Chapter 18
18
Elliot Crane
Can I ask you a biochemistry question?
Seth Mays
Sure.
What’s your question?
How much foxglove would it take to kill someone as opposed to work as a heart medication?
I was at work, but I immediately hit the little phone icon.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey.”
“You should not be giving anybody digitalis,” I said sharply.
“That’s the same thing as foxglove?”
“Yes, it’s the same fucking thing, Jesus, Elliot. Please tell me you aren’t seriously planning to give this to someone.”
“Not… exactly.”
“Elliot.” I made it clear in my tone that I was not having any bullshit.
I heard him let out a little sigh. “There are a lot of effective and safe herbal remedies,” he said. “Stuff for migraines and joint pain.”
“You don’t use digitalis for joint pain,” I snapped. “Or headaches.”
“No, you don’t,” Elliot agreed, his tone that of a man trying to be patient. “That’s cloves and anise and lion’s mane, among other things. Willowbark for headaches, which is not the point,” he continued, sounding mildly annoyed. “But Lonnie Redcreek has a mild heart condition. Not severe enough that she needs surgery or a pacemaker or anything. Henry has the list of what goes in it, but not the amounts.”
“Elliot, you could kill her ,” I said as firmly as I could without yelling at him.
“Which is why?—”
“And as a biochemist,” I said sternly. “I am telling you not to give anybody digitalis .” Could it be done safely? Sure. It could be done. But I didn’t trust myself to come up with the correct dose, particularly over the phone, and as much as I thought Elliot was generally a pretty smart guy, I absolutely didn’t trust him to dose someone correctly with something that could literally stop their heart.
“Would you?—”
“To quote Hart, abso-fucking-lutely not.” There was no way in hell I was going to assume that kind of risk or responsibility. “And neither are you or Henry. If she needs medication, she should be going to a doctor.”
“Do you know how expensive that is? And how poor the quality of health care is on the reservation?” Elliot retorted. He was getting angry, or at least irritated. Well, so was I.
“Do you know how many accidental overdoses I’ve been at?” I snapped back. “And how very much I don’t want to show up at another one and wonder if you’re the reason she’s fucking dead?”
That shut him up for a minute.
“Promise me you aren’t going to give anybody any part of that plant,” I said firmly.
I heard him sigh. “Seth, I want to help these people. I just don’t know how .”
“Why you?” I asked him.
“Because there isn’t anybody else.” He was getting frustrated. He wasn’t the only one.
“Who was doing it before now?”
“My dad, okay?” There was more emotion than frustration in his voice now. “It was my dad,” he repeated, his voice soft, and despite its roughness I could hear the heartbreak in it.
That shut me up for a minute.
I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, wanted to provide comfort and support—but he still shouldn’t be doing what he was trying to do.
“Your dad was a homeopath?” I asked, trying to sound gentle. And not like I was asking if his dad had been a walking tragedy waiting to happen. To someone else.
“Yeah,” he rasped.
“Where did he learn?” I asked.
I could almost hear Elliot swallow. “I—it was before I was born,” he said quietly. “But the Wildwood Institute. There’s a certificate on the wall in his office.”
I didn’t know anything about it, but most of what I knew about homeopathic herbalists was based in Virginia. There were reputable programs—and there were online certificates that required a twenty-question multiple choice test. It varied pretty widely.
“But he was trained in it,” I argued, since the precise nature of his dad’s certification wasn’t the current point of the conversation. “Which goes back to my point that you can’t dose people with potentially deadly chemicals without training.”
Elliot sighed. “I just… I want to help,” he said softly. “Like Dad did.”
“Well,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “There are potentially not-deadly things you can make for people, right? Headache remedies?”
“Yeah,” he replied, although he still sounded unhappy.
“So do what you can. Safely ,” I emphasized. “And if you want to do more—figure out somewhere to get a decent homeopath certification.”
“You’re a biochemist,” he said, sounding a little resentful.
