1.

On a warm breezy day in early March, Bruce was sitting at his desk and enjoying his coffee as he opened the daily mail for the store, something he still insisted on doing after almost twenty-four years. He also insisted on opening each of the countless boxes of new books that arrived three times a week. He loved the smell and feel of each new book, and he especially enjoyed finding the perfect place on the shelves for each one. And he habitually boxed up all the unsold books and sent them back to the publishers as returns, acts of defeat that still depressed him.

A plain envelope, light lemon yellow in color, was addressed to him at Bay Books on Main Street in Santa Rosa. The address was typed in all-caps on a label, and there was nothing for the return. It was postmarked in Amarillo, and at first glance it looked like nothing but junk mail, and he almost tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he opened it. On a plain yellow sheet of paper the sender had typed:

 

THE LAST PERSON I TALKED TO ABOUT THIS WAS NELSON AND WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM. DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD HAVE A CONVERSATION?

Attached to it was a yellow index card with the message: Crazy Ghost is a chat room for anonymous mail. Costs $20 for a month, credit card. The address there is: 3838Bevel.

Bruce placed the letter and the card on his desk, took his coffee cup and went upstairs to the café and rinsed it out. He dried it, poured another cup, stared out the window, spoke to no one because the place was deserted, and went back to his office. He went online, couldn’t find anything, and walked to the front cashier and asked a twenty-year-old tattooed part-timer about the site. In less than three minutes the kid, without looking up from his screen, said, “It looks legit. One of the private chat rooms from overseas, either Singapore or the Ukraine, there are a bunch of them, and they burn the messages five to fifteen minutes or so after they’re put up. Twenty bucks a month.”

“Would you use it?” Bruce asked.

“You don’t pay me enough.”

“Ha ha. In other words, what do you do when you want complete privacy?”

“I use sign language. Seriously, I assume nothing is private on the Internet so I post only what I don’t care about. Texting is a bit more private.”

“But you wouldn’t be afraid of this?”

“Probably not. You laundering money again?”

“Ha ha.” This, from a twenty-year-old kid. No respect.

Bruce went to the site, paid with a credit card, and said hello to 3838Bevel.

Fifteen minutes passed, there was no answer, and his message vanished. He waited half an hour and tried again with the same result. With meaningful work now impossible, he puttered around his First Editions Room and tried to appear busy. He got a response on his third attempt.

Bruce stared at the screen until the entries faded. When it dawned on him that they were indeed gone forever, he scribbled down as much as he could remember. He left the store and walked to a wine bar where he ordered a seltzer water and pretended to read a magazine. He decided he would not tell Noelle until later. It could be a significant moment in the Nelson mystery, or not.

No, it had to be significant.

Little progress was made the following day during their second exchange. Bruce asked:

Bruce tried to print the exchange but the site wouldn’t allow it. He quickly scribbled down the words.

The following day, Bevel was a no-show. Same for the day after. Bruce did not want to alarm Noelle, so he didn’t tell her.

2.

Two days later, Bruce flew to Washington Dulles and went to his hotel room near the airport. Three hours later, Nick Sutton arrived by car and brought a girl with him, which Bruce had not anticipated. Nick assured him she would not get in the way and had family in the area.

After a leisurely semester abroad in Venice, Nick was drifting through his final weeks at Wake Forest and claimed to be in a funk at the prospect of leaving college. Bruce had little sympathy and told the kid it was time to get off his ass and find a real job, not the usual summertime bookstore gig where he split his time between reading crime novels and stalking college girls on the beach. Nick wanted to write fiction for a living and do it the old-fashioned way, with a big advance that allowed him to work at a leisurely pace of a few pages a day before long lunches and plenty of booze. His dream was to become a famous writer and hell-raiser at a young age, much in the tradition of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, though he planned to put aside literary aspirations and write mysteries that would sell. Bruce thought he had talent but was already worried about his work ethic.

They quickly retired to the hotel bar and ordered sandwiches, without the girl. Bruce summarized the developments in the state’s investigation, of which there were few, and described his own efforts to solve the crime with Alpha North Solutions. Nick loved the idea of hiring a secretive security outfit to handle an investigation that the police were in the process of botching.

