"You damned little worm," we heard Maggie scream at the top of her lungs. "Don't say or do anything like that again, Paul, or I'll take your head off. Are you nuts? How long has Jilly been gone?"
"What do you know? You don't know anything. You like to play at doing a man's job, but you don't do it well. But as a woman, Maggie, you really suck. Maybe this is the ideal job for you. What are you, a dyke?"
We heard a crash. I sighed, opened the door, walked into the small foyer, and looked to the right, into the living room. There I saw Maggie straddling Paul, who was lying flat on his back in his black-and-white living room.
She had him by the neck, his head pressed against the floor.
Savich calmly walked over to her, grabbed her under her arms, and pulled her straight up. She turned on him, fists raised. He held her up by her armpits and said in that deep, smooth voice of his, "Not smart.
Don't do it."
"Enough, both of you," I said, and gave Paul a hand up. "Now, what's this all about? We could hear you screaming at each other from the front porch."
"He's a stupid prick," Maggie said. "Let me down, you jock. I'm the sheriff. I'll arrest you."
"I'm not a jock, ma'am. I'm a Special Agent, Dillon Savich, FBI."
"Oh," she said, and immediately went still. "I'm sorry. You're here for Mac, aren't you? I saw you at Charlie Duck's funeral but I was late and didn't have a chance to meet you."
"That's right. Can I put you down now?" "Please do. I won't hurt that little wimp." She looked over at Paul like she wanted to spit on him.
"Paul," I said, "go sit down. We need to talk. Maggie, you sit over in that chair. Either of you makes a move toward the other and Savich or I will flatten you. Well, Savich will for sure. My ribs are a bit on the sore side.
Got it?"
"I'm the" sheriff," Maggie said, tucking her blouse back in. "I'll do whatever the hell I want to."
"Fine," Savich said. "That's the spirit. What we'd really like is for you to sit down and tell us if you've heard anything about Mac's sister."
"Not a blessed thing," Maggie said, looking over at Paul. "I even spoke to Minton this morning, not something I was crazy about doing, but he didn't have anything new, just sputtered and whined about not knowing what you and Ms. Scott are up to. I told him that if it had been any of his business, you would have told him." She smiled. "He called me a bitch. Made my day. I'm leaving now. If I stay in the room any longer with this jackass, I'll lose it. Call me if you find out anything, Mac." She nodded. "Agent Savich, thank you for your generous help. I'm sure you'll let me know if you need anything."
"Wait a minute, Maggie, I'll walk you out," I said.
"He's a pathetic jerk," Maggie said in my direction as we walked out of the house.
"What did he say this time to make you blow up?"
"You won't believe it, Mac. He tried to get in my pants. Well, to get under my uniform so he could find my pants. The little jerk. It took me a while to get him off me, so I could beat the crap out of him."
"Why would he do that?"
"God knows. I've always thought he was weird."
"Okay, Maggie. We'll keep in touch."
I waited until she drove off, waving at me. When I came back into the living room, Savich was waiting.
"All right, Paul," he said as I came in, "tell us about the drug you've developed."
"Yes. We're real interested in that, Paul."
Paul just sat there, staring down at his hands that were clasped between his legs. "I don't have a damned thing to tell either of you. Go away."
"No, we're not going anywhere until you tell us about it."
Paul looked as if he wanted to fold in on himself. Again, I thought he looked scared. "Talk," I said.
He walked around the room a couple of times, pausing in front of one of the stark modern paintings. We waited until finally he turned back to us and said, "It's all experimental, Mac. It's doubtful anything will come of it, truth be told. You know the odds against developing successful drugs these days. The business of pharmaceutical research is astronomically expensive, demands incredible numbers of man-hours and highly specialized computer programs. And then there's the PDA to contend with."
He paused a moment and pulled at a loose thread on his tweed jacket. "I wanted to continue along a certain line of research. The people at VioTech deemed it too expensive to continue the research, not enough projected payback even if the drug could be perfected, and so they canceled it. They wanted Jilly and me to go into AIDS research. Our interests just don't lie there. When Alyssum Tarcher offered to finance us, we took him up on it."
"What exactly is the drug, Paul?" I asked. "It's a memory drug, nothing more than that." "I don't know what you mean by a memory drug," Savich said. "We know so little about the mind, about how memory even works. What does it do to the memory?"
"It's meant to take away the physical responses to bad memories when they surface. You see, the drug seems to be activated when there are sudden physical manifestations of distress-heightened adrenaline levels, rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils-things like that. Its purpose is to shut down the power of the memory by reducing the physical distress and substituting a sense of well-being.
"The benefits might be enormous in treating someone who has lived through something terrible, for example, soldiers surviving battles, or physical or sexual abuse as a child. Once the emotional baggage of the memory is dissipated, so is its physiological power."
I sat forward on the sofa, my hands clasped between my knees. Finally he was talking. I had to keep him going. "The physical reactions you're describing, Paul, aren't just prompted by a bad memory. They can happen with a whole lot of things, like fear, excitement, tension."
"True enough, but you see, the drug is meant to be given in a controlled setting in which the memory is repeatedly triggered. So the drug is focused."
"It sounds incredible," Savich said slowly. "But how can you continue research by yourself, in a home laboratory?"
"I was very close to success when I left VioTech, although none of the decision makers at VioTech agreed. It's just a matter of fine-tuning some of the drug's side chains."
"Would the drug be addictive?" I asked.
"Oh no," Paul said, shaking his head. "Oh no."
"What about military uses?" Savich asked. "After all, if you can lessen all the physical manifestations of distress, why, then you could give your soldiers a shot and produce a battalion of heroes."
"No, I won't ever have anything to do with the military."
Paul looked incredibly tired, his voice flat, as if he simply didn't care about anything anymore.
"When I asked you about this before," I said, "you just laughed it off as a fountain of youth drug. This is something else entirely."
"It doesn't matter. None of this has anything to do with Jilly's disappearance. It doesn't have anything to do with anything at all. Go away, Mac. I don't want to talk to either of you anymore. Please leave now."
"Oh?" I asked, an eyebrow up. "You just want to attack women who happen to wander into your house?"
"Maggie told you about it all wrong. She was coming on to me and when I decided to do something about it, she turned on me. A man gets horny, you know that. Maggie's nothing but a tease, Mac."
"Tell me where Jilly is, Paul."
"I don't know. If I did, I'd be with her."
"Look, Paul," I continued after a moment, "it's time to drop the pretense. Laura told me she's DEA, that she was undercover. They know about this drug. They know about Molinas. There were then two attempts on Laura's life after Jilly disappeared. Who ordered them, Paul? You? Tarcher? This arch criminal, Del Cabrizo? Tell us how Tarcher's involved. Tell us about John Molinas."