Panacea Read online

  The glass tube disappeared into the pocket of her sweatpants.

  Tommy wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his Giants shirt. “Okay.”

  “Want to play chess?”

  He didn’t. Not really. But since she’d kept him home from school today …

  “I guess so.”

  “Good. Set it up and we’ll play, okay?”

  He set it up, and they played, and he won only one out of three games because all he could think about was that tube in his mother’s pocket.

  Afterward he kept an eye on her. He pretended to go watch SpongeBob in the living room, but peeked back around the corner and saw her shove something deep into the kitchen garbage pail.

  He bided his time, waiting until she went upstairs to use the bathroom. As soon as she reached the second floor he wheeled himself into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. He pawed through the wet paper towels and remnants of breakfast until he found the glass tube. His gnarled fingers had trouble with the rubber stopper, but finally it came free with a soft pop.

  He hesitated for a second—what if Mom was right and it made him sick?—then upended it into his mouth.

  Gah! It tasted awful!

  He forced a swallow, then restoppered the empty tube and jammed it back into the garbage. By the time his mother returned he was playing DNA Wars on his old PS3 …

  … and waiting for the miracle.

  6

  “He’s dead?” Nelson Fife said, staring at Chaim Brody’s body, facedown on the floor.

  The inside of the run-down, double-wide trailer was almost a carbon copy of Hanrahan’s front room: virtually no furniture and the same array of long wooden trays filled with strange little plants basking in artificial sunlight.

  He’d rushed out here to the North Fork from the city, fighting traffic on the LIE, then following his GPS onto secondary roads, then this gravel path to a double-wide trailer on the edge of what would be a potato field when growing season began. All to question a dead man.

  Add that to his endless headache and his patience had just about reached its limit.

  Nelson didn’t know who he wanted to kick more—Bradsher or Brody.

  Brother Bradsher, dressed in the same sack-cut suit he’d worn in the recording, nodded. “Just … keeled over. I don’t think I was here ten minutes when he said, ‘Good-bye,’ and he was gone. Just like Hanrahan.”

  He turned on Bradsher. “What did you say to set him off?”

  “Nothing. I swear. I didn’t even get a chance to set up the camera. But he knew we were coming.”

  “He told you that? How—?”

  “No.” He pointed to the side of one of the growing trays. “Look.”

  Nelson stepped around and stared in shock. Someone had written a number in black Magic Marker on the unfinished wood.

  536

  “But how could he know?”

  Bradsher shrugged. “Maybe he saw what happened to Hanrahan’s house and guessed.”

  Uncle Jim had studied these panaceans. He’d said they were like the old communist cells—independent functioning units, minimal knowledge of each other, connected by third parties. Maybe that was changing.

  “Perhaps. But I still don’t understand why he died so quickly. You sure you didn’t—?”

  Bradsher held up a pair of glass test tubes. “Maybe it was because I came up with these.”

  Nelson felt his knees wobble. “You’ve found some?”

  “I peeked in before I entered and saw him with his arm behind the refrigerator. So that was the first place I looked.”

  Finally … finally!

  Thrilled, he cupped his shaking hands before him to receive the vials. Each was three-quarters filled with a cloudy fluid. He had it … he finally had the panacea.

  “What are we going to do with them?”

  “I’m going to use them to prove to someone high up that we’re not crazy. And once we convince him the panacea is real, we’ll have all the resources we need to track it to its source.”

  Bradsher gestured around. “And what about all this?”

  “Same as with Hanrahan.”

  With a curt nod, Bradsher hurried out. Nelson wandered over to Brody’s cooling corpse. The NSA phone-and-text surveillance had found a number of “miracle cure” hits connected with a Moriches physical therapy facility. Chaim “Chet” Brody had been easy to trace. The backgrounding had made a good case for his being the panacean connected with the cures, and the trays of plants confirmed it. But Nelson needed to see the final piece of the puzzle.

