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  “We need to prepare for that possibility,” Clyde said, his brow furrowed with concern under his goggles. “We think that you guys crippled the cartel, but we still don’t have this Solomon character in custody. And, as the forensics team, it’s our job to stay on top of this stuff so we can help people who may take this thing. It’s your job to catch the bad guys, so hopefully, we don’t have to.”

  “We’ve got your back,” I assured them. “But what about this new version of the drug? Can you tell how deadly it is, compared to the other version?”

  “We’ve run a lot of tests,” Clyde said. “On all kinds of samples, too. As we said, we’ve used the lab-grown skin, cadaver skin, the whole host of options at our disposal. And we’d wager that the mortality rate is hovering right around four point eight percent.”

  Holm and I exchanged a look. Solomon had told us that the New Orleans version of the drug had a mortality rate of five percent back on the ghost ship.

  “That’s similar to what Solomon told us,” I explained to the lab techs.

  “We thought we remembered something about that,” Bonnie said with a nod to me. “So it seems that your information was probably accurate. Though, of course, these tests we’ve done in the lab are nothing next to the real thing. This could play out differently in reality.”

  “Not to mention that the effects of the drug can go far beyond death for the other ninety-five percent of the people who take it,” Clyde added. “And we can’t test that out on skin cells. We’d need a live person for that, and since you’ve refused…”

  He waggled his eyebrows at Holm threateningly, and we all laughed again, even Holm.

  “Is this version still detectable in the body using the same tests you made in Santo Domingo?” I asked.

  This was my most burning question, and I was almost afraid of the answer. I would hate to go back to square one with all of this after gaining so much ground in the past seventy-two hours.

  “That’s what we were working on when you came in,” Clyde said, his expression suddenly serious. “It’s going to be a little more complicated, but we think we can do it. We’re finalizing the specifications now. The issue is again that we don’t have a live subject, in all seriousness.”

  “Yes, this does complicate matters,” Bonnie said, furrowing her brows together in concern. “We know enough to see that this version of the drug will manifest itself slightly differently in the bloodstream. The coke and heroin, that will be the same. But the other, more subtle indicators? That’s all this gel substance, and since that’s what’s changed, we kind of need to see it in action to be able to know what it looks like for sure.”

  “We’ve created a model and have a decent idea of what we think it will look like,” Clyde continued. “We’ll send that to you, in case you head down to NOLA. Diane already has it. But getting a real live subject is what we really need.”

  “Which means that in order for you to be able to identify this thing for sure, you need someone to be a victim first,” I said, slumping my shoulders in defeat.

  I exchanged another look with Holm. This was all-too-familiar news.

  “Sounds exactly like those damn pencil pushers that are giving Diane trouble,” Holm grumbled, crossing his arms as he echoed my own thoughts. “Need something bad to happen before they let us do anything about it.”

  “I know,” Bonnie said, giving him a small, regretful smile. “And it’s no doubt frustrating. But there’s no way around it. If you can talk to this guy you’re in contact with in the New Orleans police department and tell him how important this is, it could go a long way in helping our case.”

  “Tell him to run our scans and models on everyone in the ER with coke or heroin in their blood tests,” Clyde added. “Better yet, see if you can make it an official policy at the hospitals there, though I don’t know if MBLIS has that kind of clout right now. Then, maybe we can identify an official case and get a better idea of where we stand with this version of the drug.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” I promised them. “We don’t know exactly where we stand either, but if this guy Diane knows has some friends at the hospitals as most cops do, that could go a long way.”

  “And then, maybe we’ll get the pencil pushers off our backs too by finding a confirmed case,” Holm reasoned with a shrug. “Kill two birds with one stone.”

  “I like the sound of that,” I said, waving goodbye to the lab techs as I returned the goggles they had given me and gestured for Holm to do the same. “Thanks, you two, as always. We’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Holm and I took the elevator back up to the top floor, where our offices were. We didn’t speak on the way up.

  I pondered what we had seen. While the petri dish thing was just a lab experiment, it was a sobering reminder of all that we were up against here. Images of that poor girl with her eyes gouged out and her skin falling off were plastered in the back of my mind. I shuddered at the thought of any American girl meeting a similar fate.

  Diane was shuttered back in her office when we got back upstairs. Birn and Muñoz were gone, presumably on lunch break. I doubted they’d caught a case, given the state of things at MBLIS as of late, though I hoped for their sake that they had. Poring through old case files just to latch on to any hope of finding something to do with their time was a low point for us all. Holm and I had been there ourselves before Alejandra had called me about this case.

  I glanced at Diane’s office door. I could hear her talking almost feverishly on her phone behind it, though I couldn’t make out any of what was being said.

  “Should we pull her out?” Holm asked in almost a whisper, also sensing the serious tone Diane had taken.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Who knows, she could actually be making progress with these people.”

  So Holm and I sat down at our desks and ordered sub sandwiches from a nearby shop for lunch. The delivery driver came and went, and we were halfway done with our meals before Diane reemerged from her office, looking slightly less annoyed and disheveled than she had that morning.

