“Tell me about Taylor Cole,” Maggie said and watched Amanda’s mouth drop open. “She was a friend of yours, right?”
Maggie didn’t take her eyes off Amanda but she could see Mrs. Griffin half sit, half lean on the arm of a Queen Anne chair behind her.
“Yeah, I guess so.” The girl pretended to shake off her surprise.
“You were with her when she jumped off the bridge?”
“I wasn’t the only one.”
“She didn’t jump,” Mrs. Griffin was quick to add. “It was an accident.”
“I know about the salvia,” Maggie said, letting that sink in along with Mrs. Griffin who now sank into a chair.
“I bet Dawson squealed, right?” Amanda said with a disgusted smirk.
“Taylor was your best friend until she graduated last spring.” Maggie was careful not to say what she really believed, that Amanda felt like Taylor was leaving her behind, just like Johnny would do next year when he left to play football for a college possibly as far off as Florida or California.
Amanda shoved her plate away and Maggie knew her window of opportunity had just closed.
“Taylor didn’t slip and fall off the bridge, did she? You were all flying high on salvia and someone dared her to jump.”
“This is quite enough,” Mrs. Griffin said, standing again though a bit wobbly. She scrambled in front of her daughter as if somehow protecting her. “Amanda, you do not have to talk about this. Agent O’Dell, you must leave.”
Maggie didn’t argue. But as she got up she noticed Amanda’s forearm. The red marks had started to fade into a bluish-purple bruise.
“I’m not sure if your daughter knows who attacked them the other night,” Maggie told Mrs. Griffin while she kept her eyes on Amanda. “I do know she’s not telling you everything she does know. After I leave, you might want to ask her why she bit herself and pretended it was someone else.”
Amanda’s startled look confirmed Maggie’s guess.
Back on the road, Maggie realized it was all beginning to make sense. Amanda was the one who orchestrated the drug parties. It was her way of keeping control over the friends she invited into her group. But when they threatened to leave she found a way to get back at them.
Maggie couldn’t be sure that Amanda talked Johnny into committing suicide but the texts that she had read explained the pattern of their relationship. Had Amanda convinced him his future was over? That he would be stuck forever in the Nebraska Sandhills with her? Amanda probably didn’t think the idea would drive Johnny to kill himself. Or did she?
When Dawson asked about Amanda after Maggie told him Johnny was dead, Maggie assumed he was concerned about the girl—maybe because he had a little bit of a crush on her. But now Maggie realized Dawson was scared when he asked, not concerned. He had wanted to know whether or not he still had to worry about Amanda’s wrath. As for Courtney and Nikki? Maggie hadn’t quite figured that out yet.
Nor had she figured out who had attacked the teenagers in the forest on Thursday night. Perhaps it wasn’t related. But she wondered why Sheriff Frank Skylar chose to leave out the fact that Mike Griffin was a longtime friend when he conducted his interview of the man’s stepdaughter. And did he manipulate the case of Taylor Cole to further protect Amanda?
Frank Skylar was also ex-military. If a laser stun gun like Donny or Platt described was used on these kids, it would have been obtained by someone who had military ties. Maybe it was a long shot to think Skylar had something to do with the attacks. But it did make Maggie wonder, what else was Sheriff Skylar not telling her?
FIFTY-FOUR
CHICAGO
O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Platt and Bix didn’t talk the entire trip from the north side of Chicago to O’Hare. They were stunned, exhausted, overwhelmed. Now, tucked away in the midst of a crowd of travelers, they finally felt safe.
Bix listened to his messages. Made a few calls. Platt bought a large coffee. He thought about getting something to eat but the smell of raw beef lingered in his nostrils.
Bix closed his phone and released a long breath, as if he had been holding it all day.
“There’s a reason no one could identify this strain of salmonella,” he said, shaking his head and rubbing his temples. “It changes.”
“You said it might be a mutated strain,” Platt said.
“No, I mean it changes once it’s inside the human body. Fifteen of the Norfolk victims that were released as okay two days ago are back in the hospital.”
“Maybe it takes longer to leave the body in some victims.”
“But they’re telling me that six days later the bacteria itself looks different than it did on day four.”
“Different, how?”
“Stronger. More resilient. It’s like it’s mutated to better survive and invade its new environment. It’s clinging on to the wall of the intestines.”
“It’s not unusual to need some antibiotics with salmonella infection, especially if it hangs on or spreads.”
“That’s what they thought. So far, not much of a response.”
“Antibiotic resistant?”
“Big-time.”
“We’ll need to come up with a cocktail of antibiotics.”
“What if it’s something they developed?” Bix asked in almost a whisper. “Tell me why that guy, Tegan, was so excited to see someone from USAMRIID. And what projects from the 1970s was he talking about?”
Philip Tegan had ended up giving them a short tour after realizing the two men he had allowed inside his facility might actually not be aware of all the classified work done in the laboratories despite their impressive credentials. He told them about the different hybrid crops they had been able to genetically engineer and he showed them—in excruciating detail—how they were able to do that. He informed them that 77 percent of soybeans are genetically engineered as is 85 percent of corn in the United States. The biotech crops decrease the use of pesticide, require less water, and reduce carbon that normally is released into the atmosphere. All good things for our environment.
When a skeptical Bix asked if it’s healthy, Tegan reassured him that, of course, it was and that these crops were fed only to animals—not used for human consumption.
China, he told them, had created a new corn that contained an enzyme that makes pigs better able to digest the nutrient phosphorus, which would decrease the amount in their excrement. Phosphorus, he went on to explain, was the major polluter of waterways. “Isn’t that amazing?”
But when Bix asked what happened to people when they ate the pork that ate the special corn, Tegan just laughed. “We’ll have to wait and see, huh?”
Platt knew about the technology. He also knew Tegan’s tour didn’t include any of the labs they had seen soldiers guarding or those where they had seen an armored truck leaving. They wouldn’t see those. At least not on this visit.
“So what was USAMRIID doing back in the 1970s?” Bix asked when Platt hesitated too long.
“During the Cold War, when there was a race to create ultimate weapons—before Russia and the United States signed a treaty agreeing to stop—USAMRIID had a program to develop bioweapons.”
“Like mustard gas?”
“Like mustard gas. And anthrax. Other viruses that we might be able to launch on an entire population.”
“Jesus!” Bix sputtered. “And now they’re going to fucking do it with food?”
They sat side by side, staring straight ahead, waiting for their flight back to D.C. to be called.
