Sierra
B ecca woke from the post-sex nap snuggled up against Carter, the same way she’d fallen asleep.
She still felt at peace even though her first thought was of her sister’s family, as it had been every morning since they’d been killed.
But maybe for the first time, she wasn’t focused on what she could do to make sure it got solved.
In her heart, she knew that Carter and the Shepherd Security Team would figure out who had committed the murders and they’d be brought to justice.
She wasn’t sure where the confidence in this suddenly came from.
It was dark out except for the light that reflected up from the nearby buildings and street lights.
She lazily stroked her hand over his chest and abdomen, his muscles tight, even as he slept.
“If you keep doing that, we’re going to have to go for a round two,” he said.
She smiled as she ran her hand further south, coming in contact with his erect cock.
He moaned his approval of her actions and wrapped his arms around her as he turned into her and pressed his cock up against her abdomen.
Their lips met, and the kisses were passionate, fueling a fire that would not be put out no matter how many times they coupled.
His phone, which was on the nightstand beside him, rang.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he moaned as he rolled over to grab it.
He viewed the display.
It was Shepherd. “Sorry, have to take this,” he told her.
Then he accepted the call, sitting up as he did.
“Tessman.”
“Fifteen minutes, my office, you and Becca both,” he said.
Then he disconnected.
Tessman turned the bedside light on.
“That was Shepherd. We have a meeting in his office in fifteen minutes.” He wondered if Shepherd knew they’d been together and Shepherd was going to address it.
But he was sure if that was the case, Shepherd would address it with him alone as Becca wasn’t agency personnel, or was she?
Had her limited employment contract included the nonfraternization clause?
But why would it matter to Shepherd when so many others had violated that protocol?
No, he told himself.
That wasn’t it.
“Did he say what it was about?”
“I assume either your case or Briana’s domestic violence case,” he said.
He kissed her one last time before getting up and grabbing their clothes.
He tossed hers to her.
“Raincheck?”
A smile spread over her lips.
“Definitely.”
“I’m just going to rinse off real quick,” he said, pointing to the bathroom.
“I’d invite you to join me, but we’d never make our meeting with Shepherd if you do, and then I’d be fired. I promise, I’ll only be a minute, so you can grab a quick shower if you’d like.” He left his clothes on the bed and stepped into the bathroom.
He emerged exactly four minutes later, wrapped in a towel.
His hair was still dry, a purposeful move on his part not to advertise he’d just showered, post-sex.
Becca rushed past him and sealed herself inside next.
Seven minutes later, she emerged fully clothed.
Her hair was in a ponytail and also dry.
They rushed down the stairs to floor five and entered his office at exactly the fifteen minute mark.
Shepherd sat at the conference table with Jackson and Brielle.
Shepherd glanced at his watch and then at Tessman.
In his world, being on time was considered late.
Tessman closed the door, and they took a seat at the table with the others.
Brielle had Becca’s mother’s laptop hooked up to the large wall monitor.
Shepherd glanced at Brielle and nodded.
“Walk us through what you found,” he said.
“There was a lot to go through in the cloud storage, both from your mother and the documents that were uploaded after her death, presumably by your sister and or her husband,” Brielle began.
She clicked a few keys and two documents displayed on the wall monitor.
“These are the two MDSs on chemicals or compounds that I believe contributed to the poisoning of their family. I couldn’t find much on either of them when I Google them. I can’t even pronounce either of them. One appears organic, maybe even developed in-house at Well-Life. The other appears petroleum based, which has me confused because of the vision statement Well-Life has out that says they ban all petroleum and other caustic chemicals from all their products.”
Becca and Tessman both stared at the chemical names and then read further down the MDSs.
The one that appeared to be petroleum based, held all sorts of warnings regarding inflammation to skin and eyes if contact was made as well as being highly flammable.
The other, a more organic compound, although appearing to be plant based, also included the psychotropic drug diazepam.
“Diazepam,” Becca pointed out.
“Is that in the same family as lorazepam? That’s what was in their systems per the tox screen, wasn’t it?”
Brielle nodded.
“Yes. Diazepam is known as the brand name Valium. Lorazepam is stronger than diazepam. Ten mg of diazepam is equivalent to two mg of lorazepam. The other notable item I found is that lorazepam has the ability to cause short-term amnesia.”
“That’s another argument that Nick DeSoto did not kill his family and then himself, not that we need one. He had access to diazepam in the lab. Why go to the trouble of getting his hands on lorazepam when the diazepam would do the job and he had access to it?”
“Does the use of that drug mean that maybe they didn’t intend to kill everyone, but rather cause short-term amnesia?” Becca posed.
“Maybe something went wrong while they were in the house, which caused them to kill everyone.”
“It could be,” Shepherd said.
“Until we get a statement from whoever did it or ordered it, we won’t know.”
