Chapter Seven
Sawyer
“What do you have for me, Ash?” I asked as soon as I was outside the door and making my way down the stairs.
To be honest, my immediate instinct was to put Ashley on speaker and let Riya hear the results of her tests. But that was the part of me that was more than professionally interested in the woman thinking that way. I needed to focus and get my head in the game.
That was why I headed outside.
“Well, it’s weird,” she said, and I could hear her flipping through pages.
“Ash, do I seem like the kind of man who likes to have to pry information out of people?”
“From what I hear about your time in the…”
“Don’t,” I warned, feeling myself stiffen.
“Right,” she said, understanding. “Well, her levels are… optimal.”
“What levels are we talking here?”
“All her vitamin levels. Bs, iron, calcium, D, C, E, zinc, iodine…”
“Yeah, babe, I get it. She’s been eating right.”
“No. There’s no way just eating right gets her levels to where they are. Even if she was eating organic and non-GMO, our soil is too depleted in nutrients for this. They’re literally perfect.”
“So she’s been taking vitamins.”
“Religiously.”
“Alright. Weird, but okay. Anything else?”
“The scrapes from under her fingernails gave us nothing. Literally nothing. There was nothing under there except a trace of white cotton.”
Again, weird.
Everyone has crap under their nails. Actually, if most people knew the kind of shit they had under their fingernails, they would be completely anal about scraping them.
So to have nothing under them was not only unusual; it was almost impossible.
“What else?”
“Well, when I did her exam, I saw needle marks in her…”
“What the fuck, Ash,” I interrupted, frustrated. “You see goddamn track marks on her and you don’t say shit to me? This woman is staying in my house.”
“If you would let me talk,” she said, unfazed by my outburst, “I would have said that they were too few and too precise for a junkie. But I ran a drug test anyway.”
“And…”
“And nothing. Not even a hint of alcohol or pot. She’s never touched drugs. That being said, I did find a couple other things in her blood that shouldn’t have been.”
“What the fuck can be in her blood if it’s not drugs?”
“Well, it is. In a way. Sawyer, I found a trace of pentobarbital in her system.”
“Pentobarbital?” I repeated, pausing in my pacing of the parking lot behind my building. “The shit they use in lethal injections?”
“Yeah,” she agreed, sounding equally baffled. “They use it to put down dogs too. And it can be used in emergency situations to stop seizures.”
“She has no history of seizures.”
“I mean… they can just happen sometimes. Especially as your hormones change. Which, I need to add, her hormones were nuts.”
“What, like she was going through a sex change or some shit?”
“Looked her over, Sawyer, she’s not going through a sex change. But her hormone levels are almost a thousand times what they should be.”
“What could cause that?”
“Honestly?” she asked, sounding frustrated. “I have no friggin’ idea.”
I reached up and raked a hand through my hair. “Well, that’s just fucking great.”
“Yeah, I mean… we have nothing really to go on. I mean, what? Someone pumped her full of vitamins and then tried to kill her with a lethal injection? While exposing her to something that spiked her hormones? It makes no sense.” She paused. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
I exhaled hard. “You never know what bit of information might be useful down the road. I have to do some digging personally. Maybe from there, some of this shit will start stacking up.”
“Good luck, Sawyer. If you need anything…”
“Thanks again, Ash,” I said, hanging up.
More confused than I had been before, I moved around the building and let myself into the office, going into my room and having to sit on my guest chair thanks to Slim, as I went over not only the files from Ashley but the ones from Barrett as well, writing down notes to questions I had or connections and leads I needed to look into.
There were more questions than answers and, well, that shit would not stand.
It wasn’t every day that I had a case that made no sense whatsoever.
“You got that pretty piece upstairs and you’re in your office. That shit doesn’t make any sense,” Brock said, leaning in my doorway.
“What are you doing here so late? Aren’t there girls at Chaz’s who need to be swept off their feet and into your bed?” I asked, not looking up.
“Thought I had a lead on that missing heroin kid. Turns out I didn’t. I just wanted to update the file. You working her case?” he asked, moving into the room, taking one of the files. “Pentobarbital?” he asked, brow raised.
“Yeah, isn’t that some shit?”
“And these vitamin levels. What? Was someone trying to see the effects of a lethal injection on someone in perfect health?”
I looked up at him, seeing a Brock I hadn’t seen in a while.
See, in general, he was light, easy, funny, and a shameless flirt. That was the Brock I knew growing up, and it was the Brock he was the vast majority of the time.
That being said, at eighteen, we were both headstrong adrenaline junkies in need of a constant danger fix.
So we enlisted. We went through basic. Then when that wasn’t good enough, we opted in to the Marines.
We got our asses handed to us in LINE. We got deployed. We proved ourselves time and again.
And then we were approached and offered something that we would never be allowed to talk about again to anyone but each other and our supervisors. And even them, rarely.
We were offered black ops.
We were taken off the official books.
Then we were thrown into shit situation after shit situation and had to fight, shoot, run, crawl, and limp our way out of it.
