A palpable, sweeping darkness had crept into his heart, a new personality that relished pain, that sought to make others suffer, that took him to places he never would have allowed himself to go before the metamorphosis in his soul took place.
And now, finally, he would avenge Tatiana’s death.
It had to do with the drug shipment, yes, but it went a lot deeper than that.
The suicides would only be the beginning.
Ultimately, it had to do with striking back at Mother Russia for training, honing, creating the man who had killed his wife.
The Valkyrie.
The harbinger, the courier of death.
He returned to his suite, drew the shades shut, and used his encrypted, untraceable cell to reach his contact from the Chechen Republic to tell him the drugs were ready to be shipped to the States.
39
For reasons she didn’t tell me, Lien-hua asked me not to come by until after the doctors had put the cast on her leg at eleven, so after dropping Tessa off at school and making sure the public safety officer had her schedule for the day, I’d gone to my office in the classroom building at Quantico and set to work.
With notes from Agent Hammet’s recently posted interviews with the people who were friends and family with Basque’s previous victims in the DC area, and my own investigation into their travel patterns, I was able to refine the representations of their cognitive maps.
I compared the background checks that the team had done yesterday with what I already knew, adding the location where Basque had purchased the lock and taking a more careful look at Lien-hua’s awareness space.
I’d hoped the location from which Basque had stolen the car might shed some light on what we were looking at, but it didn’t do much, other than give me one more location to add to the geoprofile.
After updating the online case files with what I had, I turned to the other front burner.
Corey Wellington’s suicide.
Obviously, I couldn’t visit the scene myself today, so I called the Atlanta Police Department and convinced them to send an officer there to be my eyes. Thankfully, they sent the man who’d been the first one to arrive yesterday when Corey’s body was discovered.
While I waited for him to get there, I ran through what we knew.
Corey hadn’t shown up for work on Thursday or Friday and didn’t call in sick. When he didn’t answer texts over the weekend or come to the office yesterday, one of his friends went to his house, found it locked, and went around back. He saw Corey’s body through the living room window.
Margaret’s brother hadn’t left a suicide note, hadn’t texted or e-mailed anyone telling them what he was going to do.
He hadn’t updated his will or, as far as we could tell, set his affairs in order. There was no sign of forced entry.
Now, when the officer, a somewhat impatient man in his early twenties named Dustin Wilhoit, arrived at the scene, we started a video chat. I asked him about something that hadn’t appeared in the police report: if there were any pills found near the body.
“No, sir. We checked.”
Based on what Margaret had told me, Corey was taking depression medicine and I wanted to know what it was. “Corey was taking prescription meds. Look through the rest of the house. The bathroom medicine cabinet, the kitchen cupboards maybe, find the pills.”
While he searched, I contacted Angela Knight, who was at home when I reached her. I asked her to do some checking through Corey’s credit card records to see what pharmacy he used. “I’m not at work,” she objected.
“You can remotely log into Lacey, can’t you? It should only take a few minutes.”
It took three.
Putting through a call to the pharmacy, I learned that Corey took Calydrole, which was prescribed to people who’d attempted or contemplated suicide. Then I phoned the waste management company to find out when they picked up the garbage and recyclables, just in case my gut instincts, which I don’t put much faith in, happened to be right.
Wilhoit returned my call and told me that he hadn’t found anything.
“No prescription meds in the whole house?”
“No, sir.” He sounded ready to be done with this.
“I want you to check the garbage cans for me.”
A pause. “Sir?”
“Look for any empty bottles or blister packs.”
“Really, are you sure that’s necessary?”
“I’m not sure what’s necessary, apart from being thorough. Take a look for me.”
He didn’t agree right away. “Alright.”
It took him a few minutes, but then he got back to me. “There’s an empty foil packet in the trash can in his bathroom.”
“Is the name of the drug imprinted on it?”
“Yeah. Calydrole.” He told me the lot number printed on the back of the packet.
“How many pills did it contain?”
“Fourteen.”
So, likely two weeks’ worth, or perhaps one, depending on how many Corey took each day.
A thought began to form in my mind.
“In the crime scene reports, the photo of the bathroom shows the medicine cabinet door open. Was it open when you arrived?”
“It must have been.”
“Don’t tell me it must have been. Tell me if it was.”
A pause. “It was.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I closed it myself. Look, what does it matter if it was open or closed?”
“Everything matters. Get it dusted for prints.”
“This was a suicide, Agent Bowers.”
“Then there shouldn’t be any anomalous prints there to slow things down when you run them through the system.”
He didn’t try to hide his sigh. “Alright. Sir. We’ll dust for prints.”
I ended the call, contacted the pharmacy again, and the pharmacist told me that Corey was prescribed four hundred milligrams per day of the drug. “The ones in the packets he bought were two-hundred-milligram pills.”
“Did you just say packets?”
“Yeah, he bought a month’s worth when he came in here on…” He paused and I pictured him pulling up the records. “It looks like March twenty-seventh. Right at five o’clock. Got here just before we closed.”
“At what time of day do people take Calydrole?”
“In the morning.”
I did the math in my head. “Thanks.”
One more call, this one to PTPharmaceuticals, the makers of Calydrole, to have them run the lot number on the back of the blister pack. They told me they’d call me back.
Margaret had been concerned about the meds, so I thought at this point I should probably fill her in. Rather than go through the Bureau’s switchboard I tried her cell.
She jumped right in. “What do we know?”
“The drugs Corey was taking for depression are used to reduce or quell suicidal thoughts, but they weren’t there.”
“What do you mean, they weren’t there?”
“There was an empty packet that held a week’s worth of meds, but no prescription pills were in the house. And, by all indications, the medicine cabinet was open when the police arrived.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s hard to say, exactly. The garbage is picked up every Friday and he hadn’t taken his out yet. I contacted his pharmacy and they told me he’d purchased enough for the next month on Wednesday, March twenty-seventh.”
She thought that through. “So if he took one the next day after he bought them and had the last one on the day before he died, then he took a week’s worth.”
“Yes.”