try to leave, you’ll be shot.”

76

When I woke up the sky was light again, which totally confused me until I realized it was the next day. Moose had made coffee and, thankfully, had done laundry. After a quick shower, we were ready to go.

Getting to the hospital wasn’t easy. The feds had set up a massive detour around the scene of the fire. A trio of black helicopters hovered over the field like dragonflies, motionless in the air. I used them as reference points as I navigated the back roads and eventually made my way to the hospital.

When we got there, the woman at the intake desk gave us Nola’s new room number. But once again, it was empty.

“I’ll go ask the nurse where she is,” Moose said. I had already spotted Nola in the solarium at the end of the hall, but I let him go looking anyway.

She was sitting in a wheelchair, paler and thinner, gazing out the window. She turned and saw me and she started to stand, but I got there before she could. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed. There was a frailty to her, but holding her tight, I could still feel the strength at her core. I held her close for a while, and then she pulled back and ran her fingers over the knot where Pruitt had hit me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. You look great.”

“Yeah, right.”

She was wearing a hospital gown under a robe, and I slipped my hand into the robe, around to the back.

She let out a little gasp as my hand found the gap and the warm skin underneath it.

“You’re bad,” she said, pulling my hand up to her face.

“I’m trying to be,” I told her.

“They treated the others,” she said solemnly. “They’re doing better, all of them.”

“Good.”

Her eyes welled up, and she squeezed my hand hard. “They told me what you did. I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for you.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have been sick if it wasn’t—”

She silenced me with a finger on my lips and said, “Thanks.”

I knew I was supposed to say “You’re welcome,” but it didn’t feel right. So I was relieved that Moose found us then. He gave Nola a long, teary-eyed embrace.

For the next half hour, I filled them in on some of what I knew. I told Nola about Cooney’s little shrine to her, about the calls from his phone. She nodded quietly, and in her wet eyes I could see relief and fear and sorrow for Cooney’s sad, lonely life. Moose seemed a little angry, and relieved Cooney was dead. I was with him on that, but we gave Nola a moment.

“But wait a second,” Moose said. “If those calls weren’t about trying to get her to sell, what about the text? Why did he torch Nola’s crops?”

“That wasn’t Cooney. I think that was Rupp’s people. Nola told Rupp she was getting pressured to sell when we brought him the corn that had been contaminated by his GMO corn. They used the hang-ups and the harassment as a cover to destroy Nola’s tainted corn, erase their evidence. Then they harvested their own.”

Nola’s eyes welled up again at that, all her hard work, and how they destroyed it. I squeezed her hand, and after a minute I continued, telling them about my interrogation with Sorenson, and everything I’d learned about Rupp’s plan, including the things I told Sorenson I wouldn’t tell anybody.

By the time I was finished, Nola was visibly drained. We wheeled her back to her room, and Moose gave her a peck on the cheek. I helped her into bed, and I copped another feel when I did it.

As we got back in the loaner car, my phone went off. It was Sorenson.

“You were right about Squires,” he said. “Contusion on the side of his head was inconsistent with the injuries from the fall. Coroner said he figured the kid had bumped his head on the railing or something, but you were right; the blood in it had traces of opiates, but nothing compared to the blood in his system. Looked like they hit him with a rifle butt. Good call.”

He’d probably been consuming juice from those apples for a little while, so it was no surprise there were traces in his system.