“Yes, I am. With an emphasis on toxicology because I went into forensic science,” I replied. “I did my undergrad research on low levels of fungal neurotoxicity as a potential form of therapy for different forms of psychosis.”
“Which means what?” he asked, frustration creeping back in.
“How semi-toxic mushrooms in low doses can help balance out brain chemistry for particular mental conditions,” I said. “And my masters was on lethal neurotoxic compounds and how to posthumously detect indices of their use.” I took a breath. “Point is, I know a lot more about killing people than I do helping them. So yeah, I could tell you how much digitalis would definitely kill someone, but I can’t tell you how much would help them.”
“Because it’s a flower, not a mushroom,” he said, his voice flat.
“Actually, yes,” I snapped, starting to lose my temper in spite of myself. “Because I understand how mushrooms work and I don’t understand dosage on the fucking flower, Elliot, so while that distinction might seem silly to you, it’s pretty damn important.”
Oops.
I had not meant to go off on him like that.
But I was a little bit pissed off.
He wasn’t ‘ready’ for a relationship with me, and I respected that. I didn’t call him, didn’t text him, didn’t show up on his doorstep—shifted or unshifted, drunk or sober—and the first time he texts me it’s so that he can ask me how to unethically dose some poor woman with a heart condition who was, yes, getting screwed over by the broken health care system, so that he could… I don’t know… feel closer to his father?
Of course I felt terrible about his dad’s murder. I couldn’t imagine the horror he must have gone through—and the fresh grief every time he was confronted with something that reminded him of his dad. Reminding him that his dad was gone.
But it was reckless and irresponsible to be dosing people with medicine—even homeopathic or naturalistic medicine, which actually might have been worse, since people assumed that something ‘natural’ couldn’t hurt them—when you weren’t a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist.
“So you’re not going to tell me,” he said, and I could hear resentment in his voice.
“I don’t know ,” I snapped back. “I’m serious about this, Elliot. Don’t do it.”
He let out a blustering sigh. “Is this?—”
“Don’t you dare ask me if I’m not telling you because you didn’t want to fucking go out with me,” I snarled, rage running through me.
He said nothing.
I hung up on him, my face and neck on fire.
It had been three weeks since I’d last spoken to Elliot, and the first time we talked after he’d essentially dumped me on our first date, he’d asked me to help him do something very dangerous and very stupid. I’d refused on moral grounds— not , no matter what he thought, because I resented him.
I resented him now , but I hadn’t resented him until he’d accused me of petty revenge.
I’d spent those three weeks trying not to feel sorry for myself—and also trying not to think about ways that I could potentially convince Elliot to date me. I’d come up with at least a dozen possibilities, from leaving him cookies to increasingly ludicrous romantic gestures, but none of them had involved yelling at him about poisoning a woman with a mild heart condition.
What I hoped was a mild heart condition.
Shit.
I wondered how hard it would be to get Henry’s number.
I started with Hart. You don’t happen to have Henry’s number, do you?
I do, why?
Did Elliot mention to you the fact that he wants to give digitalis to some woman with a heart condition? I asked him.
No… Fucking dumbass. Did you tell him what to do?
I told him not to do it. He could kill her.
Good. And now you want Henry to convince him? Hart asked.
No. I want to tell Henry why it’s a bad idea so he doesn’t try to do it himself.
The dots blinked a couple times on and off for a minute or two before a message returned with a phone number. Henry doesn’t text, you’ll have to call him.
Thanks.
No problem.
I was about to call Henry when another message came in.
He still cares about you, you know.
I didn’t want to have this conversation. Especially not now.
What did he tell you? I asked, unable to help myself.
That he’s not ready for a relationship because he’s too fucking stupid to realize that nobody’s ever ready for a relationship, came the response.
I happened to agree, but it felt too weird to reply with something like that. He said the same to me , was what I sent back to him.
He’s a dumbass, Hart sent back.
I wasn’t sure what to say to that.
It’s none of my damn business, he sent before I figured out what to actually send back to him. But if you really care about him, don’t give up on him yet.