Tessman knew she desperately wanted to believe that, believe that all of them, including the children, hadn’t been murdered in cold blood.
Somehow, that would make it easier for her to accept.
“There was one more thing I found that was odd. It was a sheet on ethyl alcohol, as in grain alcohol used in beer, wine, and other spirits. It’s primarily used in alcoholic beverages, but also as a solvent, antiseptic, and fuel additive,” Brielle said.
“What the hell kind of drug was he developing with those ingredients?” Tessman asked.
“I’m no chemist, but combining alcohol and sedatives with something toxic doesn’t sound like a recipe for a cure to anything to me.”
“The last thing I found related to the lab and what was being used in it that had been uploaded was a packing slip for the preservative Thimerosal, which is a bacteriostatic and fungistatic mercurial compound that is approximately fifty percent mercury by weight. It has been used as a preservative in vaccines since the 1930s,” Brielle said.
“Vaccines?” Becca said.
“Well-Life doesn’t hold any patents for vaccines nor were they ever on the trajectory to create them.”
“I did a little research into Thimerosal and discovered it has been banned in vaccines for children because of the heavy mercury content. The other notable thing about it is that Thimerosal is metabolized to ethyl mercury, which can easily cross the blood-brain barrier. I read a lot about neurotoxicity with the accumulation of Thimerosal in the brain.”
“I’m going to send all this to a contact of mine at the FDA, without divulging Well-Life as the source, and see what they make of it,” Shepherd said.
“There was something else I found,” Brielle said.
“Kind of unrelated to this.” She instantly appeared a bit nervous.
Becca picked up on it immediately.
“What is it, Brielle?”
“Your sister kept a journal of sorts in that cloud file. She made weekly journal entries, a conversation of sorts with your mother.”
“After she was dead?” Becca asked.
“Yes,” Brielle confirmed.
“You can read it yourself. Most of it was your sister’s thoughts, working through her grief. But about two months ago is when it got interesting to the case. She wrote about Nick’s disillusionment with his job at Well-Life and he was considering leaving.”
Becca shook her head.
“She said nothing about that, not about writing a journal to our mom, nor about Nick thinking of leaving his job.”
“About a week later was the first entry mentioning Nick feeling ill and what she described as him catching hell from his manager, Neil, who she described as that ass-kissing sonofabitch,” Brielle said.
“So he felt ill and caught hell for it?” Jackson recapped.
“This makes no sense,” Becca said.
“Yes, it does,” Brielle said.
“Here is your sister’s last entry to the journal.” Brielle typed on the keyboard, and the last journal entry displayed.
I think that Mom and Dad’s accident was no accident.
From what I’ve dug up, it looks like Mom was in a power struggle with one of the partners to stop a potentially dangerous drug from being developed, from Nick developing it.
She knew the side effects and possible risk of poisoning with one of the ingredients and they pushed it through anyway after Mom was gone.
I’m going to talk to the one person who I think is honest and didn’t know.
This has to be stopped.
Panic rose inside of Becca as she read it, the full impact of the meaning hitting her.
“Nicole would have deemed James Standish as honest over Marvin Ackman if she was going to talk to one of the partners. John was more friendly, the public relations face of the original three partners. Marvin was the money man, the comptroller, the CFO. There’s nothing warm or fuzzy about him.”
“So Nicole confided in James Standish, who was either the one responsible for the dangerous direction the drug development took or Standish told someone else, the person who was responsible,” Tessman posed.
“What did the person responsible hope to accomplish by drugging the family and sending people with guns to their house if it wasn’t to kill them?”
“And let’s not forget they’d all been poisoned by something in the lab,” Jackson added.
“We haven’t seen anything yet to know if it was fatal or not.”
Shepherd shuffled a few papers in the folder on the desktop in front of himself and glanced through the content of one of the papers.
“They were all shot in the head. The coroner reports that the shot to Nicole’s back would have been life ending if the shot to her head didn’t accomplish that quicker.” He paused and glanced at Becca.
“Sorry. But I think it’s germane. Were they destroying evidence in their brains?”
Tessman glanced at Becca.
She sat rigid, and her breathing appeared to be very shallow.
He reached over and laid his hand on her forearm.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded stiffly.
Her gaze went to Shepherd.
“How do we prove it so it sticks?”
“A confession may be the only way,” Shepherd said.
“I’d like to send you in to confront James Standish. Let’s confront him and see what shakes loose. We’ll have the room bugged.”
“No,” Tessman argued.
“That puts a target on her back.”
“Yes,” Becca said, her gaze darting to Carter.
Then she returned her eyes to Shepherd.
“I’ll do it.”
Shepherd glanced at Tessman briefly before his gaze shifted back to Becca.
“We’ll keep you protected before, during, and after. And we’ll script your entire meeting with Standish.”