Waking Nightmare (36 page)
Ryne leaned against the wall of the crime lab’s conference room and mentally rehearsed his spiel for Han. The chemist wouldn’t be pleased to see him, but Ryne thought he’d shown great forbearance in not contacting the man earlier. And let’s face it, he needed to arm himself with good news before the meeting with Dixon.
It would have been far easier if he had only Dennis Brown to answer to. The captain had been in the trenches, had worked difficult investigations before and realized the excruciating process of fitting hundreds of seemingly disconnected pieces of information together to make a case. Back in Boston, Dixon had always been more political tool than cop. Nothing in the last year had convinced Ryne he’d changed.
Mark Han entered the room, a familiar expression of impatience on his face, and Ryne straightened, reached for diplomacy. But the need didn’t arise. The man saw him and grunted. “Good. I was hoping it was you. I was about to call.”
For Han, those words were tantamount to a pleasantry, and Ryne was momentarily taken aback. Then comprehension filtered through him and excitement flared. “You’ve identified the drug?”
“It’s a beauty.” Han crossed quickly to a conference table and set down the notebook he carried. “From a purely scientific standpoint, of course. Someone spent a lot of time designing this compound.”
He flipped the book open and pointed to a page. Ryne glanced down at the scribbled formulas and notes. They may as well have been written in Greek. “Why don’t you tell me what you discovered.”
“I’m not done with all the tests. I have to be careful with such a limited amount of the sample. I don’t suppose you’ve found any more?”
Ryne hated to dash the hope in the other man’s expression, but he shook his head.
Han gave a philosophical shrug. “In any case, I think I’ve identified the two main components of the compound. One is MDMA, methylenedioxymethamphetamine.”
“Ecstasy,” Ryne murmured. The tox screens had shown traces of it in each victim.
“Right. Often people will report enhanced tactile sensations with use. But you’ll never guess the second element I identified.”
“You’re not going to make me, are you?”
Han reached up to push his glasses more firmly on his nose and flipped a page in his notebook. “Tetrodotoxin, or TTX.” He paused expectantly for a moment, awaiting a response, but when Ryne merely raised his brows, the chemist blew out a breath. “It’s a highly poisonous neurotoxin that is fatal well over half the time it’s ingested. Ten thousand times deadlier than cyanide. A single milligram is enough to kill.”
“Wait a minute.” Ryne jammed a hand through his hair, as a new thought hit him. “He was trying to poison them?”
Han shook his head impatiently. “This drug is a derivative of TTX, which tells me the guy was going for some of its effects, but not death. If he wanted to kill them, he’d have mixed in a larger amount. No, from what you told me about the victims’ reactions, he probably wanted to immobilize them. With large dosages, the first symptom would have been numbness or tingling in the lips, followed by complete paralysis, cardiac and respiratory distress, and then death.”
Ryne pulled out a chair and reached for the chemist’s notebook, flipping through pages, although none of the chemical formulas or writing made much more sense than the pages he’d already seen. “All the victims reported the tingling in their lips,” he affirmed. “But although they were weak after he injected them, most of them still spoke of struggling, so they weren’t completely paralyzed. They were all injected twice during the course of the assault.”
Shrugging, Han said “Like I said, trace amounts. If he was going to mix his own drug cocktail, so to speak, I can’t figure why he didn’t use a form of scopolamine, which also could have been tweaked to produce the paralysis and hazed memory. It would have been a lot easier to access than TTX.”
Ryne recalled scopolamine from his early days working narcotics undercover. He’d once infiltrated a gang-related drug ring selling it, along with roofies and GHB, as date rape drugs.
“What would be the major outlets for TTX?”
The chemist smirked at him. “The Indo-Pacific Ocean.”
Looking past the man to the clock on the wall, Ryne was reminded that he didn’t have much more time before his meeting with Dixon. “Can you be a little more specific?”
“Sure.” Han grabbed the notebook from him and looked through its pages, until he found the one he was seeking, tore it out, and handed it to Ryne. “Tetrodotoxin is found in several forms of marine life, but the most common is the puffer fish, otherwise known as fugu or blowfish. They’re considered a delicacy in Japan, which not coincidentally leads the world in TTX-related deaths. It’s even used in voodoo to create zombie poisons.”
Ryne eyed him askance. “Get out.”
The chemist slapped a hand over his heart. “Swear on my mother’s grave. That’s mostly in Haiti, I think.”
“So I just need to start tracking down voodoo queens, sushi chefs, and geeks raising puffer fish in their home aquariums.” Ryne’s tone was sardonic. “Thanks, Mark. This is really helpful.”
“You can skip the home aquarium enthusiasts. The fish don’t produce the TTX on their own, a bacteria does it for them. And the bacteria is only present in the marine world. Puffer fish cultured by humans don’t carry it.”
“That really narrows it down.”
“Probably not, but this should. There has been some recent interest by the pharmaceutical community regarding the use of TTX for medicinal purposes.”