I sighed. I wasn’t sure that it was healthy for me to hold out for Elliot to decide that he was going to be ready for a relationship. Both because Hart was right that one wasn’t ever really ready for relationships, but also because I wanted to be wanted—not settled for.
Hart didn’t seem to be preparing to send me any more messages, so I sighed and called the number he’d given me for Henry Lamotte.
“Hello.” He didn’t say it like a question the way most people did.
“Mr. Lamotte, it’s Seth Mays. I—was staying with Elliot for a little while earlier this summer.”
“I remember, Seth. And it’s Henry, if you’ll recall.” He sounded slightly amused, but also curious.
“Yes, sir. Henry.” Southern manners had been bred into me—it was a hard habit to break. “I’m calling because I just spoke to Elliot.”
“Yes?”
“He mentioned something about compounding herbal medicines.”
“Yes?” he said again.
“He was asking about using digitalis—foxglove—for someone.”
“Lonnie Redcreek,” Henry said.
“Yes, sir. Henry.” I swallowed. “I’m calling because I don’t think it’s a good idea to be making potentially lethal compounds. At least not without the proper pharmaceutical training.”
I heard what might have been a snort. “I’ve no intention of doing so,” he replied, his voice even, if slightly amused.
“Elliot seemed to think it was a good idea.”
The next sound was a sigh. “He wants to help,” Henry said quietly. “He thought you might be able to tell him how.”
“I don’t know anything about dosing digitalis,” I told him.
“So I gathered,” Henry replied. “Although I expect he found that answer disappointing.”
“Yes, sir. Henry.”
“And you want to make sure that I don’t let him try to do it anyway.”
“Yes, sir.” I didn’t bother correcting myself again.
“I promise not to attempt to do anything with potentially deadly consequences,” Henry told me. “And I will do my best to make sure Elliot doesn’t, either.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I ended the conversation, still annoyed with Elliot, but at least reassured that he and Henry weren’t going to set up some sort of illicit pharmacy that would end with me being called out to a scene at which one of their patients ended up dead.
I was also annoyed that I was now thinking about Lonnie Redcreek and the fact that she wasn’t getting the medical care she needed—and deserved. It made me wonder what sort of heart condition she had and how much whatever Elliot’s dad had been giving her helped. What she’d been doing since he died. Had she been suffering? Or had she had a stock of it and only now just run out? What would happen to her without it?
I was annoyed because Elliot had made me feel responsible for the health and wellbeing of a woman I’d never met. It made me wonder if there was a way I could get the answers Elliot wanted—who I could talk to.
Which was ridiculous . Because I didn’t really know people in pharmacology or homeopathy. I knew of programs, and I’d talked to pharmacists in my life—with my number of medical problems, of course I had—but it wasn’t like I had a pharmacist friend I could call up and ask. Not that I would ask them what Elliot had asked me—because that would put them in a really bad legal position. But I might be able to figure out a way to ask hypothetically…
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. There was no point thinking about it because it wasn’t a good idea.
But I did feel really bad for Lonnie.
Both Roger and Lacy were out—we took turns responding to calls, and it had been my turn to stay back this time—so I was by myself, looking at some particulate evidence taken from an accident scene earlier in the week. It hadn’t been a deadly accident, although two people had been taken to the hospital for treatment, but I had to admit that I liked the fact that I would sometimes get called to work scenes where people weren’t dead.
This one had pretty obviously been a DUI, and we’d been told by the prosecutor working out of the Sheriff’s Office that they planned to bring charges, so our evidence would be useful. Most of that would be evidence taken from the skid marks on the pavement, tire tracks in the mud, and particulates that helped to identify who drove over what first, second, and so on.
It wasn’t high-stakes, exactly, but it was useful work if it helped to keep a drunk driver off the road, as far as I was concerned. And since I felt like it made a difference, I happy doing it.
At least until my phone rang.
It wasn’t a number I had in it, but it was a Shawano county area code.