I had always been a little more serious, more guarded. So it hardened me. It made me detached and cynical. It made me painfully aware of the downright evil people were capable of.
For Brock, it forced him to be something he wasn’t by nature. It made him cold and numb.
For years, I went to sleep near and woke up by a man I no longer recognized.
He barely slept, and when he did, he had nightmares.
He ate only enough to sustain him, saying food suddenly tasted like cardboard.
He raged out. He refused to answer letters from home on the extremely rare occasion that we were even allowed to do so, skirting the actual truth about what we were doing and where in the world we were at any given time. He just shut down.
Brock failed his next psych eval. And he was being sent home.
It was about then that I decided I was done as well. I finished up the mission with my best friend, and then I got discharged as well, both of us under heavy threats of execution if we ever talked about the things we had done, the secrets we had upheld, the lives we had taken.
I immediately started the agency. The nice thing about being in the military when you’re young and bad with money is you’re not home to spend it foolishly.
So it piled up in an account for years. It was more than enough to buy the building, do conversions, and pay Marg to work for me.
Eventually, the business grew and I hired Tig.
Meanwhile, Brock was off the grid for a while. He drank, he fucked, he lay around and watched mindless TV.
I let that fly because I was busy for about… a year. Then I went over there, poured ice water over him, asleep on the couch at three in the afternoon. We fought. Then we talked. Then he started to get his shit together.
Ever since then, he slipped back into the Brock I had always known. He lightened up. He warmed back up.
But there were moments every now and then, cases and clients that brought out the coldness again.
And watching him look over her files, I saw the deadness hit his eyes.
“Brock?”
“Think about it,” he said, looking up at me, his deep eyes intense. “We don’t get the luxury of ignorance. We know the shit they do. They do stuff like this all the time.”
“Brock, I’m not sure this is a government conspir—”
“It’s not a conspiracy theory, Sawyer. We’ve fucking seen them doing experiments similar to this.”
“Listen…”
“I’m not saying it’s that,” he reasoned, shaking his head, letting it go somewhat.
“I am saying that you shouldn’t close your mind to the possibility.
Who else can disappear a person and have no one miss them?
Who else can drop them back off a fucking year later with no traces of where they have been and no memory?
Consider it. If the leads take you in that direction, don’t discount it because you think it sounds like a conspiracy. This shit happens. You know it does.”
He wasn’t wrong.
No one wanted to think their government did things to its own people. But, fact of the matter was, they did. Every government in every country in all the world.
It happened in San Quentin prisons from nineteen thirteen to nineteen fifty-one when the doctors performed illegal surgeries on inmates.
It happened up until the seventies when big business companies paid the prison system to inject dioxin into the inmates.
It happened in the sixties and seventies to poor Black people who were given whole-body radiation without being told it was being done to them.
It happened in the early two-thousands when people all over the United States were injected with artificial blood without their knowledge, unwittingly increasing their chances of heart attacks and death.
MK-ULTRA.
Project Bluebird.
Project Chatter.
And those were just the ones that were declassified and brought to the light. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of others.
Brock wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. He had just seen enough corruption and unethical government overreach to be understandably aware of the possibility of it happening again.
Bringing it to my attention was, whether I liked it or not, a good thing. I needed to be open to all possibilities on a case as weird as Riya’s. As much as I doubted it was a government experiment, I had to admit there was a chance.
Especially done the way that it was.
It was perfect.
She had no memory of what happened to her over the course of her missing year. So when she showed up at the cops and the hospital, they just thought she was nuts. No one would believe her after that was recorded, even if she did eventually start remembering what happened.
There would always be a record of her being nuts.
It was a flawless plan.
And if there was one thing the government was good at, it was taking out their own trash.
“I’ll keep my mind open,” I assured him, making the last of the tension leave him.
“Right now, I have a lot of work to do. I need all the test results and Barrett’s file so I know where I am heading.
I have her former co-workers to look into.
I need to go back and talk to her landlord alone.
And I need to track down these exes and these people she thought of as friends. I have a lot of questions for them.”
“Starting with why no one filed a missing persons report,” Brock said, nodding.
“Exactly. Why, when someone has a proven track record of being reliable and easy to get in touch with, did no one think it was weird for her to fall off the face of the Earth?”
“You need any help on this one, I’m in. And not just because I think she’s the best-looking woman in this town.”
“Nice to have a challenging case,” I agreed, nodding, understanding that. “I’ll keep you up to date,” I told him, giving him a nod. “Go home. Get some rest.”
“Rest?” he asked, giving me a smirk. “The last thing I plan to do is rest.”
“Another woman already?”
“Nah. Same one,” he said with a shrug.
“The same one who threw you out with nothing on and then screamed at you?” I asked, brow raised, lips twitching.
“What can I say… I like a little spirit. Nothing better than a passionate woman.”
I shook my head. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Brock.”
“Hey,” he said, stopping and turning back from the doorway.
“Yeah?”
“Riya in your place…” he trailed off.
“Strictly professional.”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I give that two more days, tops.”
He would win that bet.