Poison Control Read online

  We got the bodies from convicts serving a life sentence. Without telling them exactly why we wanted their body, Q2 paid their family a cool $2 million in tax free money and they agreed to aid science, or serve humankind, or whatever noble phrase would make them feel better about taking the off-ramp from life in a cell.

  It’s all very weird but it worked for the country’s security. I’ve been killed multiple times so I’ve experienced several different bodies. Many of them I didn’t care for, but some were damned impressive. The one I had now — with the exception of that bullet wound currently chapping my ass — fell into the latter category. This dude worked out.

  Maybe another reason why Quanta had loaned me out to the DEA. She didn’t want to waste one of our better physical specimens just waiting around for a psycho to come along and threaten Uncle Sam. Now I guess a psycho had showed up.

  Once she’d finished meditating in a plant-filled atrium in the center of her home, Quanta joined me at the big round table in the kitchen. She placed an electronic tablet between us, swiped to an image, and, without any preamble, started right in.

  “His name is Steffan Parks. He’s in his mid-50s, unmarried, and currently unemployed.”

  He looked his age. A slight graying around the temples, the hair pulled back into a tail. He sported facial hair, too, a goatee and mustache. One look suggested he might be the kind of 50-something hippie who’d refer to it by its old-school name, the Van Dyke. His eyes were semi-dulled, as if disinterested in anything except his own thoughts.

  “What does he normally do?” I asked.

  “He’s a scientist. And not just a run-of-the-mill scientist.” She swiped to another image.

  I gave a low whistle. “Holy shit. Is that the Nobel Prize ceremony?”

  “It is. Parks won the Nobel for chemistry about twenty years ago.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “His career has gone downhill since then.”

  Quanta shrugged. “Yes and no. After winning the prize he left the University of Chicago and started a company with one of his former associates. For the first few years he did remarkably well, mostly because of government contracts. Lots of those.”

  “What field?” I asked.

  “Water. He was awarded the Nobel for his work in desalination, which has always had lucrative potential. In just a few years it’s possible that one in every seven people on Earth will live in a region where water is scarce. Removing the salt from seawater is one way this could help.”

  I tapped a finger on the table. “Remind me what’s kept desalination from taking off. Is it cost?”

  She nodded. “Cost. Energy consumption. Some people worry that the process removes other important mineral elements besides the salt. Assorted other speed bumps.”

  “But the process is sound,” I concluded.

  “Oh, it works. The critical component is making it work in a way that’s safe and efficient for the nearly one billion people whose lives either currently depend on it or will soon.”

  I got up from the table and fetched a refill of the mystery juice. I was afraid to ask my eclectic boss what type it was. I didn’t want her to ruin it.

  “Okay,” I said. “So this guy wins the biggest prize in science, leaves his cushy university gig, and goes out on his own. Convinces the government to pour money into his company, probably lives the high life. But you’re showing all of this to me because something has gone wrong. Jump to the nasty part. Why is Parks suddenly considered a knave?”

  Quanta gave me the scowl she reserved for times she thought I was making fun of her. Which I kinda was. I just thought her pet term for the worst villains — her knaves — was funny.

  “Four years ago several government programs began cutting off their funding to his company. There were allegations that his work didn’t exactly hold up under peer review. One competitor lodged a complaint about falsified data, and there were other problems.

  “Parks fought all of these claims, and for a while it looked like he’d get back on track. But then one of his developments, one that had been anticipated for many years, was unveiled. And it failed. Two other programs cut their allocations to and things inevitably snowballed.”

  I swiped back on Quanta’s tablet and looked at the photo again. “Then?”

  “Then it got uglier. A former colleague who knew Parks when they were in Chicago gave an interview where he questioned if Parks was even deserving of the Nobel Prize. He was vague, but he insinuated that Parks had ridden the coattails of others and maybe claimed certain things that either belonged to others or were questionable.”

  “Wow,” I said. “How the mighty fall.”

  “Or how the mighty lash out,” Quanta said. “In this case, with malice.”

  “I’m obviously hearing all of this because someone is dead. Let me guess: the dude who questioned him winning the Nobel.”

  She reached out for the tablet and swiped forward a few frames, then turned the screen toward me. “This man. His name was Leon Haas. Taught chemistry at the University of Chicago, including the years that Parks was on the faculty. And yes, his interview was widely circulated and it was surely an embarrassment for Parks, who was already reeling from his company’s troubles.

  “Three years ago Haas also left the university to open his own lab. He moved with his wife to Santa Fe where he purchased a company called Marquart Labs. He kept the name. They, too, received some government funding in the area of water research, although their specialty was in filtering and recycling.

  “When Parks fired back in some journals about what Haas had said, he often cited the fact that Haas was merely a competitor hoping to siphon away business at the expense of a former colleague. Parks used the term professional envy more than once.”

  I grunted. “So he tried to discredit the guy who discredited him.”