“Mays,” I answered it. And, since nobody I didn’t know called me for any reason other than work, I added, “Shawano County Sheriff’s Department Crime Scene Investigation.” It was a mouthful, but I was new enough that just my name wouldn’t be nearly enough. After the first few times when very confused people asked who I was or if they had the right number, I’d started answering with the full thing when I saw an unknown local number.
“Mr. Mays? My name is Robin Colfax with the Gresham Fire Department. I was given this number by Chief Ziemer, and I just cleared this with Sheriff Mallet. We’re looking at what we assumed was an unauthorized bonfire, but there seems to be some sort of bone, and we want to know whether or not we need to call homicide.”
Depending on how badly burned it was, I might or might not be useful, but I could bring whatever it was back and get the DNA or spectrometry testing process started. “Just tell me where I’m going,” I told Colfax.
I got the address, and I said I’d be there as soon as I could.
Before I grabbed my stuff and left, I quickly looked up the name ‘Robin Colfax’ in the department database, and it pulled up a profile for a Lieutenant Robin Colfax, who had dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that was the color of a rich chai latte. The contact number given in the database matched the number on my phone, so I saved the contact and pulled up the address in my GPS on the way out the door.
I was halfway to Gresham when my phone rang again. This time the number was Gale Smith’s.
I poked the answer and speaker buttons. “Hi, detective. What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to let you know—our kidnapped shifter woke up this afternoon.”
I sucked in a surprised breath. “Really?” I said to Smith.
“Really,” he replied. “Just did the interview.”
“Good for him,” I said, impressed at the poor guy’s tenacity. He’d been in really rough shape, and it hadn’t been at all clear that he was going to survive, much less wake up and be able to give a statement in a timely manner—not that being unconscious for a month felt ‘timely’ in any real sense. I’m sure it had been interminable for his family—his wife and two kids who had come home to find him missing with blood all over their house.
“He gave us some rough descriptions to go on—and you were right,” he continued, “about there being four total perpetrators at the scene.” I’d concluded this from the fingerprints—there had been four fresh sets that clearly didn’t belong to the family, especially around the door and the parts of the house where there had been signs of struggle and blood. “So I guess we’re looking for some sort of group.”
“Some sort?” I repeated.
I could almost hear him shrug in response. “Could be a group of friends or something more formal. If we were in one of the big cities, I might say it was gang-related, but you don’t get that kind of thing here in Shawano. If anything, you see white supremacists versus tribal members, but it’s not gang warfare in the way you’d find somewhere like Milwaukee or Chicago.”
I frowned, although I tried not to let myself get too worried about it, since I didn’t want to get distracted from my driving. “White supremacists versus tribal members?” I asked. That sounded a lot like something that could be potentially dangerous for Elliot, and while I knew I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him in a romantic way—and I was still mad at him about the foxglove thing from this morning—I didn’t want to see him hurt.
“Yeah, unfortunately.” Smith sounded tired and unhappy. “There’s not a lot of… color up here, in case you hadn’t noticed.” I had. I’d spent half my life in a city that was almost half Black and another ten percent non-white. In comparison, Shawano was a full eighty percent white.
“I did notice that,” I told him, trying to keep the judgment out of my tone.
I apparently failed, as Smith made a snorting sound. “Point is, we’ve got a little bit more to go on in addition to fingerprints—rough heights and weights, some other details. Not that fingerprints aren’t useful,” he quickly noted.
“But unless they’re already in the database, they’re hard to use to ID someone,” I finished for him. It was true. You could confirm that a suspect had been at a scene, but unless their fingerprints were already in the federal database, they didn’t tell you what characteristics to look for.
“Exactly.” I could hear approval in his voice.
I was probably supposed to ask something else, but the blue line on my GPS told me that I needed to turn. “Thanks for calling, detective,” I said. “I’ve got to get to a fire scene,” I explained.
“They’re having you work cases for arson already?” There was surprise there, but not derision.
“They’re trying to determine if they have a homicide or not,” I answered. “There were bones in a fire pit, and they want me to tell them if they need to call in homicide.”
