The Lost (7 page)

Kit looked at Grif.

Ott motioned to the door behind him. “Come with me.”

“Should someone look that laid-back about death?” Kit whispered, edging close to Grif as they followed the coroner into the autopsy room.

“Not on this side of the Everlast,” Grif muttered, and drew her even closer.

“Excuse the mess,” Ott said, leading the way to a sheet-covered body in the room's center. “Nobody around here cleans up after themselves.”

Har, har, thought Kit, swallowing hard as she neared the body. She averted her eyes, as if staring at the dead would be rude, her gaze scanning the long counter opposite them, and the sink rising in its middle. It was as cold and unwelcoming as Kit would've thought, if she'd ever really given thought to the workings of a morgue. Though the drains beneath the autopsy table were scrubbed clean, and the scale next to the body gleamed under the bright lights, Kit shuddered. Feeling her tremble, Grif gave her hand a little squeeze.

The doctor checked his hanging clipboard. “Jeap Yang . . . what kind of name is that anyway?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Age nineteen, sixty-eight inches tall, and he's a featherweight. You know anything else about him?”

Kit looked at Grif, who shook his head, so she said, “He wanted to be a chef.”

“Well, the only thing he's been cooking lately is poison. There are traces of heroin in his system, probably the gateway drug for this one, and a quick-and-dirty hair sample shows residual cannabis, but any cash he had lately, and I guarantee there wasn't a lot of it, went into this drug. He'd have died even without the last few doses.” Niceties over, Ott yanked back the sheet, and pushed at Jeap's white, mutilated arm with his fingertips. “Blood poisoning had already set in. Gangrene in several areas—the arm is only the most obvious. His groin, probably his first and most oft-used injection site, is the worst.” He rolled the sheet back even more. Kit cringed. “The drug certainly lives up to its name. It's a fucking beast.”

“What the hell is it, Doc?” Grif stared at the infection site, his voice tight, and his face so pale that his freckles stood out like constellations against his skin. Kit gave his hand a squeeze this time, and he glanced at her gratefully.

“Don't feel bad,” Ott said, seeing it. “Even I haven't seen a green scaly groin before.”

Kit blew out a hard breath. “I had an infected hangnail once, and that alone had me screaming for antibiotics.” She couldn't imagine having an open wound on her body. Or in it.

“It's called desomorphine,” Ott said, pushing the rotted flesh aside with his thumb. “The street name is
krokodil,
or ‘crocodile' to us English speakers. It's a Russian street drug.”

Kit drew back. “Russian?”

“I know,” he said, shaking his head. His hair bloomed like a troll doll's. “I never thought I'd see it in my life, certainly not stateside. It's incredibly powerful and brutally addictive.”

Kit's own vices didn't extend past caffeine and smokes, but she had friends who'd tried to shake off addictions before, some more successfully than others. “More powerful than heroin?”

The doctor scoffed. “A heroin substitute, but it makes powder look like a sugar high.”

“No kidding.” Grif's mutter made him sound more like himself.

Ott shoved his fingers someplace they shouldn't be, and the fetid smell of rot bloomed in the room. “It's not just the symptoms, though. Necrotic skin is bad, but the withdrawal is what ambushes the user. One hit and you're hooked, but try to quit and that's when it really takes hold.” He glanced up. “Ever experiment with drugs?”

“No,” Grif said.

Kit shook her head. “I don't like the feeling of being out of control.”

“Big surprise,” Grif muttered. She elbowed him.

“Well, I did,” Ott said, bending to peer at places not meant for the human gaze. He was so intent on his search that he missed Kit's surprised frown. “Started popping pills right after med school, then gradually moved on to X, coke, heroin, meth. That's why they don't let me work on the living anymore, and it's how I got into this business. Personally, I know what it's like to be addicted. Professionally, I know what the chemicals are doing to the addict.”

“You're very lucky to have that sort of perspective,” Kit said softly.

“You're lucky you're still alive,” Grif said, and Kit caught him studying the air around Ott's body. He'd once told her that he could see the imprint near-death left on those who'd narrowly escaped it, and he read those etheric outlines as easily as a palm reader scanned a hand.