  “Oh, you’re back,” she said, a little startled to see us. “How long was I in there?”

  “Long enough,” Holm said, his mouth still full of ham sandwich.

  “What was that about?” I asked, setting what remained of my own meatball sub down on its paper and nodding in the direction of Diane’s office.

  “I was just on the phone with my contact in New Orleans,” she said, her brow creased with worry and making her look closer to her forty years of age than she usually did. “He’s getting concerned, though there’s nothing concrete yet.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked, sitting up a little straighter and giving Diane my undivided attention. “What’s going on?” Holm set down his own sandwich, washing it down with some water, and did the same.

  “Nothing concrete yet, like I said,” Diane reiterated, shaking her head and pursing her lips. “But he says there are rumblings that something strange is going on. No one’s talking about it, though. Apparently, all the narcotics department’s confidential informants have practically disappeared off the face of the earth overnight. Complete radio silence.”

  I exchanged a concerned look with Holm.

  “That’s… unusual,” he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms as he took this in. “Every one of them at once? In a city like New Orleans? That’s a lot of CI’s, isn’t it?”

  “Dozens,” Diane confirmed with a curt nod in his direction. “And it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “What makes him think it’s related to this case?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s nothing concrete. It’s just a hunch. A time-worn, good cop’s hunch, but still a hunch. And that’s worth a hell of a lot in my book.”

  “We’re in agreement on that,” I said whole-heartedly. In my experience, a cop’s gut was one of the best, if not the best, barometers in the
business. “But let me guess, that’s not going to go very far with these pencil pushers you’ve been dealing with.”

  “No,” Diane said shortly, her tone scathing and her gaze blistering as if the man she’d been arguing with for days was right there in the room with us. “No, it will not. Though I’ll certainly try my best.”

  “There has to be something we can do,” Holm said, throwing his arms up in the air in exasperation. “People could be dying down there, and there’s no way a regular old police department, no matter how good it is, will be able to handle something like this on their own.”

  This was true enough. There was a reason that MBLIS existed, even if some people couldn’t get it in their thick heads to see it. We took on the cases that other agencies just didn’t have the resources or experience to tackle.

  “I don’t understand why we can’t just go down there and see what’s up,” I said stubbornly. “It’s not like we’re doing anything, anyway. And if it turns out that everything’s fine and dandy down in NOLA, all the better. We’ll come right back and move on to the next case if we ever get another one.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Ethan,” Diane said, giving me a small smile. “It’s not me that needs to be convinced, or anyone here. Eventually, we’ll get past this rough transition period with our funding, and things will get back to normal. But until then, we just have to work with what we’ve got.”

  “And if we never get sent down there?” I challenged. “Can we just go anywhere? I’ll hop in the car and drive myself, no government-bought plane tickets necessary.”

  Diane gave me a sharp look.

  “Don’t you dare, Marston,” she warned me. “You’re on thin ice enough as it is after what you pulled in New York. We all are. You could set us back months if you pull a stunt like that.”

  “I know, I know,” I relented, holding up my hands in defeat. “But I’m just saying, we’re here. And some of these guys sound like they need a talking to.”

  “You think I haven’t given them one?” Diane asked sharply, turning her piercing gaze on me.

  “Oh, I’m sure you have,” I chuckled, holding up my hands again. “More than sure, in fact.”

  “Who is this guy of yours down in NOLA, anyway?” Holm asked. “How do you know him?”

  “Detective George Barrett,” she said with a small smile. “He’s an old friend of mine from the glory days. He’s a good man. You’ll like him. And he’s an even better cop. He cares a lot about that city, even with all its troubles.”

  She didn’t elaborate, and I wondered if there was more to Diane and this George character than met the eye, but I didn’t dare to ask.

  “I know a lot of people left after the hurricane,” I remarked. “I imagine a fair number of law enforcement officers did, too.”

  “Yes, though not as many as you’d think,” Diane said, the corner of her lip curling upward. “People like George wouldn’t leave their city hanging.”

  “Good for them,” Holm murmured.

  “So, what did Bonnie and Clyde have to tell you boys?” Diane asked, quickly changing the subject.

  Holm and I looked at each other and then launched into an explanation of what we’d seen down in the lab, lab-grown smoking skin particles and all. Diane looked to be a strange combination of repulsed and morbidly fascinated when we finished our retelling.

  “Sometimes, I wonder about what exactly they all get up to down there in that lab,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Then I hear this and wish I’d never asked.”

  Holm and I both laughed.

  “At least you didn’t have to smell it,” I said, remembering the strange smoky sensation around my nostrils. “But anyway, they seemed to think it was helpful.”

  “To each their own, I guess,” Diane said, rolling her eyes. “Yes, I’d gotten a message shortly after you headed down there from the guy leading our excavation crew for this ghost ship of yours off the coast of Haiti. But then I got the call from George and forgot all about it. Let me go see what he had to say.”

  Diane stepped back into her office, though this time, she didn’t shut the door. I heard her pick up her phone, presumably to listen to the message from this excavation guy.