“Me, in other words.” He sounded resigned.
“Probably not,” I told him. “Unless you cover Gresham.”
“Sheriff’s Office covers them,” he replied. “So not me.”
“Have they replaced your partner yet?” I asked him. I hadn’t worked a homicide with anybody else, but maybe that was because the other detective called in Lacy or Roger. Shawano PD had two detectives and one vacancy—Smith was homicide, McKinley was special victims and missing persons, and the vacancy would cover anything they needed, from homicides to vice to cold cases. It had been a senior position, although nobody seemed to know if Smith would get promoted or they’d hire someone with experience.
“Applications are open,” he replied. “Whether they even bother to ask me about it or not, I have no idea.”
“Fingers crossed you get someone decent,” I said.
“Fingers crossed you find some dog bones,” he replied.
“Thanks.”
We both hung up, and after another turn, I found myself on a long gravel track heading into the woods. “Jesus,” I muttered, unnerved by the nearly impenetrable stretch of gravel and forest in front of me. Noah and I would go camping up in Shenandoah, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know that it got dark in the woods, but that had felt different than driving a rickety pickup down a track into God-only-knew what.
For all I knew, in fact, Colfax was setting me up—or maybe it wasn’t even the real Colfax at all, but someone pretending to be to lure me out into the middle of nowhere. I didn’t think I’d made any enemies in the few months I’d lived in Shawano… at least not bad enough that they’d want to kill me or kidnap me in the middle of the woods.
Another couple of minutes of stressful driving, and I found myself at a small gravel lot—the only other vehicle in it was one of those EMT/fire department SUVs, so I parked next to it and got out. It was highly unlikely that someone would have stolen an official vehicle just to kill me out in the woods.
As I swung down, wincing as my knee jarred as my feet hit the ground, I heard the crunch of gravel under shoes.
I turned toward the sound and found myself staring up—pretty rare for me—at a yellow-olive skinned orc with dark hair that looked like it was growing out from a shorter cut, wearing a tight-fitting fire department uniform. It took me a second, but after staring for a half-minute or so I saw the resemblance between the orc in front of me and the profile I’d looked at on the computer screen.
“You Mays?” The orc asked me, and I recognized the voice from the phone.
“Lieutenant,” I replied, inclining my head. “You might want to update your official photo in the county records.”
Colfax let out a huff that might have been amused. Maybe. “Says the shifter,” the orc rumbled.
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to deny it. Orcs had strong enough senses of smell that they could tell who was a shifter and who wasn’t. “I registered,” I replied.
“You what ?”
“Registered.” Then I realized that Colfax genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about—the registry was for Virginia, and I wasn’t in Virginia anymore. I sighed. “In Virginia, shifters have to register with the state,” I explained.
“That’s—” Colfax appeared to be struggling for words.
Several came to mind. Bullshit. Bigoted. Sub-speciesist. Stupid. I probably shouldn’t say any of those to a fire department lieutenant who could easily make or break my impending fire investigation career. “ It is what it is,” I replied. “Lieutenant.”
Colfax huffed again. “It’s that, too,” the orc replied. “You ready to see some bones?”
“Absolutely.”
Colfax led me down the trail a ways—maybe a quarter- to a half-mile—to a small makeshift campsite. There were a couple stones and a log worn in such a way that it was clear it had been used as a seat by several dozen or more butts over the years. They formed a semi-circle around a sizable fire pit, the blackened ashes and chunks of wood—and, apparently, bone—spreading beyond the lipped edges of where it had been dug out.
I crouched down beside it, looking into the burned detritus clustered in the center. Chunks of carbonized wood, blackened stones, charred pine cones, and what looked like a large femur-like bone. I pulled out my phone and pulled up OsteoID—we used it to make approximate species IDs on bones of unknown origin. It gave approximate length, width, and distal measurements for multiple species of animal, as well as human, bones.
A quick scroll through the list, comparing size and shape and proportions, told me that I was looking at an unusually large canid.
Which probably meant a shifter. Wolf or coyote, most likely.
