“There you go.” The keep put the beer down on the table. “Care for anything to eat? We’ve got a great special today. Chicken Tenders in Mustard Sorrel Sauce.”
“Hmm. That sounds wonderful.” The offer sounded tempting. A good sorrel sauce would make any meat come alive.
Any meat.
“Thanks,” the man said, “but to tell you the truth, I’m not that hungry now. I think maybe I’ll try to whip that up myself later, when I have more of an appetite.”
««—»»
“Take a look.”
Jan Beck handed Helen a short, tractor-fed sheet of multi-colored graphical printing paper. What was printed on it might as well have been Druidic glyphs.
3 - [-3 - (-succinate-2) - 4 -(chloro- N -(2-chloroethyl)- C5H11C12. -(4-sulph—HN2)-0
“What’s this?” Helen asked. “It looks like something kicked out by the SEM. Some drug?”
“It’s a mole-chain, a chemical designation,” Jan Beck replied. “The last leg of my tox screen of Arlinger. And, no, it’s not from an SEM. Christ, scanning-electron microscopes are thirty years old. The only people who use SEMs these days are flunky novelists who don’t do their research. We haven’t used ours in years. This is from an AFM—that’s Atomic Force Microscope. They’re state of the art and brand new.” Beck rested a hand on a respectably sized machine to her right, with a face plate that read: TopoMetrix. “It’s ten times faster and ten times smaller than an SEM.”
“And ten times more expensive, I suppose?”
“Well, no, actually it’s only about twice as expensive. You’re looking at about four hundred grand here. But if you want fast results, like we do, we pay.”
We? Helen wondered. Yeah, that’s right—the taxpayers. “So why did you page me? What’s this all about?”
“That mole chain came from the tox screen I was just telling you about,” Beck went on.
“A chemical analysis of Arlinger’s blood?”
Beck gave a nod. “It’s a paralytic agent by the trade name of succinicholine sulphate. This guy ingested a massive dose shortly before death.”
“You’re telling me that this stuff is what killed him?”
“No, no, when I say massive dose I don’t mean massive enough to kill him. Point-zero-three would be enough to kill, not much but from what I can tell, it was orally administered, probably put him under in about twenty minutes. My read tells me it was a dose of approximately 0.01 mgs per deciliter.”
A…paralytic agent? “In other words, Arlinger was paralyzed before he was murdered?”
“That’s a fact.”
Helen couldn’t help but acknowledge the impact of this. “But Dahmer did the same thing too, didn’t he? Back in 90?”
“Yes and no. He frequently drugged his victims, but not with anything like this.”
“Barbiturates,” Helen said, remembering.
“Right, street barbiturates to be exact. Quaaludes, Valium, and other benzodaizepam off-shoots. He bought them from pushers on the street, in the Milwaukee dope districts.”
The last thing Helen needed was another m.o. similarity, and with this, she didn’t see much of a difference. “Valium or Quaaludes or this stuff? What’s the difference?”
“That’s where you lucked out. The dissimilarity is just too apparent. Succinicholine sulphate isn’t something you buy from a pusher on the street; it has absolutely no use as a recreational narcotic.”
“Then—” Helen wondered. “Where did the P Street killer get this…succinicholine sulphate?”
“Only two places possible: a drug manufacturer or a—”
“A hospital?”
“Right,” Beck assented. “SS doesn’t produce any kind of a high, it merely paralyzes the skeletal musculature. And that would explain why Arlinger’s body showed no signs of struggle. He couldn’t struggle, not with a cardiovascular system full of this stuff. What it all boils down to, Captain, is that your man knocked his victim out, just like Dahmer did, but with the least likely and the least accessible substance. The only place you’ll find a lot of SS are in ambulances and ERs. They use the stuff for sudden seizure traumas.”
But Helen, based on what she’d just been told, was already contemplating the worst implication. “Paralyzes the skeletal musculature… You mean—”
“What I mean, Captain, is that Arlinger couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even flinch. But one thing he could do was feel. It’s the ultimate torture. Arlinger felt everything while the killer was cutting on him.”
Helen blanched.
Everything, she thought. Everything…
“And there was nothing he could do about it,” Beck finished, “except lie there and take it till he died.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER TWELVE
Olsher did a double-take passing her office, then, squinting, stuck his big head in. “Jesus, Helen, it’s going on midnight. I saw you in here this morning at—what?—eight?”
“Seven,” Helen corrected, glancing up from her desk. And I’m not even on the clock.
“You ought to go home, get some rest.”
“So should you,” she suggested. “You’ve been working just as long as I have.”
“Can’t sleep,” the deputy chief grumbled.
“Fifty cups of coffee a day, it’s no wonder.” She noticed a tabloid under his arm, The Star. GOVERNMENT ADMITS: DAHMER WAS PART ALIEN! Helen just shook her head.
“Hey, coffee’s the only thing that makes me happy. And how can I sleep when I gotta worry about what the press is going to say about us tomorrow? Tait really slapped it to you in the Tribune.”
“I heard. But I got more important things to worry about than the worst newspaper in the city.” Then she explained Jan Beck’s tox screen of the blood of Stewart K. Arlinger, and the dose of succinicholine sulphate.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Olsher perked up. “Nothing like the run of the mill street tranks Dahmer used.”
“That’s not how the papers’ll see it,” Helen posited. “They’ll only see what they want to see. Even though this is a completely dissimilar drug, they’ll play it as another similarity simply because Arlinger was drugged before his murder. And that damn letter is still killing us.”
“So what are you working on now?”
“Trying to get a line on where this succinicholine came from. You can’t buy it on the street—it has no street value. According to Beck, the only places are emergency rooms and ambulances, and the manufacturer, of course, but that’s in Newark, New Jersey, and pharmaceutical manufacturers all have security like Fort Knox.”
“But still, it’s got to be some sort of theft.”
“Sure.”
Olsher, obviously weary but trying not to show it, leaned against the office doorway. “So where do you go from there?”
“All clinical pharmaceuticals have a federal control number, and whenever they’re stolen or found missing in inventory, it has to be reported to NCIC and also FDA. And the only way hospitals can make a report like that in the first place is through the state police MAC. So that’s what I’m doing now.” Helen’s hand bid her computer CRT. “Unfortunately, at this hour, only half the terminals are on line. It’ll take me some time, in other words.”
“Well, just make sure you don’t drop dead from sleep deprivation. If you start to burn out, go home. It can wait till tomorrow.”