Bruce wanted him in the room because, so far, his instincts had been near-perfect. And because he was only twenty-one, he was far tech-savvier than Bruce could ever hope to be.

Bruce showed him the transcript of the two exchanges with 3838Bevel.

“A huge step in the right direction,” Nick said with a satisfied smile. “This is our guy, the snitch who knows it all and contacted Nelson with the goods. Beautiful.”

“But he’s gone silent. How do we get him back in the loop?”

“Money. That was his motivation to begin with. How much did you get for the novel?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“Has that been reported?”

“No, but the sale has. Bevel certainly knows there’s a book deal.”

“And Bevel wants the cut that Nelson promised. He’s not going away, but he’s also afraid of his shadow.”

“So what’s our next move?”

“We wait. He’ll contact you because he needs you, not the other way around. Your goal is to solve Nelson’s murder. If you fail, your life goes on unchanged. He ain’t your brother. But Bevel here wants the money Nelson promised. For him it’s a definite game changer.”

3.

Promptly at nine Friday morning, Bruce and Nick entered the nameless mirrored tower where Alpha North Solutions hid itself. Lindsey Wheat met them at the elevator and Bruce introduced Nick, who drew a look with his faded jeans, battered sneakers, colorful T-shirt, and oversized sports coat with tattered elbow patches.

“Nick here was a friend of Nelson’s and was with me when we discovered his body,” Bruce said, almost apologetically, though he didn’t care if she approved or not. He was paying her.

They followed her to her office, with Nick soaking up all of the surroundings, what little there were. The interior designer who outfitted the place had apparently been ordered to avoid all color and warmth.

They gathered around a small conference table and prepared their coffees. Bruce cared little for chitchat, and when Lindsey asked Nick for his plans after college, Bruce said, “Look, let’s skip the preliminaries. You have news. I have news. Let’s get on with it.”

She smiled and said, “Indeed.” Then she picked up a report, adjusted her reading glasses, and began, “We infiltrated three nursing homes in rural Kentucky. One owned by Fishback, one by Grattin, one by Pack Line Retirement. As you know, Fishback and Grattin are privately owned and have deplorable compliance histories. Pack Line is the worst of the publics. More about them later. We started in Flora, Kentucky, a backwater little town of three thousand, and quickly managed to sign up a couple of employees. The first was Vera Stark at Glinn Valley, the Fishback facility. I handled Vera myself and slowly brought her along. She provided the names of the advanced dementia patients, the nonresponsive ones, more commonly referred to by staff as ‘Nons,’ as I have learned, along with several other nonflattering nicknames. After she gave us the names, I convinced her to research the types of formula and meds that are tube-fed to the patients. Because the place is perpetually understaffed, Vera began volunteering to handle the feedings, something that is not unusual. The syringes are usually loaded in the pharmacy and given to the staff on duty, but security is not tight. Rules and procedures are not always followed. She lifted a new syringe, brought it to me, and I ordered a box of the same. We loaded a substitute with the same formula and Vera agreed to swap it with a real one. Over the course of two weeks, she made about three dozen swaps from four Nons, giving us plenty of samples to analyze. The bottom line is that there is nothing suspicious being administered to these patients, not at Glinn Valley. As far as Vera could tell, the meds are always given with the feedings, three or four times a day. She also noted that the Nons receive much better care than the other patients. Plenty of calories and water, cleaner beds, hourly turnings, and so on. Gotta keep ’em alive, you know.

“Meanwhile, a colleague named Jumper was handling a young lady named Brittany Bolton, an orderly at Serenity Home, a Grattin facility across town. Brittany’s story became far more complicated because she planned to be a star witness in an abuse case. Seems she saw one of her coworkers raping a young lady who’s been brain-dead for a long time. Brittany claimed the girl was pregnant and she was probably right. Brittany did the same syringe swap and gave us over forty samples from seven different patients. Our lab technicians here in D.C. found the usual concoction of various formulas and meds for blood pressure, diabetes, dementia, blood clotting, blood thinner, blood thickener, pretty much the entire menu. Plus some vitamins. And then they found something they could not identify. A mysterious ingredient that was neither food nor vitamin. And it appeared in all forty samples Brittany lifted from Serenity. Our scientists ran test after test but got nowhere. So Jumper went back to Brittany and said we needed more, we needed to get inside the pharmacy.