  “And it didn’t work. From what we’ve gathered it only made Parks look worse. And then Mr. Haas was found at his lab.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “According to the original inquest, poison. And not just Haas. One of his lab assistants, as well. At first investigators didn’t consider an outside source for the poison.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The lab in Santa Fe worked on some of the foulest water sources you could find. That was their mission, after all, to cleanse the most contaminated water and make it potable. That meant they worked with a lot of chemicals, experimenting with countless combinations. So the investigative team started under the assumption that Haas and his people simply failed their safety protocols and managed to poison themselves.”

  I smiled at her. “But, again, you’re talking to me because someone didn’t buy that explanation.”

  “Few did. But the loudest of the non-believers was Haas’s wife. She claims Parks threatened her husband a month before he died. And she says it’s ludicrous to think someone of Leon’s education, training, and experience would be so foolish as to accidentally kill himself with shoddy oversight. She’s the one who reached out to the police, who contacted the FBI, who contacted us.”

  I studied the photo of Haas, then flipped back to Parks. “Anything concrete that could tie Parks in? Or is he merely a suspect because of the bad blood between them?”

  Quanta sat back and sipped her water. “After his largest grant was terminated, Parks submitted a proposal to the Pentagon. It outlined a method of compromising an enemy’s water supply and introducing a microscopic toxin that would be difficult to detect and yet prove fatal. The military, of course, rejected the proposal right away.”

  “Of course,” I said, hoping my knowledge would impress the boss. “The Biological Weapons Convention of 1970.”

  “Very good, Swan. Although it was 1972, but yes. The United States is one of more than 100 nations that have agreed to ban production of biological and toxic weapons. The proposal from Parks would clearly be in violation.”

  “Although I’m sure there have been some behind-closed-doors experiments—
”

  She cut me off. “We’re not here to talk about theories of that nature. We’re here to talk about Steffan Parks.”

  Properly chastised, I gave a small shrug. “All right. But the more I think about what you said a minute ago, the FBI wouldn’t have reached out to you if there wasn’t something they considered an imminent threat. So what’s the scoop?”

  Quanta paused, then leaned forward again and swiped a couple more times on the tablet. She found a page she was looking for and pointed. “Haas’s wife wasn’t satisfied with the coroner’s inquest, so she hired an outside pathologist. This is an excerpt from his report.”

  I scanned the document. Most of it was incomprehensible, a lot of medical jargon and abbreviations. Then I found a paragraph toward the bottom.

  I read aloud: “Includes traces of tabun.” I looked up at Quanta. “I know that word. It’s a nerve agent, right?”

  “Extremely toxic. Developed by Germany just before World War II as a pesticide and then used as a biological weapon. And . . .” She held her glass up. “And it mixes easily with water.”

  “The plot thickens,” I said.

  She set the glass down. “The reason Q2 is involved is because Haas’s wife claimed Parks made some wild comments when he threatened her husband. She said he called Leon and berated him for the interview. When Haas not only refused to apologize but actually doubled down on his accusations, Parks uttered something about ‘screw you’ and ‘screw this whole country.’ He told Haas that lots of people would be sorry. His parting words were, ‘You’ll be the first, but you won’t be the last.’”

  “So he’s planning to strike back for all of the slights he’s suffered.”

  “And,” Quanta added, “he has the resources. His proposal to the Pentagon included some vague instructions. But they included tabun.”

  Whoa. I studied her face for a moment then said: “Guess I’m going to Santa Fe.”

  Quanta returned the gaze. “First thing in the morning.”

  Chapter Three

  I actually had a date with my wife, which was rare. Not because we didn’t enjoy it, and not because I’m a cheap bastard, but because my life is mostly on the road. I think Christina’s okay with that; she treasured her alone time, and with me she got plenty. I texted her and made plans to meet at one of our favorite Italian places where the servers would only interrupt you to take your order, bring your order, or tell you the place was on fire.

  Before I could feed my fettucine fantasy, however, I had to make a stop at Q2 headquarters. Quanta’s assistant, an overly-serious woman named Poole, would have travel details and other information. I hadn’t been crazy about Poole when I first met her, but during my mission to stop a freaky family from wiping out the country’s power grid I developed a newfound appreciation for the tall, lanky Poole. It was still my goal to get her to laugh at something, anything, but I’d concluded she was at least remarkably efficient.

  I parked in the underground garage of the drab building and took the elevator up to four. Poole was in her office, peeling an orange.

  “Oh, hello Swan,” she said, dumping the rind into a trash can. “I have a packet for you.”

  “You know I’m a sucker for a good packet,” I said. “Have you had time to scrounge up anything else on Steffan Parks?”

  “Actually, yes. Hold on.” She swiveled around in her chair and retrieved a manilla folder. It was a lot thinner now than it would be once Poole got busy. “His last reported full-time address was just down the road from here, in Dover, Delaware. But reports show that he abandoned the property a couple of months ago.”

  “Abandoned?”

  She nodded. “He just left it, furniture and all. Made a phone call to his mortgage broker and told them they would find the keys and garage door opener in the mail box. A sheriff I talked to said he went with the broker just in case there was trouble, but the home was in absolutely perfect condition. Even a vase full of fresh flowers waiting on the kitchen counter. Just no Mr. Parks.”