  He pulled a knife from his pocket and unfolded it as he knelt beside the corpse. He grabbed the back of Brody’s long-sleeve T-shirt and slit it top to bottom, then spread the edges.

  Well, well, well … another of those strange tattoos. The final confirmation.

  Bradsher returned with a red metal can.

  “You know the protocol,” Nelson said.

  The fumes that filled the air as Bradsher began sloshing the accelerant onto the plants bumped the intensity of Nelson’s headache from four to six. He headed for the door. Outside in the twilight, he seated himself behind the wheel of his car and dug into the pocket of his suit jacket—the same herringbone he’d worn to the meeting with Pickens—for the bottle of Advil he’d taken to carrying everywhere.

  As with last night—or rather, early this morning—no trace of the plants would remain, and the panacean himself would defy identification for a while. Not indefinitely, but it would take time to determine that he belonged to no gang and was not connected to any drug traffickers. As the local yokels scratched their baffled heads, Nelson would be well on his way to tying up the panacea and its makers once and for all.

  Less than a minute later the trailer burst into flame with a loud woomp! Nelson saw Brother Bradsher hurrying across the yard, silhouetted against the flames. They’d faked the incendiary booby trap on the video he’d shown Pickens. No need for a repeat performance. Tomorrow he’d report a similar story: The panacean dropped dead and then his incendiaries exploded, taking the camera along with everything else. The only new wrinkle would be that Nelson had obtained samples of the panacea before everything blew to hell.

  Nelson dry-swallowed three of the Advil as he put the car in gear and drove away. Was that irony? Taking Advil when he had something in his pocket that would cure his headaches forever?

  He thought about it—he could take one dose and use the other to convince Pickens. No more headaches. Even better, the panacea wouldn’t limit itself to his headaches. It would cure Nelson of everything—these migraines and all other maladies, known and unknown. Really, who knew what was lurking in one’s body? He took care of himself, got a checkup every couple of years, and led a life rigorously free of risky behavior: didn’t smoke or do drugs, ate a vegetarian diet, drank only wine, and that sparingly. But that didn’t mean a cancer couldn’t be smoldering somewhere in his body—say, his pancreas, for instance—hiding, waiting until it had progressed to a terminal stage before revealing itself.

  Tempting, but no. That would be just plain wrong. He had a higher calling. But perhaps …

  He exited the LIE and took the Northern State Parkway toward East Meadow …

  7

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Deputy Lawson said. “Three times in one day. Tongues will be wagging.”

  You wish, Laura thought, as she surveyed the chaotic scene before her.

  She was tired. She wanted to be home. But instead she’d felt compelled to drive out to the North Fork to view another crime scene. Jeff Hager, one of her fellow MEs, had been on deck to take this one, but Deputy Lawson had said the scene was so damn near identical to the Sunken Meadow fire that Laura just had to see it.

  Long Island’s South Fork was the crowded home of all the sundry Hamptons—South, East, West, and Bridge—and their moneyed inhabitants. The North Fork was still relatively rural and had reinvented itself, morphing from corn and potato farms into wine country.

/>   Smoke drifted from the charred ruins of a double-wide trailer situated on the southwest corner of a ten- or twelve-acre rectangle of plowed earth. Two fire trucks and an EMS rig idled around it, red and blue flashers lighting the night. Their work done, the Cutchogue firemen were winding up their hoses while the EMTs hung out.

  Waiting for her most likely.

  What appeared to be a corpse lay on the brown grass under a plastic sheet.

  Also waiting.

  Phil waved toward the firemen. “These boys were just on their way back from Southold when they spotted the smoke and turned in for a look-see. Good thing they did. They managed to pull the body from the trailer but weren’t able to kill the blaze. We don’t have a crime scene—well, not in any useful sense—but at least you’ve got an uncooked DB to work with.”

  “Was he growing something too?”

