Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (22 page)

“Are you all right?” Dani asked.

“Something I ate,” Quinn said, waving off the pain as a minor inconvenience. “Dani told me Amos was taking part in a drug trial and gave me a sample of the drug she thinks he may have been taking.”

“Oh, did she?” Casey said, looking at Dani with surprise.

“I was going to tell you about it once we had the results.”

“Which we do,” Quinn said. “I got an e-mail from my friend at Columbia, who did a fine job, I must say. I think she stayed up all night.”

“I didn’t know it was a she,” Dani teased.

“Illena,” Quinn said. “She’s the reason I had to dump Otto on you. She’s allergic to dogs. Anyway, the medication Amos was on appears to be an SSRI. That’s a selective serotonin—”

“Reuptake inhibitor. I know what an SSRI is,” Casey said. “It’s an antidepressant.”

“It’s a class of antidepressants,” Quinn said. “Including Prozac and Zoloft and Celexa and the like. The drug Amos was testing seems to have been sort of a one-pill-fits-all designer antidepressant. If I had any money and knew what company invented this thing, I’d buy as much stock as I could. Amos should have been flooded with good feelings.”

“But he wasn’t,” Casey said.

“No,” Quinn agreed. “His adrenaline and noradrenaline weren’t being utilized, and his dopamine levels were nonexistent, except, I suspect, from what Dani told me about his psychopathic behaviors, when he could self-medicate with violence. Remember that catecholamines regulate the fight-flight response. I think the drug he was taking created a craving for that sort of behavior. The fight. Not the flight.”

“Well, that ain’t good,” Casey said.

“It gets worse,” Quinn said. “I could be wrong, but here’s what I think. If this medication were given to children, or if it were taken by pregnant women, it would create a large population of boys, and some girls too, who would seem to be very happy and content, and they would seem like perfect students and get straight As.”

“You could sell a lot of something like that,” Dani said.

“Yes, you certainly could,” Quinn said.

“Is this the Provivilan everyone is talking about?”

“No,” Quinn said. “It’s something else. Maybe a beta version. I don’t know.”

“So what’s the problem?” Casey asked.

“The problem is that in that population of boys and girls, the medication would both induce an artificial case of autism and mask it. By inhibiting the Purkinje cells. The kids would seem sweet and slightly robotic.”

“Stepford children,” Dani said.

Quinn looked puzzled.

“It’s an old horror movie,” Dani said. “Which I gather you never saw.” “I didn’t,” Quinn said. “Anyway, for a while you wouldn’t know there was a problem.”

“Until?” Casey asked.

“Until they hit puberty,” Quinn said.

“What would happen then?” Casey said.

“Well, in autistic children, the onset of puberty and the hormonal influx that that involves often result in outbursts of uncontrollable anger.”

“What would happen in normal children who take the drug?” Dani said. “Or whose mothers took it when they were pregnant?”

“The girls would be the lucky ones, relatively speaking. They’d have all the usual problems with sexual maturation, multiplied by a factor of maybe ten. Maybe more. The boys would fare much worse.”

“How so?” Casey asked.

“It’s hard to predict.”

“Try.”

“I’d say,” Quinn said, taking a deep breath, “with a fair amount of certainty, that they would become, rather quickly, emotionally overstimulated beyond their ability to cope.”

“Uh-oh,” Casey said.

“And then,” Quinn continued, “they would become physically and emotionally addicted to the pleasure-giving dopamine released by angry outbursts and violent behavior, without caring about whether or not what they did was self-destructive.”

Quinn paused to let his words sink in.

“Assisted by the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline, producing feats of superhuman strength,” he concluded. “I, for one, would not want to be around when it happens. I thought of a name for the compound in Amos’s brain. Sort of catchy.”

“What?” Dani asked.

“I might call it the ‘Doomsday Molecule,’” Quinn said.

18.

“Was that my phone?” Tommy said as he set a stainless steel colander with a half dozen large fresh eggs the color of mahogany on the kitchen counter.

“It was Dani,” Carl said. “She said they’re going over to the Gardener farm with a warrant. She was hoping we could join her.”

“How’d she sound?”

“A little tired. She’s going over the lab results on Amos Kasden with her ex-fiancé, Quinn Whatshisname.”

“Technically, they weren’t officially engaged,” Tommy said.

“These days, who knows what’s official?” Carl said. “Whatever happened to the rock you got Cassandra?”

“It’s parked in the garage.”

Carl looked confused.

“When she gave the engagement ring back, I sold it on eBay and bought the V-Rod.”

“I have to say, I was looking forward to officiating at that wedding.”

Tommy was placing the eggs in a tray in his refrigerator.

“You ever think about her?” Carl said.

“Who?”

“Cassandra.”

“Not really. I guess when I see her picture in the supermarket checkout line, sometimes I think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

“You dodged a bullet.”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but it all worked out for the best. And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met Dani. Everything happens for a reason. Why do you ask?”

“I guess she’s on some magazine cover again,” Carl said. “Some soccer player broke her heart.”

Tommy shrugged. “It’s always something. Or someone. I told her she could call me if she ever needed to,” he said. “I think we’d just seen
Toy Story
. Whichever one had the song ‘You’ve Got a Home in Me.’ That’s what I told her. I actually misquoted it. The line is ‘You’ve got a
friend
in me.’ I’m glad she hasn’t called. She was a lot of work. Hey, I gotta go fill the feed bins.”

