Chapter twenty
“We started with the money, as Callie suggested,” Amber said.
“We assumed he’s not making the drug himself for all the reasons we talked about earlier, which means he’s acquiring it from someone.
Whether he’s paying for it or has convinced someone to give it to him, we didn’t know, but we started with that question and looked for any suspicious outgoing expenses or ones out of sync with the rest of his spending. ”
She paused, marveling at how much easier it was talking about Anthony now.
He’d been this mythical beast who inflicted real terror in her life for a long time, but now he was just a man.
A man doing terrible things that she was going to help stop.
She glanced at Spencer and smiled. She’d come a long way in the past year, but even in her wildest imaginations, she never would have considered she’d be here.
Surrounded by friends, her daughter playing happily on the floor, and in a real relationship with a man she trusted and respected.
A man she likely even loved, though she hadn’t used that word in so long it felt rusty in her brain.
And it felt so damn good.
“You found something?” Spencer asked.
She draped her arm along his thigh, her fingers curled over his knee, the denim warm under her touch, as she turned back to the group.
“We did. Anthony hates bed-and-breakfasts. I mean hates them. He hates the chitchat that happens between guests and owners, hates the decor of every one he’s ever been to.
And he really hates how it feels like he’s staying at someone’s house, which he never does because he loses control when he’s out of his own environment for any period of time.
He’ll go to parties. He thrives on those.
But if anyone invited him somewhere for a weekend, that never happened.
Not unless he got a hotel—a real hotel—room. ”
“Which is why the charge on his credit card to a B&B in scenic rural Virginia caught Amber’s attention,” Callie said.
“You have access to Ely’s credit card statements?” Grace asked. Everyone looked at her. Amber’s heart stuttered. So caught up in the breadcrumb trail they’d found, she’d forgotten that Grace was bound by different rules than the rest of them.
Grace sighed. “Never mind. I was never here. Not for this part anyway.”
“We don’t want to put you in a bad spot,” Dulcie said.
She waved him off. “Considering some of the shit that goes down in the DEA, this is child’s play.
If something comes of it, we’ll just need to strategize on how to protect the prosecution,” she said with a meaningful look to Callie, who nodded.
With a regal wave of her hand, she said, “Please continue.”
“It turns out that that’s not the only B&B he’s stayed at in the past year. There were two others,” Amber said.
“Why a B&B and not a hotel, if he’s so particular?” Hawkeye asked.
“Because B&Bs don’t usually have CCTV security systems would be my guess,” Scipio replied.
“You’d be right about that,” Callie said.
“But some of the local businesses do,” Amber added with a grin.
Never in her life would she have thought she’d enjoy investigating so much.
Then again, she had a personal stake in this.
And she wasn’t so blind as to not recognize that a part of her glee was more about taking the power back that her ex had stolen from her.
“He might be willing to stoop to staying at a B&B, but he’s not going to skimp on food. We found dinner charges on his card for each stay, all at, predictably, the most expensive restaurant in the area. Two of which do have CCTV.” She looked to Callie to continue.
“Leo did some quick work for us. It helped that we had the date and time of the dinners, and he pulled some footage. In both, Anthony was enjoying the company of Johanna Milvela. A researcher at Bios Therapeutics,” Callie said.
Kara and Juliana straightened. “What drugs do they work with?” Kara asked.
“They work with several,” Callie said. “But their most successful product is a postoperative anti-nausea.”
“Scopolamine,” Kara said. Juliana nodded.
“Which one?” Juliana asked. Callie rattled off the name, and Kara started typing on her computer.
Less than two minutes later, Kara nodded. “I can confirm it’s a scopolamine-based medication. Not controlled.”
They still had a long way to go, but a bolt of excitement coursed through Amber’s body.
Even a day ago, the thought of being able to discover, let alone prove, Anthony’s role in any part of the story Clara and Adrian brought to them seemed impossible.
But now, with the pieces coming together, hope glimmered around the edges.
“If it’s not controlled, does that mean it’s easier for it to go missing?” Spencer asked. “Grace said it’s about a gram to cause an overdose. If there have been eleven murders, that’s only eleven grams over the course of a year. Not a lot.”
“If it were a controlled substance, there’d already be an investigation,” Grace said.
“But you’re right. It’s different with uncontrolled substances.
” She paused, then frowned. “Even so, while eleven grams doesn’t seem like a lot, if the company is a legitimate company, they’d notice a pattern of the missing compound. ”
“You think she didn’t steal it for Anthony?” Mantis asked.
Grace tipped her head in thought. “No, I think it’s a definite possibility that he got it from her. But my guess is that if she took it, she didn’t take it all at once, or even a gram at a time. Do you know what she researches specifically?” she asked, turning to Amber and Callie.
Amber sat back and let Callie drive the computer. She’d never been particularly computer-savvy. And given that she’d spent most of her time in the past year in the kitchen concocting recipes and meals, she didn’t even pretend to be the best person for the job.
“Based on her bio and papers, she’s researching the use of scopolamine drugs for women with hyperemesis gravidarum. That’s severe morning sickness, for those not familiar with the term,” Callie replied, looking up.
Amber hadn’t had any morning sickness, but Kara and Callie grimaced in sympathy.
“My friend Scarlett, Brad’s wife, had that,” Kara said.
“It’s brutal.” Brad was another one of the Warwicks, a cousin of Kara’s husband.
