“So what’s our next move?”

“We wait. He’ll contact you because he needs you, not the other way around. Your goal is to solve Nelson’s murder. If you fail, your life goes on unchanged. He ain’t your brother. But Bevel here wants the money Nelson promised. For him it’s a definite game changer.”

3.

Promptly at nine Friday morning, Bruce and Nick entered the nameless mirrored tower where Alpha North Solutions hid itself. Lindsey Wheat met them at the elevator and Bruce introduced Nick, who drew a look with his faded jeans, battered sneakers, colorful T-shirt, and oversized sports coat with tattered elbow patches.

“Nick here was a friend of Nelson’s and was with me when we discovered his body,” Bruce said, almost apologetically, though he didn’t care if she approved or not. He was paying her.

They followed her to her office, with Nick soaking up all of the surroundings, what little there were. The interior designer who outfitted the place had apparently been ordered to avoid all color and warmth.

They gathered around a small conference table and prepared their coffees. Bruce cared little for chitchat, and when Lindsey asked Nick for his plans after college, Bruce said, “Look, let’s skip the preliminaries. You have news. I have news. Let’s get on with it.”

She smiled and said, “Indeed.” Then she picked up a report, adjusted her reading glasses, and began, “We infiltrated three nursing homes in rural Kentucky. One owned by Fishback, one by Grattin, one by Pack Line Retirement. As you know, Fishback and Grattin are privately owned and have deplorable compliance histories. Pack Line is the worst of the publics. More about them later. We started in Flora, Kentucky, a backwater little town of three thousand, and quickly managed to sign up a couple of employees. The first was Vera Stark at Glinn Valley, the Fishback facility. I handled Vera myself and slowly brought her along. She provided the names of the advanced dementia patients, the nonresponsive ones, more commonly referred to by staff as ‘Nons,’ as I have learned, along with several other nonflattering nicknames. After she gave us the names, I convinced her to research the types of formula and meds that are tube-fed to the patients. Because the place is perpetually understaffed, Vera began volunteering to handle the feedings, something that is not unusual. The syringes are usually loaded in the pharmacy and given to the staff on duty, but security is not tight. Rules and procedures are not always followed. She lifted a new syringe, brought it to me, and I ordered a box of the same. We loaded a substitute with the same formula and Vera agreed to swap it with a real one. Over the course of two weeks, she made about three dozen swaps from four Nons, giving us plenty of samples to analyze. The bottom line is that there is nothing suspicious being administered to these patients, not at Glinn Valley. As far as Vera could tell, the meds are always given with the feedings, three or four times a day. She also noted that the Nons receive much better care than the other patients. Plenty of calories and water, cleaner beds, hourly turnings, and so on. Gotta keep ’em alive, you know.

“Meanwhile, a colleague named Jumper was handling a young lady named Brittany Bolton, an orderly at Serenity Home, a Grattin facility across town. Brittany’s story became far more complicated because she planned to be a star witness in an abuse case. Seems she saw one of her coworkers raping a young lady who’s been brain-dead for a long time. Brittany claimed the girl was pregnant and she was probably right. Brittany did the same syringe swap and gave us over forty samples from seven different patients. Our lab technicians here in D.C. found the usual concoction of various formulas and meds for blood pressure, diabetes, dementia, blood clotting, blood thinner, blood thickener, pretty much the entire menu. Plus some vitamins. And then they found something they could not identify. A mysterious ingredient that was neither food nor vitamin. And it appeared in all forty samples Brittany lifted from Serenity. Our scientists ran test after test but got nowhere. So Jumper went back to Brittany and said we needed more, we needed to get inside the pharmacy.

“This would take time. I moved on to the third facility, a Pack Line Retirement home in an even more rural area about an hour from Flora. I made contact with a twenty-year-old newlywed father with a kid, working for thirteen dollars an hour. Because Pack Line is a public company its pay scale is slightly better. He needed cash and took the deal. We eventually got samples from five Nons, and all checked out. Nothing suspicious.

“Back to Brittany. She volunteered to work double shifts so she would be on the floor late at night. We gave her a list of every medication and vitamin that the labs had identified so far, and she memorized it. She already knew most of the meds anyway. Without creating suspicion, she managed to learn her way around the pharmacy and realized that she could leave with certain over-the-counter items—aspirin, cough drops, Band-Aids, and so on—almost any time she wanted. Because of staffing issues, she told her supervisor that she was willing to learn how to handle the food and meds for the feedings. Eventually, she walked out with a jar of something called vitamin E3, a generic-looking capsule that could pass for almost any supplement. Don’t know how much you know about vitamins but there is no such thing as E3. It sent off alarms in the lab and went through every possible test. The bottom line is that it’s an obscure drug called Flaxacill, one that’s never been on the market. It’s never been approved anywhere because no one has tried to get it approved. The story is that it was accidentally created as some by-product in a Chinese lab twenty years ago and was tested on a few human guinea pigs over there. It was dropped immediately when they realized that the drug causes vomiting and blindness.”