  “Yep.” He popped his neck as he led her over to the embers. “And it looks like the same kind of super accelerant as before.”

  “So we still don’t know what he was growing.”

  Phil looked at her. “Really? You think he was growing geraniums or something? He had big light racks. It’s an indoor pot farm.”

  She wasn’t convinced. “Cannabis sativa grows how tall?”

  “Eight, ten feet. Oh, I see what you’re getting at: Too tall for a trailer. But these were probably seedlings he was getting started to transplant somewhere else. Or maybe some shorter strain. You won’t believe the hybrids some of these pot farmers are developing these days.”

  Laura shook her head. “Don’t they know GMO is politically incorrect?”

  She’d heard of cannabis hybrids. But something about this didn’t sit right.

  “Forget the plants,” Phil said, reaching for the plastic sheet on the ground. “They just go to motive. Check out the vic.”

  A male corpse lay facedown on the ground. His T-shirt had been sliced open to reveal a strange tattoo in the center of his back.

  As she squatted for a closer look, she noticed other tattoos running up and down his arms, which lay straight at his side, palms up. That was how she saw the number scrawled on his palm.

  536

  It didn’t look like a tattoo. When she noticed the cap of a black Sharpie protruding from the back pocket of his jeans, she had a pretty good idea how it got there. How long ago had he written that? Might be nothing, might be the last thing he did before his death. She turned her attention to the tattoo.

  Phil said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I am,” she replied.

  Yes … this certainly shared features with what she’d been able to discern on the back of the burn vic.

  “Is that the caduceus or whatever you mentioned?”

  “No. But neither was the other one, and what we could see of the burn vic’s tattoo was missing the same features. This is the same size and looks to be the same variation on the caduceus, which means…”

  “… the vics are connected. And owing to the similarities of the crime scenes, the deaths are connected.”

  Laura rose to her feet. “I think that’s a safe assumption, Sherlock.”

  He popped his neck again. “Hot diggity.”

  Laura had to laugh. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say that.”

  “Something my grandfather used to say.” He rubbed his hands together like a miser contemplating wads of cash. “The joint task force is going to want to hear about this: new gang in town.”

  “That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all. Two growers with matching tattoos, both murdered among their plants—”

  “Hold on now with the murder bit. I couldn’t find a cause of death on the first.”

  “But you will. I have faith in that. And in both cases the rival gang committed arson to destroy the evidence. Drug-related felonies galore.”

  She didn’t know where the rival-gangs idea came from—probably just frosting on Phil’s story—but no question about the felonies.

  She stared at the body of the dead grower. Despite the colorful tattoos on his arms and shoulders, the black lines of the snake and the staff stood out.

  Wait … staff? That looked more like a bone … like a femur. And what was with the shooting star? She’d have to do some digging online after she’d posted him tomorrow.

  She sure as hell hoped she could find a cause of death for this one.

  8

  In East Meadow, Nelson pulled into the parking lot of an assisted-living facility run by the Catholic church and called the Advocate. Ceil, the receptionist in the lobby, recognized him and said, “He’s in the common room.”

  He found Uncle Jim in his wheelchair playing pinochle. Some sort of jury-rigged clamp attached to his paralyzed left arm held his cards. He tossed them on the table with his good right.

  Uncle Jim … At age seven, after Nelson’s parents were snuffed out in a head-on crash on the Jersey Turnpike, he’d had no one. So he’d wound up in the care of Child Protective Services with a round-robin of foster homes looming in his future. Then a man calling himself James Fife showed up—his father’s brother, older by two years. He’d never known he had an uncle. Apparently the two of them had had a catastrophic falling out before Nelson’s birth and hadn’t spoken since.

  James had himself declared executor of the estate and moved Nelson into his Brooklyn apartment where he raised him like his own son. His boyhood lacked any and all frills except the live-in housekeeper who saw to his daily needs during his uncle’s frequent absences. But Jim always brought Nelson interesting little artifacts when he returned from his trips.