Ott's must have been bad for Grif to mention it, and the man confirmed it with a dark, drawn nod. “My last hit was eleven years ago, and it put me down hard. The withdrawals lasted about ten days, or so they told me. I lost count.”

“I bet even an hour is like a lifetime when you're in that kind of pain,” Kit sympathized.

He moved his shoulders, as if the memory made him uncomfortable. “And all you have to do is shoot up to make it all go away.”

“So how is
krokodil
different from that?” Grif asked, as Ott covered Jeap's chest cavity.

“Other than a desperate need to keep using it even after your flesh starts decaying?” Dr. Ott blew out a breath. “Imagine that painful week of detox being extended a whole month.”

“After how long of using?” Kit asked, eyes gone wide.

“One hit,” he said grimly. “And that month of agony is non negotiable. You can't tough it out. A colleague of mine went to Russia, did a paper on it. He said they had to tranq the patients just to keep them from passing out.”

Kit let out a low breath, gaze flicking back to the scaly sites on Jeap's upper body. “Now the name makes sense.”

“The Russian doctors call desomorphine addicts ‘the walking dead.' ” Ott shook his head, staring at the remains of what had once been a whole, if not perfect, boy. “The drug literally eats you alive.”

“C'mon, Doc,” Grif said, tone round with disbelief. “Surely word spreads on the street about a drug like that. If people know their flesh is going to fall from their bones, and their mind will break if they try to quit it, why would they still do it?”

Now the doctor looked amused. “Because they're poor, Mr. Shaw. Making illegal drugs more expensive doesn't result in fewer junkies, just more desperate ones. Come here.” He motioned Grif closer to the corpse, and when they were all as tightly gathered as they were going to get, the doctor bent low and sniffed. “Smell that? It's acrid. Like ash if it could still burn.”

Grif looked at Kit, and she knew he wasn't going to be sniffing anything. Kit wasn't exactly excited about the prospect, but she was curious despite herself. The more she learned about this drug, and what it'd done to Jeap, the more ammo she had to chase down its supplier. She sniffed, and immediately pulled back. “Irritating.”

“Think how it felt to him,” the coroner said.

Hands in his pockets, Grif finally leaned over as well. “What the hell is that?”

“Iodine,” the doctor answered evenly. “And some lighter fluid, maybe some industrial-strength cleaning oil, and—most important—some over-the-counter codeine.”

Kit waved a hand like she could rewind the conversation. “Like in cough syrup?”

“Over the counter?” Grif tilted his head. “Sounds harmless.”

“That's just the thing,” Ott said, inhaling deeply, though he appeared more fascinated than repulsed. “It's only over the counter in Russia. You need a prescription here. And it's not harmless once you put those things together. Then you've created a poison the body can't resist.”

He gestured again at Jeap's body, and Kit's gaze followed the movement. The white bone of Jeap's elbow lay exposed, perfectly formed and almost pretty through the tattered tissue.

“It's cheap.” Kit closed her eyes to fight back the tears. And Jeap had been poor. And desperate. And in the end? Alone.

“Heroin has to be grown,” Ott said, covering the body. “Someone has to plant poppies, convert them to opium, turn that into heroin. Then they gotta transport it. None of that's necessary with
krok
. It's a synthetic, so anyone with the recipe can whip it up. Ol' Emeril Lagasse over here probably did all this with a kitchen spoon, a lighter, and a syringe.”

“You do know a lot about it,” Grif commented.

“I wasn't just an addict, I was an addict with access to the medical library.”

“And would you have ever done something like this?” Grif asked, jerking his head at Jeap's destroyed remains.

“I'm lucky I didn't have to make that choice,” Ott replied, frowning. “
Krok
's relentless. Thirty minutes to cook, but only a ninety-minute high. Using this shit is a full-time job.”

One you couldn't quit, Kit thought, breathing out again.

“See that?” Ott said, pointing at a wound that had oozed openly on the corpse's neck.

“Least of his worries,” Grif muttered, though Kit cringed at the open sore.

“The last in a long line,” Ott confirmed. “His hands would have been shaking, either from the withdrawals or the pain. He missed the vein. That creates an immediate abscess.”

