KISS THE WITCH (8 page)

“
That’s right. That’s why
I want to hear the rest of your theory. So please.”

Carlos took the pack of sugar representing
Williams and placed it on the edge of the table. Without waiting
for us to ask what he was doing, he pushed it off the edge, onto
the floor. I looked at him curiously. “Why did you do that?”

Without smiling, he said, “That was Williams
going over the balcony.” He looked down at the packet on the floor.
“Probably messier than that.”

I slapped his arm just as he was about to
take a sip of his iced tea, causing him to spill some on his lap.
“As messy as that, maybe?”

“
Hey guys. Food’s up,”
said Dominic.

We set the conversation aside and allowed
our server to place our orders on the table. I had the tuna melt,
Spinelli the Philly with cheese and the rest went to Carlos: a
cheeseburger with curly fries, garden salad, bowl of French onion
soup and a basket of chicken fingers. I mention this so that you
will know why Carlos had nothing more to contribute to the
conversation, except of course for the inevitable pass the ketchup
please.

After settling in with our first bites, I
asked Dominic to continue laying out his theory. He picked up where
he left off by knocking aside the next packet of sugar from the
stack representing Delaney.

“
Here we have Rick
Delaney. Delaney was operations and logistics manager. Now, if you
ask me, I think this is the guy that arranged for the actual
break-in. As operation and logistics manager, he was in perfect
position to allow an unauthorized entry into the building. He had
the security codes, computer passwords, gate passes…everything you
need to get in and out of the building without anyone seeing
him.”

“
That’s good,” I said, and
I watched Carlos scoop up the sugar packet that was Delaney and
empty it into his tea. That left one packet remaining. I pointed to
it. “Tell me about Snow.”

“
Ah, yes. Howard Snow.
Senior research supervisor. I suppose if you were looking for
someone who could negotiate terms for the clandestine transfer of a
super-secret commodity to a rival company, you could not do better
than Howard Snow.”

“
Then why kill
him?”

“
Snow? Think about it.
Even after the bad guys get the secrets and physical product in
hand, Snow still has the information in his head to reanimate the
project. It would be like stealing the atom bomb secrets from the
Manhattan project after the first bomb was already produced. If you
still have Oppenheimer, you still have the bomb.”

“
You think it’s a case of
kill the messenger?”

“
It’s possible, but I have
to tell you. If this is a case of simple corporate espionage,
someone sure went to a lot of trouble to cover his
tracks.”

“
It’s not so simple then,
is it?”

“
Not hardly, which still
makes me think there is a lot more to this case than meets the
eye.”

I pointed at the sugar packs. “If these
people were all murdered, and their murders made to look like
accidents, then we’re working with professionals here.”

“
A hit squad?”

“
A very expensive hit
squad. And if nearly everyone involved is dead, we have to look at
who is still standing.”

“
J.P. Ferguson is still
standing.”

“
Right. What do you say
after we finish up here you get back to the office and dig deeper
into Ferguson and Biocrynetix Laboratories? See what we’re
missing.”

“
Got it. What will you two
do in the meantime?”

I looked at Carlos. He had his soup bowl
pressed to his lips. With luck, we would all finish eating about
the same time. “We’re going to take a ride out to the hospital. See
Mrs. Snow. Someone has to tell her about her husband. It might as
well be Carlos.”

“
What?” Said Carlos, as
French onion soup dribbled down his chin.

Spinelli and I laughed. It was worth it for
letting him off the hook. “Relax. I’ll tell her. She’s not going to
want to smell your onion breath anyway.”

We left The Percolator at 1:00, and were
barely a block away when Carlos brought up Dominic and Ursula
again. I really wanted to concentrate on the case, maybe sort a few
things out in my head. But Carlos has a way of driving the topic
sometimes. And sometimes it is best just to roll with it.

“
So, did you notice?” He
asked.

“
What?”

“
He didn’t mention Ursula
even once.”

“
So?”

“
Don’t you think that’s
kind of strange?”

“
How so?”

“
He’s getting married this
weekend. You would think that is all he can think
about.”

“
Maybe it’s all he can do
to bury himself in his work to keep from thinking about
it.”

“
Huh, you know what I
think? I think he doesn’t want to go through with it.”

“
The marriage?”

“
Yup.”

“
Why do you say
that?”

“
I think he’s
scared.”

“
Well of course he’s
scared. It’s a big step.”

“
No, I mean I think he’s
scared of marrying a witch. Who knows what could happen if the two
of them get into an argument. She might turn him into a newt or
something.”

“
She won’t turn him into a
newt.”

“
How do you
know?”

“
Because Lilith and I
argue all the time. She has never turned me into a
newt.”

“
That’s `cause you’re a
witch, too.”

“
No, it’s because deep
down she loves me, and people who love each other don’t go around
turning their lovers into newts.”

He grimaced lightly, and I could tell he
wanted to add something. I waited until it seemed obvious he was
not going to say it, and so against my better judgment, I asked
him, “What’s on your mind now?”

He looked over at me, his expression
unchanged. “What is a newt, anyway? Is that like a frog?”

“
It’s a type of
salamander. Haven’t you asked me that once before?”

“
Have I?”

“
I think so.”

“
Oh, then I forgot.” He
turned his attention back to the road and seemed to give it some
serious thought before coming back. “I see Dominic as more of a
frog. Don’t you?”

I shook my head and held my answer in
reserve.