“This would take time. I moved on to the third facility, a Pack Line Retirement home in an even more rural area about an hour from Flora. I made contact with a twenty-year-old newlywed father with a kid, working for thirteen dollars an hour. Because Pack Line is a public company its pay scale is slightly better. He needed cash and took the deal. We eventually got samples from five Nons, and all checked out. Nothing suspicious.

“Back to Brittany. She volunteered to work double shifts so she would be on the floor late at night. We gave her a list of every medication and vitamin that the labs had identified so far, and she memorized it. She already knew most of the meds anyway. Without creating suspicion, she managed to learn her way around the pharmacy and realized that she could leave with certain over-the-counter items—aspirin, cough drops, Band-Aids, and so on—almost any time she wanted. Because of staffing issues, she told her supervisor that she was willing to learn how to handle the food and meds for the feedings. Eventually, she walked out with a jar of something called vitamin E3, a generic-looking capsule that could pass for almost any supplement. Don’t know how much you know about vitamins but there is no such thing as E3. It sent off alarms in the lab and went through every possible test. The bottom line is that it’s an obscure drug called Flaxacill, one that’s never been on the market. It’s never been approved anywhere because no one has tried to get it approved. The story is that it was accidentally created as some by-product in a Chinese lab twenty years ago and was tested on a few human guinea pigs over there. It was dropped immediately when they realized that the drug causes vomiting and blindness.”

“That would pose a challenge for marketing, even for a drug company,” Bruce quipped, but it fell flat.

“Apparently it’s an easy drug to make and is produced only on demand.”

“So what does the drug do?” Bruce asked.

“Keeps the heart beating, barely, but only in people who are practically brain-dead anyway. It stimulates the medulla, the lower half of the brain stem that connects to the spinal cord and controls our involuntary functions like breathing, heart rate, swallowing, blood pressure. Pretty important little area.”

Nick added, “It also causes vomiting, which explains that side effect.”

“Correct.”

“And no one knows the patients are blind, because they can’t open their eyes, right?” Bruce added.

“Exactly.”

Nick said, “So Nelson was on to something.”

“He certainly was. He knew about this drug, and the only way he could have possibly learned of its existence was through an informant, someone with deep connections at Grattin.”

“Thought so,” Nick said, almost under his breath. He shot a quick smug smile at Bruce, who could only shake his head.

“And what happened to Brittany?” Bruce asked.

Lindsey slowly took a sip of coffee while staring at Bruce. “Do you know what happened?”

“Yes, I do, and the question is whether you planned to tell me.”

“Yes, I was going to tell you. She’s dead.”

“Opioid overdose, according to the newspaper over in Kentucky. You believe that?”

“No, not really. It got real complicated and it’s far from over. We’re done, but the plot thickens. Evidently there was a surveillance camera in the pharmacy that Brittany did not notice. She was seen lifting the vitamin E3 along with other medications. Maybe pain pills, maybe not. We really don’t know. They kept a fair amount of the heavy stuff in the pharmacy but usually under lock and key. If Brittany lifted the opioids, we didn’t know about it. There are a few cameras around the facility but hardly anyone to monitor them. A colleague named Gerrard, a real character, had access to the cameras and he had noticed Brittany’s new and sudden interest in the pharmacy. It appears that Gerrard doesn’t miss much. He kept the footage for future extortion. He and Brittany despised each other. Not long afterward, she caught him in the room with the pregnant patient and they had a huge fight. She accused him of getting the girl pregnant and threatened to tell a lawyer. He accused her of stealing meds and said he had the video to prove it. He showed the video to the director and Brittany was fired on the spot. Two days later, the pregnant girl died ‘of complications.’ Brittany was certain that Gerrard juiced her with a mix of drugs. Her body was immediately sent to her mother in Ohio and buried quickly. The lawsuit was gone. The company then knew that Brittany had lifted some E3, although at the time our lab work wasn’t finished and we didn’t know about the drug. Neither did Brittany. Jumper suggested that she leave town for a spell and we even offered to send her away. She was thinking about this when she died.”

“And, she died how?”