Grif fell silent. The lunch Kit forgot to have rose in her throat. Dita's dress size, she thought dizzily, might not be out of reach after all.

“What really stumps me,” Ott went on, “is where the hell did he get the recipe?”

“Good question,” Grif said stiffly.

“Well, let me know when you get the answer.” Dr. Ott was replacing the sheet over Jeap's face, but paused at Grif's pointed look. He gave a humorless laugh. “Don't worry, it's the professional in me that wants to know. Because personally?” The doctor's face darkened, the crazed look fell away, and his face went as dead as Jeap's. “I'd check myself into rehab the moment I even
thought
about doing that.”

Chapter Six

K
it was on her phone before the morgue doors even slammed shut behind them, the Q&A between her and her aunt rapid-fire as she slid behind the wheel. Marin's raspy staccato was an evenly matched rival as they exchanged information, and despite the long night and day, Kit had to smile. It was good to be able to move quickly beyond the niceties and get right to the point.

It was, Kit thought, good to have family.

Kit was still wearing a faint smile twenty minutes later, when she stepped into Marin's office at the
Las Vegas Tribune
. However, the expression fell as she searched her aunt out over the mounds of papers and books threatening to topple from her desk. Kit heard the clacking of computer keys as she crossed the room and finally caught sight of Marin's dark, spiky hair, though her shoulders remained hunched, her head bent.

“What the hell happened in here?” Kit asked, gesturing at the mutating pile of dead trees.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Marin shot back, never looking up, and not missing a key. Someone, Kit thought with a wry smile, was on a deadline.

“I've been up since three
A.M
.,” Kit said, wishing she'd said nothing when Grif, who'd trailed her in, gave her a knowing scowl. “But I still managed to spruce up.”

“Of course you did.” Still typing, Marin added, “I see you brought your lap dog.”

“That's guard dog to you, Wilson.” Grif perched himself on the only free edge of Marin's desk.

Her aunt looked up then, eyes narrowing into slits. “And how're you doin' on that count, champ?”

Grif jerked his head at Kit. “She's still walking this mudflat.”

Marin leaned back in her chair. “Yeah, walked right into a drug den this morning. Where were you then?”

“That's enough.” Kit stepped forward, and Marin's hard gaze shifted. Marin and Grif might like sparring, but Kit's idea of sport stopped short of drawing blood. “Grif's only mistake was in trusting me too much.”

Marin turned back to her work. “Ran into that problem a few times myself.”

Grif said nothing, but Kit sighed. “And if it weren't for Grif we would have never known about this Russian street drug.”

“
Krokodil,
” Marin said, mouth twisting like the word itself was poison. She punched a key, then shifted her laptop around so they could see the images she'd gathered there. “Crap makes chemo cocktails look like Kool-Aid.”

Not to mention chemo was meant to help its host, Kit thought, looking her aunt over. Three years past her last treatment and Marin was thriving.

“Yeah, we already got the Technicolor version of that,” Grif said, jerking his head at the gangrenous images offered up from the bowels of the Internet. “Question is, how'd it get here?”

“Know how to read Cyrillic script?” Marin asked, hitting a button on the computer so that the screen flashed to Russian text.

“No,” they both replied.

“Well, if you did you could print this baby out here and cook up your own fresh batch of crocodile soup. I've been using the Latin alphabet to transliterate it and decipher at least some of the ingredients. Did you know they put paint thinner in this garbage?”

“Don't forget codeine,” Kit added. “Lots of it. So who'd be able to secure enough of it to boil it down into a street drug?”

“A doctor,” Grif guessed.

“Aren't we smart?” Marin then switched her screen to another, this one in English. “A Russian one, in fact. I've already begun searching Russian surnames in the valley. It's a long shot, and total cultural profiling, but it's a start.”

“Ever hear of delegating?” Grif asked her.

“Ever hear of ‘no'?” she said, reclaiming her computer.

Kit interrupted again, trying to get them both back on track. “Ever hear of the Russian mafia plying their drug trade on the Las Vegas market?”

“The Rusanovka
bratva
. They're small, and not too powerful . . . except when they are.” And before either of them could ask, Marin said, “Meet Sergei Kolyadenko, originally from Kiev. He's the
bratva
's comrade and leader. He's also a felon with ties to drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and money laundering.”