Walking through the hospital, I got an
unsettling feeling, an uneasy sort of vibration inside me that I
could not explain. I felt it once before at the cemetery. We were
burying Manny Sung, a retired cop who died of a heart attack while
making love to his mistress, a woman one-third his age. Lilith told
me that restless spirits try to invade the living, and that I might
feel it at places like that where souls and bodies are newly
separated. Sometimes, the newly dead cannot accept that their
vessel is gone, so they try to take over another that is living.
Their attempts are feeble, though, because the soul occupying the
live body is much stronger and easily evicts the invader. The
battle is brief and only those with a keen sense of their inner
light, such as witches, can detect the attempted coup.

I nudged Carlos with my elbow and said to
him, “Someone died here recently.”

He scoffed. “Yeah, well it is a hospital,
Tony. They can’t save everyone.”

“
No, you don’t understand.
This one I can feel. It wants me to know something, but I don’t
know what.”

“
Maybe it’s the Jane Doe I
investigated earlier. She wants to tell you who swiped her body
from the morgue.”

“
Yeah, maybe,” I said, not
ruling it out for a minute. “I’ll let you know.”

We stopped at the reception desk and
identified ourselves proper. I asked if we could see Mrs. Howard
Snow. From the look on the woman’s face, I could tell that was not
going to happen.

“
I’m sorry, Detective,”
she said. “Mrs. Snow departed last night.”

“
She checked
out?”

“
She died.”

“
Died?”

“
In her husband’s arms at
11:06 PM. We cremated her remains this morning.”

“
I see.” I turned to
Carlos. He seemed less surprised than optimistic.

“
Well,” he said. “Guess
that lets you off the hook now, doesn’t it?”

“
How do you
figure?”

“
Now you don’t have to
tell the old girl that her husband is dead.”

The woman behind the desk gasped. We both
looked at her. I smiled politely and apologized. Carlos smiled,
too, adding only, “Well he is.”

Back at the office, Spinelli was eager to get
us to my desk where he laid out a stack of documents five fingers
high. Accompanying that were photographs of a dozen people from
Biocrynetix Laboratories, including the six that died in bizarre
accidents within the last three weeks.

“
What is all this?” I
asked, though I knew without saying. Spinelli likes to present his
findings in a way that seems choreographed for maximum effect. It
is not that he is a control freak, per se, as much as he is
compulsive obsessive over information assimilation and its lineal
dispersion. In other words, he gets antsy if you jump ahead of his
carefully laid out presentation.

“
Glad you asked,” he said.
“This here,” he flattened his palm atop the stack of documents, “is
what I downloaded off the internet. Most of it comes from
Truthineessence.com, a grass roots radical organization opposing
the research and development of anything that simulates,
replicates, manipulates or destroys life. Lately, it has dedicated
itself strictly to exposing the truth about QE647 and its
disastrous potentials.”

He tapped the pile with his hand. “These
documents outline a decade of secret research conducted by
Biocrynetix Laboratories and its affiliates. To date, they have
spent billions on research and development, and now they are poised
to make a fortune off their research.”

“
Some fortune,” I said.
“If they spent billions already, good luck to them getting it
back.”

“
No, you don’t understand.
They expect to make trillions worldwide.”

“
Trillions? For a corn
syrup substitute?”

Spinelli shook his head and smiled coyly.
“Tony, QE647 is not a corn syrup substitute. It is the elixir of
life itself.”

“
Excuse me?”

“
Look. Life, by
definition, is organic based. There are four major categories of
organic compounds found in all living things.”

“
I knew that,” said
Carlos.

I laughed. “Of course you did.”

“
No, I do. They are
carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids.”

“
Huh?”

“
He’s right,” said
Spinelli. “But life is not that simple. You have a smorgasbord of
chemicals you need to mix in just the right proportions. You have
water, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, as well as a host of
others; sulphur, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, magnesium,
calcium–the list goes on. You mix them all in just the right order
and concentration and you have the very essence of
life.”

He gauged my reaction with a tentative
smile. Clearly, he was in his element. I nodded affirmatively.
“Okay, you got me. Go on.”

He continued. “The thing is this. The exact
balance of these chemicals has eluded chemists and alchemists for
millennia. Until now. QE647 is not a sugar or corn syrup
substitute. It is a reciprocating compound that when energized
becomes the essence of life, a quasi essence, if you will, capable
of auto-regenerating biologically. With a suitable base of
genetically engineered DNA, the organic structure can generate into
any type of life form conceivable.”

“
Quasi essence?” I think I
laughed at that. “It sounds like the stuff of science
fiction.”

“
It was at one time, but
no more. The talk is that Biocrynetix Laboratories successfully
completed production of a stable version of quasi essence and now
they want to take it and their company to the New York Stock
Exchange.”

“
That explains their
reluctance to let the media get a hold of this story.”

“
Sure, between the theft
of the research and the deaths of six employees, who would want to
buy stock in the company?”

“
Something tells me this
case has just gotten considerably more complex.”

“
And mysterious,” said
Spinelli.

“
How so?”

“
J.P. Ferguson, the CEO of
Biocrynetix?”

“
Yes?”

“
He never called the FBI
or the State Police. We are the only ones he called to look into
this case.”

I saw Carlos raise a brow at that and I knew
he and I were thinking the same thing. I said to him, “You
ready?”

“
Whenever you
are.”

Spinelli asked, “Where are you two going
now?”

“
To pay another visit to
Ferguson,” I said. “See if there isn’t anything he forgot to tell
us.”

Carlos said, “Oh, he forgot to tell us
something all right. Maybe we can play good cop bad cop to get it
out of him.”