I looked up at Colfax. “Well?” the orc asked.
“Canid, but much bigger than an animal canid should be,” I said.
“Which means what?”
I sighed. “I’ll need to see if there’s enough left of it for DNA, but you’re most likely looking at shifter bones. Wolf or coyote.”
“How sure are you?” Colfax asked me.
“Eighty percent,” I replied, swiftly. Larger normal animals were a possibility. Maybe someone’s St. Bernard or Great Dane. But your average coyote femur topped out around 200 mm, and a wolf was only marginally larger, at 275 mm or so. A shifter’s canid femur would be closer to 320 or 330mm.
Mine, if I were killed in wolf form, would be about that.
That was a disconcerting thought.
Even though I’d been around a good deal more than my fair share of death over the course of my career in CSI, I’d somehow managed to mostly keep myself from thinking what if this were me? It probably helped that I’d never seen anyone who looked particularly like me or reminded me of myself in any other way.
I’d had bodies that made me think about Quincy or Noah or Hart or someone else I knew and liked, but never myself.
This one was different.
I was different.
Colfax had me take the femur and a collection of other bone fragments pulled from the ashes of the fire back to the Sheriff’s Department so that we could attempt to run DNA and whatever else might help us definitively determine species and, hopefully, identify our victim. I’d also started a homicide report that I’d turned in to a very surly-faced Sheriff Mallet who had explained that it wasn’t me he was upset about, just what I was handing him.
I couldn’t say that I blamed him for that. I didn’t much like the idea that I was once again working a shifter death. Murder. You didn’t burn a shifter who died of natural causes in a goddamn campfire.
I hoped they’d be able to get DNA. To figure out who this was. To tell their family they were dead so that they could put away the false hope and try to find cold comfort in knowledge. Every family I had ever met, every story Ward had told, always—the not knowing was worse than even the worst news. If I could, I would try to spare this shifter’s family that.
I was doing my best to get enough material for our new DNA sequencer—thanks to copious amounts of begging from both Smith and McKinley, as well as Roger and Lacy, at least according to Lacy—when my phone buzzed, face down, on the table that passed for my desk.
I ignored it, finishing what I was doing first, then prepping the machine and putting what I hoped would be a viable sample into it, then hitting the button to let it work.
I picked up my phone and flipped it over, noting that the missed call had been from Judy Hart. There was a tiny voicemail icon, so I called it to see what Hart’s mom had wanted.
“Hi Seth, sweetie!” Judy Hart was in incredibly cheerful and kindly woman. I wondered what on earth had happened to her son. Not that Hart wasn’t kind, because he was, he just wasn’t nice about it. “Marsh and I are barbecuing chicken tonight. There was a sale on chicken, so we bought way too much, and it’ll go bad if we don’t cook it all up. So you should come out and help us eat it all.”
I felt emotion rise in the back of my throat. They had so very obviously done this on purpose. Just for me.
Because by all rights, if they were going to call someone to feed them lots of chicken, it probably should have been the man who called them ‘Ma’ and ‘Pop’—but they hadn’t called Elliot, they called me. Now they probably had Elliot over yesterday or something, but I was still touched by the fact that Judy had called me.
I checked the timer on the sequencer, figuring I could make it out to the Harts’ place by around seven, and called her back.
The grilled barbecue chicken, for the record, was fantastic. But it was made a little blander by the fact that the DNA on the femur came back shifter.
Colfax had thanked me and let me know they’d be in touch if they needed anything else.
I knew what that meant. It meant thank-you-very-much-if-you’re-lucky-you’ll-find-out-if-we-caught-the-guy. I was used to that—handing over evidence and hoping that it was helpful. Maybe finding out in a few months or a few years whether or not it had made a difference. If the case had been solved, the perpetrator caught, justice served.
Just because I was used to it didn’t mean I liked it. But it was what it was. I worked the evidence, found all the pieces, and gave them to somebody else to put together.
Now if only somebody could help me put the pieces of my life together, I’d be all set.