Once Tommy had returned to the coop, Carl checked out the window to make sure he was busy, then picked up Tommy’s cell phone and searched his contacts list. Carl’s body ached, a throbbing in his muscles and joints, as if he were coming down with a fever. He tried to tell his hands not to do what they were doing, but the more he tried to resist, the more they hurt. When he found the listing for Cassandra Morton, he scrolled down until he located a mobile number marked as private. He opened the screen to send a text message, tapped in the words
REMEMBER—YOU’VE GOT A HOME IN ME. XO
, and then put the phone back where he found it. The part of him that was still Carl felt guilty for betraying his friend, but when he thought he needed to warn Tommy, a louder voice in his head said,
You will not!
as an electric charge shot through him and left a sizzling sound in his ears.
That is just a small taste of the pain I can give you—my power over you is complete!

When his cell phone rang an hour later, Tommy picked up and, sounding surprised, said, “Oh, hey—we were just talking about you . . . All right. See you then.”

“Who was that?” Carl asked.

“Dani. Just letting us know she’s headed for the farm.”

“I wonder if she’s bringing Quinn,” Carl said. “I’d love to meet him. She tells me he’s an absolute genius.”

Tommy drove the Jeep, pausing momentarily a mile from his house to move aside a deer carcass lying in the middle of the road, a stag with a full set of antlers and what Tommy took for a frightened look on its face, mouth frozen open, eyes wide. Tommy knew he was probably projecting. It was, after all, rutting season, and deer were everywhere. He used his phone to call a nearby wolf sanctuary where a nonprofit conservancy was trying to raise and eventually restore to the wild endangered populations of Mexican gray and red wolves. He told the director where she could find the carcass, as local roadkill made up a large part of the wolves’ diet. Carl stayed in the car while Tommy dragged the buck to the side of the road. Tommy didn’t mind, but it was unlike Carl not to volunteer his assistance.

He saw Dani’s car parked in front of the Gardener farmhouse, next to a police cruiser and a white panel van with a large gold key painted on the side. Beyond the house the water of Lake Atticus was gray and choppy, waves driven by a cold wind from the north. One of the cops waiting by the car was Tommy’s friend, Frank DeGidio, who had his hands deep in the pockets of his uniform jacket for warmth.

“Tomaso!” DeGidio called out. “I wasn’t expecting
you
.”

“Dr. Harris called and asked us to come by,” Tommy said.

“I got a guy says you and her were homecoming king and queen back in the day.”

“Don’t hold it against me. Or her.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. I know how tough it can be to be popular.”

“No, ya don’t, Frank,” Tommy said, patting his friend on the shoulder.

Frank saw Tommy pull something out of his jacket pocket. “What’s that?”

“Infrared camera,” Tommy said, showing it to him. He pointed it at the house, which registered the same temperature as the air around it. He pointed it at the second cop. “Did you know your partner has chemical hand warmers in his pockets?”

“Are you kiddin’ me?” he said. He turned to his partner. “Jimmy, you holding out on me?”

They joined Dani, Detective Casey, and the locksmith on the porch. The locksmith had an old manual he was consulting to research antique locks.

Tommy put his arm around Dani, gave her a hug, and kissed her. “How you holding up? Where’s Quinn?”

“He went to walk the dog,” she said. “Who is eating me out of house and home. But Arlo loves him. I didn’t know cats and dogs could get along so well.”

“I thought Quinn was staying at the inn.”

“Quinn is. His dog isn’t.” She looked over her shoulder to the locksmith. “Apparently the lock on the door is straight out of the Middle Ages.”

Detective Casey interrupted them, holding a business card between his two fingers like his number had been called at the deli counter.

“Dani says you both met this guy,” he said. “His card was under the door knocker.”

“George asked him to come by to appraise his mother’s art collection,” Tommy said.

“Oh yeah?” Casey said. “When did he do this?”

“After his mother died,” Tommy said. “Actually, I take that back. He didn’t say when George asked him. Just that he left a message.”

“Well, then he should be here, shouldn’t he?” Casey said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

Casey told DeGidio to send someone to pick up Julian Villanegre and invite him to join them. While Casey made arrangements, Dani brought Tommy and Carl up to speed as briefly as possible on the theories and
explanations Quinn had laid out after looking at Amos Kasden’s proteomics. She told them the drug they’d gotten a sample of promised to create walking time bombs, children programmed to explode into anger they’d never be able to control.

“Was the sample you gave him Provivilan?” Carl asked her.

“No way to know.”

“Have you figured out who provided it?”

“No. And I don’t dare text him because it might give him away,” she said. “We haven’t had any luck tracing the cell number.”

Finally the locksmith got the door open. He then asked Casey if he could take the lock mechanism out of the door and study it because he’d never encountered anything like it. He was clearly disappointed when Casey told him he didn’t have the authority to allow that.

Casey opened the door, stepped into the darkness, looked around for a second, then moved aside so the others could enter. Outside the daylight was fading.

Casey noticed the glow of Tommy’s handheld infrared. “You looking for ghosts?”

“Demons,” Tommy said. “But they’re only going to show up if they’re standing still.”

Casey smiled at what he took for a joke. “Anything?”

“You’ll know when I know, Detective,” Tommy said, smiling back. He used the scanner to sweep the living room. Carl ducked behind him so as not to get in the way. “All clear.”