forest? Redneck with all the trailers?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He says you were going to use your abilities as a chemical engineer to create a new meth recipe. He said you tried to get him to sell Ecstasy instead. He gave us the Ecstasy tabs you gave him.”
Jason was nodding slowly in agreement with everything Stallings said. “I really hadn’t started on his meth recipe. I don’t think meth is good for all of the rednecks west of Jacksonville. X is much safer.”
“Tell me about the X. Who did you sell it to?” Stallings couldn’t control his impatience to know which of the suspects was a client of the chemical engineer.
“I sold to a whole bunch of people. Mostly the people I met in bars. It’s not like I handed it out like candy. I sold bigger lots so I only had to deal with twenty people or so. Nothing serious, I liked the extra income.”
“You didn’t make enough from your regular job?”
“I had a lot of expenses.”
“Like what?”
Jason just looked around at the kitchen.
Stallings said, “You finance Miss Brison’s life here, don’t you?”
“Everything was for her. I started making the X as a way to get her off heroin. Then she got hooked on the X. So I had to start making special batches for her that were less and less potent. Now I’ve got her almost back to reality.”
From the other side of the kitchen, Patty said, “That explains why the Ecstasy tab Tony sent to the lab was so much weaker than the others.”
Jason twisted in his seat, nodding. “Exactly. She’s hardly even noticed, and soon she’ll be able to deal with the world drug-free.”
The young chemical engineer had answered a lot of questions in Stallings’s mind, but he still had the most important one yet to ask. “Did you ever sell any Ecstasy to a guy named Chad Palmer or Gary Lauer?” Stallings truly didn’t know if he wanted Palmer to be the man or Lauer.
Jason scratched his head, concentrating hard on the question. He looked back at Stallings and said, “Dude, I don’t keep track of names. I’m a strictly first-name-and-short-description kind of guy. Like Joe, the truck driver, or Tom, the garbageman.”
“Then it would be Chad, the pharmaceutical rep, or Gary, the cop.”
Jason perked up and said, “A cop? I sold to an undercover cop?”
“Don’t worry about that. All I need is information. Do either of those guys sound familiar? They’re both about your age, athletic, dark hair.”
Slowly Jason shook his head. “I think a pharmaceutical rep would have access to a lot better shit than my Ecstasy. And I’d know if I was dealing with a cop. I’m pretty smart that way.”
Stallings looked over at Patty, knowing they’d hit another dead end in the case. Now the question was what to do with the spacey adult runaway.
Fifty
It was dawn, and Patty Levine felt herself dozing in a comfortable chair in the corner of the hotel room where they’d stashed Jason Ferrell for the night. It was Sergeant Zuni’s idea to keep track of the wily chemical engineer without booking him in case narcotics could use him as a snitch. It was her background in narcotics that gave her the idea, and it seemed reasonable last night. Patty had volunteered to take the first shift of watching him because she knew she wouldn’t sleep much anyway.
Listening to the lovesick chemical engineer talk about how he changed his whole life to help Marie Brison, including making his own Ecstasy with decreasing potency, had brought Patty’s own drug use into the light. She always had some excuse to keep using her regular regimen of Xanax, painkillers, and Ambien. For several years she’d used the excuse of being a female in a male-dominated profession as a way to keep taking the anxiety drug. But she knew she was more capable than most cops and more physical than most cops. Now she had to analyze why she should keep taking the Xanax.
The Ambien was a more obvious issue. She couldn’t sleep at night. The fact that she stayed awake the entire night while Jason Ferrell snored on the bed across the room showed that her insomnia was still going strong. Sure, she nodded off, but it was only for a few minutes.
The final leg of her pharmaceutical trinity was the various painkillers she’d been prescribed for numerous injuries and strains she had received while involved in competitive gymnastics. Now she wasn’t sure the scholarship to the University of Florida had been worth the years of discomfort. This seemed to be the easiest habit to kick of the three kinds of drugs she took. Today would be her test. She would tough out any pain she felt. It didn’t matter if her hip throbbed like a bass speaker at a rap concert or her back radiated pain all day. She would not pop a Vicodin or Percocet no matter how badly the pain affected her.
Her experience in police work taught her not to try to kick all three drugs at once. She’d focus on the pain pills first. Then deal with her anxiety and insomnia as her life started to adjust.
As close as Patty was to John Stallings and as serious as she was getting about Tony Mazzetti, she’d never told either of them anything about her drug use. She was pretty sure neither of them had any idea.
Jason stirred and sat up quickly in the bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when they found him. He stared at Patty for a moment, shook his head, and blinked his eyes. “Where am I, jail?”
Patty had to smile. “Do you remember anything about last night?”
“I know you’re a cop named Patty, even if you don’t look like it. And you work with a scary guy named Stallings. I may do X at night, but it clears out pretty quick.”
“You ever wonder if you’re wasting your talent as a chemical engineer?”
“You mean by finding ways of getting rid of the Maxwell House waste products? Because I think I helped at least one person by making the Ecstasy.”
Patty shook her head. “We’ve got two dead girls with Ecstasy in their systems. One of them overdosed on it, and her heart exploded in her chest.”
The color drained out of Jason’s face. He clutched his stomach and scooted to the edge of the bed, looking over at Patty in the chair. “You think it was my Ecstasy that killed her? I never meant for anything like that to happen. That’s why I was making such weak tablets.” He paused, gathered his thoughts, and took several deep breaths. “What can I do to help? I have the recipe on my computer.”
“I don’t know what good the recipe will do. What we really needed was who you sold it to. And not just first names and job descriptions. Besides, you could only remember three or four clients last night.”
“But I have a full list on my computer.”
That caught Patty’s attention. “You really are more lucid this morning. Where’s your computer?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
The phone startled John Stallings first thing in the morning. He’d already tossed and turned most of the night, worried about Patty at the hotel room with Jason Ferrell. Not that he didn’t think his partner could handle herself- she was tougher than any cop he knew. He just hated when someone got stuck on a shitty detail.
He fumbled with his cell phone as he glanced at the clock and saw that it was seven in the morning. He popped it open and mumbled, “Stallings.”
Yvonne Zuni said, “John, there’s a possible break in the case. Meet me down at the PMB as quick as you can. Come up to the third floor.”
Stallings sat up in bed trying to clear his mind. “The third floor? Where on the third floor?”
“Internal Affairs. Gary Lauer is being questioned there right now, and we might have an opportunity to break him on the Allie Marsh case.”
“What’s he at IA for?”
“Apparently he got drunk last night, said it was all the pressure he was under, then got into a big fight with his girlfriend. The neighbors called the cops, but he’d already left her apartment.” There was silence on the line for a moment. Sergeant Zuni added, “A neighbor found the girlfriend this morning with her wrists slashed. She’s at the medical examiner’s now.”
“You think Gary Lauer tried to hide her death as a suicide?”