“He's fond of action words, I see,” Kit said, writing it all down in her beloved Moleskine.

“He's damned crafty, is what he is. He was out of the country most of last year, returned to his motherland to be treated for an undisclosed illness, but now he's back and word is that he's reasserting his strength.”

“Think he brought
krokodil
back with him?”

“I think he's not above making radical statements. And
krokodil
would certainly do it.” Marin swiveled, yanking the photo she'd just downloaded from the printer, and handed it to Grif. “Sergei and his crew fly under the radar, mostly because they have the great good fortune of looking like the majority of the populace, at least until they open their mouths. It's very hard to hide a Russian accent, not that most of them even try. English is barely a second language to the
bratva
.

“As for the alleged dealers and launderers, the individuals enter and leave Vegas as they please, departing when the heat gets turned up, though not before entrusting someone else with their role. They give the local law enforcement fits, because police never really know who they're looking for. You know those pasty white men. They all look the same.”

Grif passed Kit the photo of the Rusanovka gang. Sergei was as handsomely nondescript as Marin had said. So was the handful of men staggered behind him. However, the woman next to Sergei was a different story. Kit's gaze slid over her milky face, down plentiful curves, and dropped to her name, printed just below. Yulyia Kolyadenko. Sergei's wife.

“So how is Jeap Yang involved?” Kit wondered aloud, handing the photo back to Grif. The kid's dark skin tone had spoken of a different background. “He can't be Russian.”

“So what exactly is he, Asian?” Marin asked sharply as Grif handed the picture back. She shook her head—it was meant for them—so he silently pocketed it.

“Working on it,” Kit replied, already cringing, because she knew what was coming next.

“Dammit, Kit,” Marin snapped. “Don't just come to me with questions. Come to me—”

“With answers,” Kit finished for her, nodding. “Jeap's background check is up next. Including who he was spending his time with most recently. Dennis is going to see if his family will talk to me—”

“Us,” Grif corrected.

“And we know he was hanging out with a new girl.” Kit huffed, blowing her bangs from her forehead. “She was the one who introduced him to the stuff.”

“What a sweetheart.” Marin folded her hands. “She got a name?”

Swallowing hard, Kit dropped her gaze. “Not yet.”

“Goddamn it, Kit.”

“Hey, easy—” Grif started.

“No.” Marin stood so quickly that her chair cracked against the wall. The tower of papers on her desk wavered as she slapped her hands on either side of her computer and leaned forward. “No, I will not go easy on one of my reporters who brings me a half-baked story with more holes than a sea sponge, and asks me to do the majority of the legwork.”

“This is your niece,” Grif tried, but he'd never seen Marin in one of her full-blown tirades. Kit had, which was why she said nothing at all.

“No,” Marin snapped. “Right now she's one of my employees, and she knows better than to cross that threshold with more questions than answers.” Marin turned her attention away from Grif, and Kit felt a familiar warmth flush over her cheeks. “Don't waste any more of my time. Do you want this story or not?”

“Yes.”

“Then give it some weight, Ms. Craig. Facts, not speculation.” Yanking at her chair, she took a seat. “That's the only thing that's going to help Jeap Yang. Not your pity, not your horror.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Chagrined, Kit turned away.

“Give me something that I can put in black-and-white,” Marin yelled after her, leaving out that Kit had gotten ahead of herself. That she'd been so shocked by the horror of
krokodil
that she was forgetting to dot her
i
s and cross her
t
s. That emotion was clouding her judgment.

But Marin didn't have to say it. It was on the faces of everyone in the pressroom who'd overheard the command. And it was in Kit's heart, too, berating her with every beat.

H
ey!”

Kit paused to run a hand over her head as Grif clomped down the stairwell behind her. She wanted to be composed when she reached the ground floor, so she'd opted for the stairs.

“Kit!” Grif yelled again, but Kit was counting stairs, and rummaging for cigarettes in her bag, pissed at herself for not doing better.
Being
better.

What was wrong with her? She knew not to let her enthusiasm get away from her like that. She might be a bit impulsive—and maybe Grif was right that she was a tad flighty, too—and passion was fine in one's personal life. “But not in your professional one,” she chided aloud, and kept counting down.