  “I wish we could’ve been there for the excavation,” Holm muttered. “Maybe we should’ve stayed behind for that.”

  I didn’t disagree. It would’ve been nice to see the whole experience with the ghost ship to its natural conclusion. But it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense.

  “That’s not our area of expertise,” I shrugged. “We would’ve just been standing there awkwardly watching while a bunch of guys in wetsuits looked around the ocean floor. Plus, we have work to do here. Theoretically, anyway. We could get called to New Orleans any minute now.”

  I could now hear Diane talking on the phone. She must’ve returned the guy’s call.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Holm admitted, balling up his sandwich paper and crossing his hands on his desk. “It still would’ve been cool, though.”

  Diane came back out of her office shortly.

  “That was just the team head reporting what Bonnie and Clyde told you,” she said. “That they found one crate of the drug that appeared to still be sealed after sinking. Everything else was destroyed or never found.”

  “Any evidence of any kind?” I asked as I balled up my own sandwich paper, grabbed Holm’s, and tossed both into a trash can against the side wall of the room. “Were they able to figure out how it blew up in the first place? Or anything about Solomon and his guys?”

  “There was a detonator embedded in the ship’s hull,” Diane said, pursing her lips grimly. “They seem to think that it must’ve been placed there when the vessel was first constructed.”

  “Which means that they were planning for something like this all along?” Holm asked, raising his eyebrows. “I can’t say I’m surprised, exactly, considering what happened—but it is unusual.”

  “There’s no doubt about that,” Diane agreed. “This cartel—at least under Solomon’s leadership—seems to know what it’s doing.”

  “Yeah, they weren’t quite so put together before,” I remarked, thinking back to the first time MBLIS had run into the organization. They had kidnapped Alejandra’s brother, Miguel, in an attempt to get to their father, the Dominican president. “Though that was still a tough case, even then.”

  “At least there weren’t zombies,” Holm pointed out with a dark laugh.

  “That is something,” Diane murmured, her eyes widening.

  Sometimes I felt like this case was some kind of strange dream, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if Diane—and everyone else, for that matter—felt similarly.

  “So, the ship can’t have been that old,” I reasoned. “They had to have the forethought to put the detonator in there, and I doubt they just go around doing that to all of their ships.”

  “So why did it look so old and creepy then?” Holm asked, his face scrunching up at the memory.

  Holm was right. That old ship was pretty strange, old and creaky, and almost full of cobwebs. It wasn’t run down, per se. In fact, it looked like a pretty sturdy ship before Solomon blew it sky-high. There was just something… unmistakably odd about it. Almost like we could sense the death and destruction, the perverse control of so many poor souls, that had taken place there.

  We knew for a fact, after all, that the ghost ship was where the cartel tested out their drug after their operation outgrew the small voodoo shop where it originally got started. Countless people no doubt died there, while still others were forced to do unspeakable things against their will while under the influence of the drug.

  “Maybe everything that went on there just… rubbed off on it,” I suggested with a shrug. I didn’t want to dwell too much on the ghost ship, considering what had gone on there and how Holm and I had nearly gotten ourselves killed in the pursuit of it.

  “I guess,” Holm said, though he still sounded skeptical.

  “So
, what about the rest of the wreckage?” I asked, turning my attention back to Diane. “Was there anything else? Anything that could lead us to Solomon?”

  “Not that the team could find,” she said, her tone regretful. “But they’re going to keep combing through what they found. The excavation team members have piles of stuff to take back to their respective offices. They’ll let us know as soon as they find anything useful.”

  “Weird that there wouldn’t be anything,” I muttered, crossing my arms as I pondered this. “You would think that there would be some kind of evidence about where Solomon could be hiding. The way he told it, he practically lived on that thing, after all.”

  “Yeah,” Holm chuckled. “Because he was so afraid of getting hurt that he got all his people to do all the dirty work for him while he hung around in that grimy old bathrobe all day.”

  Solomon had been an odd character. An unusually short man, he had been dressed only in a silk bathrobe when we met him, and he didn’t seem particularly adept at using firearms or at anything other than ordering bigger men around, really.

  “That is a good point,” I said, leaning forward on my desk and gesturing in Holm’s direction. “Solomon claimed that he was the one who killed Jake Wallace, but I doubt he’d left that ship for more than a week before we ran into him. None of the Haitians or Dominican border patrol officers we interviewed said anything about him, and he’s kind of hard to miss. And the idea that he would run after Wallace and shoot him to death so brutally, especially when Wallace was putting up a pretty good fight himself… it just doesn’t make much sense.”

  This had been bothering me for a while, but even though Jake Wallace’s murder was the reason Holm and I went down to Haiti in the first place, it was far from our focus after we realized what we were dealing with when it came to this new drug.

  Wallace was also known as Abel, a street dealer originally from Florida who had since skipped parole and relocated to New Orleans. There, he connected the Haitian cartel with Daryl Williams and Clifton Beck, high-ranking gangbangers in the city. But Wallace had gotten greedy, tried to take more than his fair share of product, and been killed down in Haiti, where Alejandra and the Dominican border patrol found his mangled body and called us.