He ran the family lodge at the north end of the lake while his wife worked as a nurse in the same ER where Kara was a doctor.
Amber hadn’t met the couple but knew they’d always been generous with helping the Falcons when needed.
“Why did you ask?” Amber asked Grace.
Grace rolled her lips, then bobbed her head in thought. “I’m thinking it’s less likely she’s walking out of the research facility with a gram of the drug at a time. It’s more likely that she’s making small ‘errors’ in her research and collecting smaller amounts of it that all add up.”
Amber had no idea how a research facility operated, but she knew kitchens. And if someone wanted to steal, say, truffles or caviar, it would be less noticeable to take a little bit at a time rather than a full jar.
“Harder to trace and less likely to raise suspicions,” Scipio said. Several folks nodded.
“So how do we trace it? And are we sure it’s her?” Spencer asked. “It seems like a solid possibility, but I don’t want to get so focused that we miss something.”
“Fair point,” Grace said.
“We can pull her research notes. See if there’s anything there,” Callie said. “I’ll ping Leo now.”
“Yet one more thing I didn’t hear,” Grace said, but her grin told another story.
“You’re enjoying this,” Dulcie said, chuckling.
Grace flashed him a mischievous look. “Of course I am. They get to do all the things we wish we could but can’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the rule of law, but I’ve looked into HICC.
When they hand a case over to the FBI or even the police, it’s tight.
All the t’s crossed, all the i’s dotted.
It’s like they get to have their cake and eat it, too, which isn’t the usual script for the rest of us in law enforcement. ”
“Join us,” Callie said, her attention still on the computer.
Amber’s weren’t the only eyes that went to Dulcie. He glared at the group, which pulled a laugh from her. From all the Falcons. Probably because of all of them, Dulcie was the least likely to glare. He was the big, comfortable teddy bear, the giver of great hugs and easy smiles.
“Not sure how much use HICC has for a DEA agent,” Grace replied.
“If you can find something on Bios Therapeutics, I might be able to initiate an investigation into them,” she said, shifting the conversation back on course.
Beside her, Spencer’s gaze lingered on the agent and she wondered if he’d noticed, too, that Grace hadn’t said she wouldn’t consider it, only that she found it unlikely they’d want her.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Callie said. “Let’s make sure we have each other’s contact information before we leave.” Grace nodded.
“Okay, so we think scopolamine is being used to induce the behaviors that led to the deaths of the eleven people Clara and Adrian have identified,” Spencer said.
“And we think it’s possible that Anthony’s source for the drug is Johanna Milvela, a researcher at Bios Therapeutics.
How does Anthony get hired? How do people know to go to him and how do they pay him? ”
Amber rolled those questions around in her head.
The one she kept circling back to was how people knew Anthony could facilitate the deaths of their family members.
If their theory held any truth, Anthony was taking a huge risk.
A risk that grew exponentially the more frequently he fulfilled the requests, because more requests meant more people knew his role.
And risk simply wasn’t something Anthony embraced.
“What are you thinking?” Spencer asked, his eyes filled with curiosity and concern as he gazed down at her.
“Unless something has changed in the past year, there has got to be some sort of intermediary or a smoke screen or something,” she said.
When she’d first arrived in Mystery Lake, she’d wanted nothing more than to be invisible.
Even the thought of people looking at her made her want to curl into a ball and disappear.
But now, as everyone watched her, waited to hear what she had to say, warmth unfurled in her, like roots uncurling and digging in. Finding home.
She swallowed and blinked back the unexpected moisture gathering in her eyes. Spencer’s fingers brushed through her hair.
“Anthony doesn’t take risks,” she said. “He’s very careful about his image and controlling what he shows to the world.
Becoming known as someone who can provide the means for others to commit murder wouldn’t be something he’d do.
Or it wouldn’t have been something he’d do when I knew him.
As I said earlier, he’d like the power of being the one who knew Rolly Masterson killed his mother, but he wouldn’t want Rolly to know the drugs that facilitated her death came from him. ”
Silence filled the room, and the gentle tug of futility threatened the sense of power she’d reveled in only minutes earlier. Were they wrong about all this? Her gut said no, but her mind couldn’t marry up the scenario they were discussing with the man she’d known.
“Which means he’s either changed, the situation has changed, there’s another player, or we’re missing something,” Spencer said.
She lifted her head, her eyes meeting his.
“Of everyone in the room, you know him best. If you say that’s a hitch in the theory, then it’s a hitch, and we look for an explanation. ”
As one, the group nodded. The pit forming in her stomach didn’t go away altogether, but it did ease. “How do we do that?” she asked, her gaze darting between Callie and Grace, the two people in the room who’d conducted the most investigations.
“We dig into his life,” Callie said. Grace nodded. “We turn over every stone, look around every corner, take it apart piece by piece.”
“That easy?” Amber said with a rueful grin.
“Not easy, but worth it. As they say, the hard things usually are,” Grace said.
“And you’d be surprised what we find when we do this,” Callie said.
Amber looked at her. “We have a lot of questions, a lot of tactical questions—how does he get the drug, how does he distribute it, how does he get paid, how do people know about him, and how does he mitigate that risk?” she said, reciting the litany of questions they’d all been asking.
“But if we start with his life, if we start by picking it apart and focusing on why he’s doing this, I expect we’ll find answers to the how as well. ”