Old accusations of nepotism and favoritism and other “-tisms” rattled off the old stairwell, and as much as Kit tried to ignore them, they also rattled in her brain. Yes, there were those who believed she worked at the paper solely because it'd been started by her great-grandfather, but none of those people really knew Marin Wilson. She hired, and kept, only the best.

“Hey,” Grif huffed, finally catching up with Kit halfway down the second-to-last flight. “What was that all about?”

“That was me being an idiot,” she muttered, wincing again as she remembered the disdain in Marin's stare. Kit worked hard to prove to her aunt that while she might be the mercurial Shirley Wilson's—Marin's sister—daughter, her father's stalwart blood roared in her veins, too. It burned that she could blow it so damned easily. “I didn't prepare before I went in there. I didn't give her anything to work with or bring anything new to the table. I failed.”

“Failed?” She could feel Grif staring at her. “Honey, you've barely begun.”

“Exactly.”

Grif remained silent for a moment. “But there was more. That was . . . personal.”

Kit reached the ground floor, and pushed steel, emerging into the open air. The heat ambushed her, and she blew out a breath against it. “She expects a lot from me.”

“More than the other reporters?”

“Of course.” Tucking her head, she lit her cigarette.

“Because she hopes you'll take the editorial reins someday?”

Inhaling deeply, Kit looked at him, thinking maybe if she said the words aloud they wouldn't weigh on her so very much. “Because if I don't, then I'll be just like my mother.”

Grif spoke softly. “And what's wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Unless you were her sister.” Kit smiled wryly, then shrugged. “My mother was . . . golden. It was hard on Marin.”

“You're standing up for her,” Grif said, with a tilt of his head.

Kit took a drag, then sighed. “Being my mother's daughter wasn't easy, either.”

Shirley Wilson-Craig—the beautiful black sheep of the Dean S. Wilson newspaper fortune—had married blue-collar, and at the time it was a scandal among the Vegas elite. Shirley had reveled in it, which made Kit smile . . . but it also meant Kit had a mother with a high-class pedigree and no sense of duty, and a father who valued duty but possessed an utter disregard for class.

Kit disregarded nothing. She was twelve when cancer claimed her mother's life, and sixteen when that bullet felled her father. After she'd grieved the second time—broke down, as she told Grif, and put herself back together yet again—she swore that whatever remained of her tenuous life would hold meaning. That's why she was so upset now. She hadn't just disappointed Marin. She'd disappointed herself.

“I thought you loved her,” Grif said, not understanding.

“I did. Still do.” She spoke quickly, because her heart came near to bursting every time she thought of her mother. “She was perfect. Beautiful, graceful, aristocratic, wicked smart.” She smiled wistfully, but the smile faded as a thought ambushed her: If I were more like my mother, Grif would have already forgotten Evelyn Shaw.

“You're all of those things, too,” Grif said, his timing uncanny.

Kit snorted, but waved away his raised eyebrow by saying, “Marin has some other words for me . . . but, look, she's under a lot of pressure. Most newspapers are worth less than the paper they're printed on, these days, and the fate of ours weighs on her. So, no, I'm not standing up for her, but I don't blame her, either. Besides, a dead woman can still cast a long shadow. If anyone knows that, it should be you.”

She hadn't meant to say that last part. It slipped out, more of a murmur around her cigarette than a statement, but Grif's hearing was impeccable, and his hand was immediately on her arm. “What does that mean?”

“I just meant that your wife's death, even though it was over fifty years ago . . .” Kit ducked her head. “It still haunts you.”

“ 'Course it does. But it doesn't cast . . . what'd you say? A
shadow
over me.”

“No,” Kit said, and finally looked up. She swallowed hard. “Just everyone around you.”

Grif's hand fell away. The look on his face was so injured and stunned that Kit wanted to reach for him. But she'd finally said what had been haunting
her
for so long, so not only couldn't she stop, she didn't want to.

“Look, what do you think it feels like?” Flicking her cigarette away, she crossed her arms. “To know the man I love spends most of his waking hours thinking of another woman?”