  “How polite to call and let someone know.”

  Poole didn’t know how to respond to that, so after a momentary pause she continued. “He also walked away from some pending legal issues, all stemming from his company shutting down. His attorney wants desperately to talk to him, but no one knows where to find him or his girlfriend.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Girlfriend? Okay, this is new. What’s her story?”

  “Very similar to his. She’s also a former employee of the University of Chicago and left the same time Parks did. We understand that she didn’t invest in his company, but did behave as a full partner.”

  “So they’re business and personal partners,” I said. “Makes car-pooling easy. But she’s now missing too.”

  “Yes. Her name is Jayanti Pradesh. Goes by Jay.”

  “Of course she does. She’s also a scientist?”

  “And comes from a family of respected pioneers in physics and engineering. I’ve found quite a few references to her mother and an uncle. They’ve both been published many times. Not so much with Jayanti. I get the impression she was something of a disappointment for a high-performing family in the field.”

  I flipped through a couple of pages in the file. “It’s hard to live up to expectations when your parents are already stars. Look at all the children of the Beatles.” I glanced at Poole. “You know who they are?”

  “I don’t listen to a lot of music, but I’ve heard of them, naturally.”

  This made me smile. I tried to imagine the strict, stiff Poole at a concert, down in the pit, banging her head and throwing her hands up in the air.

  That would never happen on its own. What if I took her some time, just as an experiment?

  “All right,” I said. “If Jay the girlfriend is missing, too, then we might assume she’s part of the poisoning plot. And if she’s a bit of an underachiever then she might have her own warped motivation.”

  I found a couple of pages in the file that caught my eye. It was a copy of the rather lengthy email exchange between Steffan Parks and a senior official at the Pentagon. Starting from the initial contact at the very bottom and rolling up through each of the replies it detailed the attempt by Parks to interest the military in his — using his words — ‘hydro-incursion technique.’

  In other words, his plan to poison the well for America’s enemies. It didn’t go into specifics, but seemed to treat the proposition as an almost patriotic duty. Never mind the grisly consequences for an innocent population; Parks suggested the plan could achieve ‘near 100 percent effectiveness.’ In other words, it would kill everyone: men, women, children, soldiers, civilians, probably even pets.

  What I found interesting was the response from the Pentagon official. At first he just strongly declined the offer. But when Parks pushed the issue and questioned the integrity of the official when it came to protecting the country, the official dropped one particular word: Monstrous.

  Because, really, that’s what the plan was. It was monstrous to imagine poisoning an entire country’s water supply. But this was the level Parks had sunk to. Either he had become crazy due to the hardships he faced in his career, or he’d always been nuts and had simply managed to mask it. Or simply hid behind the work of others, which is what Leon Haas had claimed. And, oh by the way, had been killed for saying.

  I set the papers in my lap and gazed at nothing for a moment. There was a tickling feeling telling me this was much more dangerous than I’d first assumed. We had a crazy scientist who’d been not only sanctioned for his shoddy work, but publicly humiliated. That was the thing that stood out in my mind. The ridicule.

  It’s one thing to fail; we’ve all done it. But the shame is in proportion to the depth of the plunge. In this case, to go from acclaimed Nobel Prize winner to failure brings with it a degree of pain few of us would be able to comprehend. Once a wunderkind, then a laughingstock? It would screw with your mind.

  Apparently it had with Steffan Parks. Two people were dea
d already. How many more would it take to even the score? We could always hope he was satisfied by eliminating his most-vocal critic.

  But what if he wasn’t? What if he saw no reason to stop at two? What if he intended to make a grand show of his work, his deadly tabun-laced toxin that could disseminate quickly through an entire city’s supply? Or state’s. Or . . .

  As usual, the rational side of my mind denied that anyone would go to this length just to assuage a personal slight. But over the years I’d seen a lot of vicious, inhuman displays by people who had no rational governor on their fury. And in an age where mass killings were considered a scorecard, when each psychopath felt challenged to increase the body count in order to stand out on the round-the-clock news services, it made things much more dire for the rest of us.

  Some people put very little stock in gut feelings, but I practically lived by it. And my gut told me that Dr. Parks was capable of horror on an unprecedented scale. It was perhaps a good thing that this case had quickly filtered down to Q2.

  Poole had respectfully waited during my comatose assessment. Shaking myself back to life I looked at the next sheath of papers in the packet. My itinerary. “Thank you for not making the flight too early tomorrow, Poole,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. I also reserved one of your favorite cars.”

  I stood up and smiled. “Poole, what special treat would you like me to bring you from New Mexico?”

  Her puzzled look returned. “I don’t know what they specialize in.”

  “Then it’ll be a surprise. Thanks for this,” I said, holding up the packet. “I’ll be in touch.”

  It had snowed earlier in the day but now the skies were merely overcast with the classic Washington, D.C. gray. Late-afternoon traffic chewed up some of the seventeen hours I had until my plane left Dulles, but I tossed my keys to the valet attendant at the restaurant just a few minutes late for my six o’clock date.