WEDNESDAY

1

Dawn came out of the bathroom after her morning retch. Nothing had come up and the nausea didn't seem so bad this time. Maybe it was easing off. But she was like totally exhausted. She could so fall right back into bed this minute, but her mouth was parched.

As she passed through the bedroom, she glanced at Jerry, still asleep. She stopped short and stared.

Ohmygod, his nose! What happened to—?

Then she remembered. How could she forget that beating he got? His nose looked awful. Worse than last night. At least she thought so. Last night was a little fuzzy, almost as if she'd been drinking. But no chance of that with Jerry around.

She went downstairs and flipped on the TV on her way to the kitchen. She gulped Diet Pepsi straight from the bottle, then carried it back to the living room. She sipped more as she watched some news story about a "suspicious" suicide in Forest Hills. The woman's identity was being withheld until next of kin were notified. The suicide was deemed "suspicious" because of the phone call that had tipped off the police.

A strange feeling swept over Dawn as she listened. For some reason she thought of her mother.

Mom? No way. She so wasn't the suicide type.

Yeah, she'd been acting totally strange lately, but she'd never…

A wave of nausea rippled through her stomach—a different sort of nausea. She went cold.

Mom?

She hunted for her phone, found it on the kitchen counter—didn't remem-ber leaving it there, but whatever. She speed dialed her home. She wasn't going to speak to her, just hear her voice and hang up.

One ring… two…

Come on, pick up—

A man's voice came on after the third ring.

"Pickering residence. Who's calling, please?"

Dawn's voice locked and her heart froze. Her mouth moved but made no sound.

"Hello?"

"Is… is Mrs. Pickering there?"

"Who's calling, please?"

"I-I'm her daughter."

"You're Dawn Pickering?"

"Yes." She felt her knees softening. "I-I-I want to speak to my mother."

"We've been trying to get hold of you since last night. I'm afraid I have some bad news."

Dawn dropped the phone and began to scream.

2

"Your suspicion was spot on," Levy said as he made a sandwich out of his side orders of toast and hash browns. "That cola was loaded with flunitrazepam."

"Never heard of it."

"Its brand name—it's not legal in the U.S.—is Rohypnol."

"Ah." Jack nodded. It made sense now. "Roofies."

"Is that the street name? It's also a date-rape drug. With the amount she had in her, that woman could have been gang raped and never remembered a thing."

At least she'd still be alive, Jack thought.

"How do you know how much she had in her?"

Levy took a huge bite and spoke around it. "I don't. But the assay calculated a concentration of zero-point-zero-three milligrams per cc. That comes out to about one milligram per ounce. If she'd had a typical serving of eight to twelve ounces…" He shook his head. "You could do just about anything to her."

"Including slit her wrists?""

"Obviously."

Right. Obviously.

Jack clasped his hands in his lap to keep from smashing his coffee cup into Levy's face.

"You son of a bitch."

The second half of Levy's potato sandwich stopped halfway to his mouth.

"What?"

"You lied to me about the alibi. You never had any idea where Bolton was when Gerhard was killed."

"Okay, th-that's true. But I was under orders. I had no choice."

Should have followed his gut when it told him Bolton had done Gerhard. But no, Levy's lie had let him feel it was just safe enough to leave Bolton on the street a little longer.

Shit.

Jack leaned forward. "A good woman, a concerned and loving mother is dead, murdered by someone you were supposed to lock away until the sun went out. She's dead because you helped slap a fresh coat of paint on that human Dumpster and put him back on the street. Now here you sit, stuffing your face with as much concern as if one of your lab rats died."

Levy leaned away from him. "I—I had to alibi him. I have a family, a life, an identity. I'm more vulnerable than you."

Maybe, maybe not.

Jack stuffed his blooming rage back into its cage, took three deep breaths, then…

"Will they pick up Rohypnol on a routine drug screen?"

Levy blinked and looked confused by the change of subject. "I… don't… know. I'd expect it to send up flags in the benzodiazepine category, which is a part of just about every screen, but I couldn't guarantee it. It would depend on what sort of blood sample they were able to obtain. Urine would be the best, since the drug's excreted by the kidney. Of course, if they don't have any blood or urine to work with, they could always try her CSF."

"Which is?"

"Cerebrospinal fluid. It's the liquid that bathes the brain and spinal cord. I don't know if that would work, but it's worth a try."

Jack would make a call and suggest that to the ME as soon as he left Levy. That decided, he had another concern.

"What haven't you told me about what this agency and the DoD are really up to with this oDNA?"

"I've told you—"

"Yeah, yeah, you've told me a lot, not all of it true. You say if you can con-trol the trigger gene you can turn them all into Alan Alda. But there's got to be another agenda. I mean, it's not the Department of Public Health and Safety we're working with here. What are they really going to do? Create oDNA-loaded soldiers and control their trigger genes so they're all milquetoasts during peacetime, then stop treatment and let the dogs out during combat?"

Levy dropped his sandwich. "Wh-where did you hear that?"

Jack stared at him. He looked bloodless.

"I just pulled it out of the air. You're not telling me—?"

"Of course not, of course not. I… I just thought… I mean, I was just wondering where you might have heard something so far-fetched and ridiculous." He pushed his plate away. He seemed to have lost his appetite. "The, um, crime scene. You were there. Any sign that he left evidence?"

Levy apparently wanted a change of subject. Jack let it go. If it were true, he could do nothing about it. And with the way this so-called therapy was working, the plan would never get off the ground.

"Not that I could tell. What about the Pepsi bottle? Any prints?"

"I'll hear today."

"And if his are on it, will that be cause enough for your people to haul him in?"

"If it were up to me, absolutely. But it will be Julia's call, and I can almost guarantee she won't. She'll say it's just an indication to up the dosage."

Jack clasped his hands tighter.

"From where I sit, Vecca's as bad as Bolton. She pointed him in Gerhard's direction, didn't she? Why? To test the suppresser therapy?" Levy's expression told him he'd hit a nerve. "That was it, wasn't it. Rattle his cage and see what he'd do. Did the same to me. Maybe she should be on this therapy. Anyone ever test her for oDNA?"

Levy shook his head. "I wouldn't know. I wouldn't be surprised if she had none."

Jack lowered his voice. "She's a killer, damn it! She might as well have slit Christy's wrists and held Gerhard's head under water herself."

"Oh, she could never do that. She's not violent—and that's the hallmark of oDNA-influenced behavior. But I do believe she's a sociopath—a scientific sociopath. She sees life as a series of well-coordinated chemical reactions. And death is merely the cessation of those reactions."

"That doesn't make her less responsible. She fingered me, and so Bolton thought he had to stop me. When he couldn't do that by his usual direct means—killing me—he did it indirectly by killing the person who'd hired me. I'm laying that right on Vecca's doorstep."