That buzz of adrenaline was back. Ryne stared at the other man, his mind racing. “How much interest?”
Han shrugged. “Couldn’t say. But I know I’ve seen periodic studies in journals for the last few years on the possible medicinal benefits, primarily for pain suppression or anesthesia.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ryne interjected. “This perp isn’t giving something to the victims to lessen the pain. Just the opposite.”
That familiar impatience was back in Han’s expression. “TTX has a relative molecular mass, right?” Han flipped through the notebook to find a formulaic drawing and stabbed a finger at it. “Pharmaceutical scientists regularly make derivatives of drugs that produce desirable effects while minimizing or eliminating the unwanted effects. They change the structure of a drug slightly to see if this makes it more effective or reduces side effects. They’ll add or remove a methyl, a hydroxy group, or some other functional group here or there on the original drug molecule and then see how it changes its effectiveness.”
“Then how could you identify it as TTX anymore?” Ryne asked. “It’s properties or whatever would be altered, right?”
Han looked smug. “You can still determine the drug it was synthesized from, but that wasn’t the tricky part. Another chemist would have used a scheme of acid and base extractions. But TTX breaks down in strong acid or strong base. A neutral extraction was needed, and that isn’t common.”
It took Ryne a moment to realize that he was supposed to be impressed. “So you must have had an idea of what you were going to find.”
“There are no screening tests for TTX or its derivatives. But I thought of it when you first described the effects to me. The structure of this drug is very close to the original compound, with slight changes that must have been deliberate. Someone spent a lot of time experimenting with minute alterations until the desired effect was achieved.” There was a shade of admiration in his tone. “Like I said, scientifically speaking, it’s genius.”
“And designed with one specific purpose in mind,” Ryne said grimly.
Abbie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and turned away from the ViCAP notebook. She’d take a break from the tedium to focus on Larsen for a while. She’d want to talk to her again, but not before she was armed with as much background as she could compile on her.
She put the cap back on the highlighter she was using—she still owed Ryne for that dig—and got up to sit behind his desk to run a check on the woman.
Her cell phone rang, and checking the number, she saw it was Ryne. Answering it, she said, “You lied. You don’t have any blue highlighters. That’s going to throw my whole system off.”
There was a pause, then a low chuckle. “Sorry about that. I’ll have to make it up to you. Does that mean this isn’t a good time to ask for a favor?”
Abbie leaned back in his desk chair, enjoying herself. “I’ve learned a little about you, too. Enough to avoid making any promises without knowing up front what the favor is.”
“Usually a wise choice, but this is related to the case. I just left Mark Han and he’s got a lead on the drug.” Humor fled, and Abbie straightened as he went on, “He thinks it’s a derivative of tetrodotoxin”—he spelled it for her and she jotted it down on a paper on his desk—“which has drawn the attention of the pharmaceutical community, and I was wondering if you could do a quick Internet search, see if you come up with anything.”
She moved to her own computer again and opened the search engine, tapped in the subject, scrolled the page rapidly. “Lots of articles on its origin . . . it comes from puffer fish?”
“Among other things. Try medicinal effects or something.”
She obeyed and a moment later let out a whistle. “Bingo. Looks like a press release from Ketrum Pharmaceuticals.” She scanned the page. “They’re currently in stage three of clinical trials—whatever that is. Looks like they’re having some success using it for a heavy-duty pain blocker.” She frowned. “That’s not how it works on the victims.”
“I’ll explain later. I’m just pulling in to meet Dixon now. See what you can find out about the parent company and where their labs are located. And if you could discover the location of the specific lab involved in this testing, that’d be great.”
“No problem,” she said wryly, eyeing the ViCAP binder. On top of everything else she’d been involved in today, what were a few more hours of research?
They disconnected and Abbie got up to position her laptop on the edge of her desk. She could use the two computers simultaneously, running checks on Larsen and Cordray while searching the web for more facts on Ketrum. Maybe she’d discover the answer to the most urgent of the questions she hadn’t had time to put to Ryne.
Like how a poison from a marine animal could be found in the veins of each of their rape victims.
“Abbie. Check this out.”
She looked up to observe Officer Joe Reed walking by, jerking a thumb behind him. Craning her head, she tried, and failed to see what he was indicating. But now that her concentration had been interrupted, she could certainly hear the commotion that she had previously tuned out.
“I’m not leaving until I see him, so the sooner you get him back here, the sooner you’ll be rid of me.” As the woman’s voice filtered back to her, Abbie pushed away from the desk and headed up front.
“Ma’am, I already told you. Detective McElroy is out and could be all day. If you’ll just leave a message . . .”
Abbie walked up to where the weary-sounding desk sergeant was addressing a dark-haired woman dressed completely in black.
Which was a little like describing the Sphinx as piles of interesting rocks.
She was clad in a skintight cat suit and thigh-high black boots with pencil-thin heels that added a good five inches to her height. She wore studded leather fingerless gloves, a matching choker, and a palpable fury that threatened to erupt at any moment.
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