Chapter 27
Though he was smaller now, edging toward average, Emmett still felt nervous about showing his body.
He blamed the loose skin beginning to accumulate at the base of his stomach, which he kept concealed under a cummerbund of flesh-colored Spandex he’d ordered online.
Despite his best efforts to hide the garment from Aaron—never taking his shirt off in front of him, even during sex—Aaron had noticed it.
He seemed surprised but didn’t say anything.
Emmett was grateful he didn’t have to explain.
At the end of his most recent check-in, Halleck had given him a box of four plastic injector pens—two months’ worth of doses—each preloaded with clear blue serum like a drip of California sky.
Now Emmett stood before the bathroom mirror, pinching different rolls of flesh, assessing them for potential.
He settled on a bit of belly fat where his stretch marks used to be livid and pink, now ghostly pale.
He held the pen against his skin but couldn’t bring himself to push.
It wasn’t fear of the needle that stopped him, but a lesser-defined discomfort, a stray whisper of dark instinct that gave the serum the look of smiling poison.
A couple of hours later he dug out his participant handbook and found the number to Monstera’s participant hotline. He needed to speak with someone, reassure himself that what he was experiencing—these lapses of memory, these cravings—was normal and safe. He was met with a robotic voicemail.
“We’re sorry, you’ve called outside our normal business hours.”
Ten a.m. on a Monday was outside normal business hours?
He left a message requesting a callback as soon as possible.
Twenty-four hours later, Emmett still hadn’t heard from Monstera or taken his injection.
He ought not to go too long without it, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t right.
Why had no one seen Myra around the store the past week?
Usually she was in every couple of days.
Trying the hotline again, he received no answer and decided to go straight to the source.
“Monstera BioSciences, this is Lisa, how may I direct your call?”
Emmett recognized the voice of the receptionist who’d previously complimented his hair.
“Hi, Lisa, my name’s Emmett. I’m a participant in one of your clinical trials. I’m having some, uh, uncomfortable side effects and I was hoping I could—”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she cut across him. “Let me give you the number to our participant hotline—”
“I have it, and they’re not answering. I really need to speak with Dr. Saito if that’s possible.”
The shine had gone from her voice. “Please hold.”
A wave of futuristic jazz, mid-tempo and cool, swallowed the silence.
The receptionist finally returned to the line. “Dr. Saito’s in a meeting at the moment, but I can take a message.”
Emmett sighed and gave her one. “Can I get her direct line just in case I don’t hear—?”
“Thank you for calling and have a healthy, happy day.”
When Emmett returned home from work that evening, Dr. Saito hadn’t called. He pushed away the feeling that they were trying to avoid him. What would be the point of the trial if they weren’t interested in understanding how the treatment was affecting users?
She was probably just busy, stuck in back-to-back meetings. He’d hear from her in the morning.
In the meantime Emmett returned to the stack of participant paperwork, including the report of findings from the Phase I trial. He felt guilty for not reading it thoroughly before now.
Long, dense, and filled with technical jargon, the read was no easier the second time around.
Buried in the appendices he found a series of participant profiles he’d missed before.
Their unremarkable results mostly reassured him.
One profile described a man who lost 211 pounds over fourteen months, reporting various mild side effects including nausea, gas, and worsening of his preexisting IBS, which proved manageable with over-the-counter antidiarrheal medications.
A twenty-four-year-old female lost forty-three pounds over five weeks before discontinuing the trial after becoming pregnant.
A middle-aged woman reported side effects of “persistent and extreme hunger,” “regular bouts of dissociative amnesia,” and what the author described simply as “unnatural cravings.” Strangely, she seemed to have dropped out of the trial after five months, despite having lost 127 pounds and shown improvement in nearly every category of health.
The reason for her not completing the trial stared up at Emmett from the page.
Participant incarcerated on charge of murder.
Dark thoughts chased themselves around his head. He and this woman had the same bizarre side effects. Then five months in—not much further than Emmett was now—a death.
Had she woken up with blood on her hands too? Had she walked out of work and returned two hours later with no memory of where she’d been?
No. He was jumping to conclusions. That was cocktail sauce on his shirt. Just cocktail sauce. Anyway, he couldn’t even be sure this woman was guilty. For all he knew, she’d been acquitted.
He opened Google on his phone and paused, unsure what to search. The participant profile offered a clue. DOB: 6/20/78. That would make her forty-five, or forty-four when she’d been arrested.
He searched the words san diego woman 44 arrested murder and clicked on the top link, a video posted to the News 8 YouTube channel the previous year.
“Tonight a woman is behind bars, accused of brutally murdering her ex-husband,” said the suited, silver-haired anchor from behind the news desk. “Good evening and thank you for joining us. I’m Todd Getz.”
“And I’m Mariana Laredo,” recited his coanchor. “The neighborhood of Mira Mesa has been left reeling tonight after a man was shot dead in his home. News 8’s Travis Medina is on location with this really disturbing story, Travis.”
“Indeed it is,” said a younger man reporting live from a residential street.
“Tanya Swygert and Ken Holmes had been married for more than a decade when the couple divorced in 2020. Now Swygert is being held at the Vista Detention Facility on first-degree murder charges after the forty-four-year-old confessed to entering her ex-husband’s home and shooting him with his own gun.
“Police found Swygert wandering the streets covered in blood after Holmes’s neighbor reported hearing screams and gunshots next door. But neighbors say this isn’t the couple’s first run-in with the law.”
“Ken used to hit her real bad,” said a neighbor woman in an interview apparently filmed earlier that day. “Called her all sorts of names. Fat cow, fat… I can’t say it. Got so bad near the end the police were out here once a week.”
“Neighbors say that even though the couple’s relationship was turbulent, they were shocked to learn that it was Swygert, rather than Holmes, who had been arrested,” said Medina.
“Tanya was the sweetest person you ever met,” the neighbor continued. “No matter how bad Ken hurt her, you never even heard her answer back.”
“Guess she must’ve been plotting for revenge,” said another neighbor, a man, “but you wouldn’t know it.
She seemed to be doing so good. Lost all that weight—had to be at least a hundred pounds.
And so quick. It was unbelievable. I thought, ‘Finally she’s getting her act together.
Finally she’s moving on.’ But maybe you never move on from something like that. ”
Medina reappeared on-screen. “Swygert’s attorney says that despite confessing to the murder, his client will pursue a plea of not guilty, claiming she was acting under the influence of experimental, mind-altering drugs at the time of the murder.
He added, quote, ‘If Tanya had wanted to kill her husband, she would have done so long before the clinical trial.’ ”