  As Nelson grew, Uncle Jim taught him the lore and the ways of the Brotherhood.

  Nelson owed Uncle Jim everything—everything.

  “Nelson?” Jim said in a slightly slurred voice as he looked up. His smile didn’t reach the left half of his lips. “What brings you here at night? Everything okay?”

  “Everything is finally right. Can we talk?”

  “Sure. This hand should put me and Jerry over the top. Meet you in my room as soon as I’m done.”

  Nelson had to cut through the lobby to reach Jim’s quarters. He noticed someone different at the reception desk.

  “Where’s Ceil?”

  The new gal looked up from her rosary beads and said, “Just left. Her shift was over.”

  Nelson nodded at the beads in her hands. “Nice to see such devotion. Not enough people say the rosary anymore.”

  “I’m flying to California tomorrow,” she said with a shrug and a smile. “I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  “I’m glad to have a good Catholic working in a Catholic facility.”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know how good I am, but I am a Catholic.”

  Interesting, Nelson thought. “In what way might you not be so good, may I ask? Do you go to church every Sunday and on the Holy Days of Obligation?”

  “Oh, I do all that, but I just can’t get behind some of the stuff the pope says.”

  Uh-oh. He ran into these folks all the time, but rarely were they saying the rosary.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you know, birth control, like the pill. I don’t believe—”

  “You don’t get a choice what to believe,” Nelson snapped, feeling his ire on the rise. “The Catholic faith is not a Chinese menu—‘I’ll take that one from column A and these two from column B.’ No-no. When the pope is speaking on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible.”

  She blinked. “Yeah, but—”

  “There is no ‘but.’” He was aware of his voice rising. “If you don’t believe in papal infallibility, you aren’t a Catholic. You’d do better calling yourself an Episcopalian or maybe a Presbyterian, because you most certainly are not a Catholic! Which means you’re wasting your time with those beads, so put them away. Or better yet, give them to a real Catholic!”

  With that he stormed away.

  He managed to calm
himself by the time he reached Jim’s room. The “room” was more like a studio apartment with a full bath, a small kitchen equipped with a little fridge and a microwave, an electric bed nestled in the rear section, and a small sitting area at the front. Jim might have been able to live on his own, but it wouldn’t be easy, what with his left side totally useless. He had no family but Nelson, who would have been glad to take care of him. But Jim wouldn’t hear of it. He’d found the Advocate, moved in, and was adamant that he liked it here. They served three meals a day down in the dining room, they cleaned his quarters, made his bed, changed his sheets, and he’d made a lot of friends. They bused him to the local Catholic church every Sunday to hear mass.

  As basic as it was, the Advocate was not a step down from how he’d lived before the accident. Despite a decent income from the Company, he’d stayed true to his vow of poverty and always lived below his means—like the monk he was.

  The Lord does everything for a reason, Jim kept saying. I’m in His hands.

  Because he was injured while on assignment, the Company paid the monthly fees. Twenty years now … the injuries fell into the “shit happens” category: The police report had said a teenage girl applying mascara behind her steering wheel ran a stop sign and plowed into him as he crossed a street in Salt Lake City, of all places.

  James Fife was why Nelson had joined the CIA, and why he had become a member of the 536 Brotherhood monastic order. He’d inculcated the truth behind the Scriptures in Nelson from the moment he entered his care. But though the Brotherhood was a cenobitic order, dwelling—or perhaps hiding—in plain sight in the community, his uncle was fond … No, that wasn’t the right word. Attached was better. Uncle Jim was attached to the old ways.

  Nelson would never forget the day he found Uncle Jim scourging himself. He’d gaped at the bloodied flesh of his back as his uncle explained that through the course of Nelson’s life his faith would be tested by both the Serpent and the Lord Himself. He would have to be strong to pass those tests. The scourging was a form of discipline, but also punishment in advance for future lapses.