Brooding City: Brooding City Series Book 1 Read online

  “Always a shame to lose a professional peer,” Wally sighed. “Not a pathologist, mind you, but trained in medicine all the same.” He turned to the other two with an upturned mouth. “We medics patch you up and get you on your way with hardly any thanks in return.”

  Brennan raised an eyebrow. “What’chu talkin’ ‘bout, Wallace?”

  Bishop snorted, then turned it into a cough.

  “You work with dead people,” Brennan continued. “And Nettle filled prescription bottles.”

  “At least you got my name right,” Wally grumbled before regaining his composure. “Medicine is indistinguishable from poison when administered improperly. Do you know how many bodies I have coming through here because they OD’d on what should have been life-preserving medicine? Take our victim, for instance. What would you say is the active ingredient in patches?”

  The two detectives shared a glance.

  “It’s a name too long for you to understand even if I told you,” Wally continued. “But the common name is Chamalla.”

  “I thought there wasn’t enough viable tissue left to sample,” Brennan said skeptically.

  “I’m better than most,” Wally said with a smirk. “It’s corrosive, right? Bleeds right through the epidermis. There was too little surface tissue, sure, but there was more than enough to sample beneath the skin.”

  Brennan grunted. “Clever. So what is Chamalla?”

  “Once upon a time, it was thought to be an alternative cure for cancer. They did a whole miniseries about it, but it was eventually debunked. Instead of tossing the project, other applications were looked into. It showed promise in treating patients with Alzheimer’s. You know how memory works as you get older?”

  They really didn’t, but neither detective interrupted the pathologist.

  “New memories accumulate over time and older, less important memories are stored away. Not gone, not like we used to think, but put away somewhere. Just like how you put Christmas ornaments in the basement when you aren’t using them,” he clarified, his eyes hopeful.

  Bishop nodded politely, while Brennan stood stone-faced. He didn’t know anybody in the city who had a basement.

  “Right. Well just like that, you still have all your memories, they’re just put away somewhere that you don’t think about, or else it’s just difficult to reach. They say that every person you see in your dreams is someone you’ve actually seen in real life, but I think that’s bogus. Since you don’t remember every single thing you’ve done in your life, your brain creates filler material for the parts you no longer remember. Over time, this filler material accumulates and can take on a life of its own, and so we get elderly patients who remember an entire life that never happened.”

  “Kind of running away from us here, Wally,” Brennan warned. “Is there a shorter explanation?”

  Wally looked at Brennan and Bishop alternately with the strangest expression on his face. Disappointment, perhaps, that they weren’t as engrossed in all the details as he was.

  He cleared his throat. “Right. Anyway, this medicine, Chamalla, clears away all the filler. Or it should, anyway. I’ve never used it myself, personally.” Heat suddenly entered Wally’s voice as he gestured to Nettle’s body. “But then someone decided to take that medicine, crank up the dosage to insane levels, and sell it on the streets as dope—”

  The drug was medicine. Brennan’s mind was fuzzy, as if the gears were trying to turn with gum jammed up in the works. Bishop had no such trouble thinking clearly.

  “You’re saying the drug is medicine, but used improperly, is that it?”

  Wally was still in his own rant. “—and they add to it with chemicals and narcotics and—sorry, what? Oh, yes. Of course,” he said, looking at her as if she were a simpleton.

  “How much more Chamalla would you need to use to go from medical to recreational?” she asked.

  “Not much,” Wally said. “The difference is in milliliters.”

  “Why do the patches burn the applied surface? This is supposed to be medicine, after all.”

  “All things in moderation. Remember, they were trying to use this stuff to treat cancer. The alternative was blasting the cells with radiation, and we know the kind of toll that takes on the body. Considering the options, the toxicity of the extract was deemed acceptable. In small doses, it works wonders on our Alzheimer’s patients. With an increased dosage, you would start to run into the more toxic side of things.”

  Wally touched the cold body for a moment, gingerly, on the head. “It’s really ingenious,” he said, “using the patches as an application method. Slow, steady release of the drug, and the epidermis takes most of the blow instead of the internal organs. If—when—you catch our culprit, I would love to have a few minutes to discuss his thought process.”

  “But Wally—er, Wallace,” Bishop corrected herself at his sharp glance. “The patches are practically worthless. Why kill the pharmacist supplying patches when the Chamalla is what is worth killing somebody over?”

  Brennan’s brain finally made connection with his mouth. “There are two points of vulnerability,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Bishop asked.

  “I’m…not sure.” He didn’t quite understand the words himself. He shivered in his still-damp clothes, and something shifted in his pocket. Brennan reached a hand inside and felt the square shape of the NicoClean patch. He pulled it out absentmindedly.

  “The men who jumped me,” he said. “They were prepared by the time I came snooping around. One of them told me that they ‘had their bases covered.’”

  “Which meant they were watching the pharmacy,” Bishop concluded.

  “No, no,” he said, waving a hand. “I think he slipped up. You said it yourself, there are two aspects of the patch: the physical patch itself, and the Chamalla. I think when he said bases, plural, that it meant they have something—or someone—else under their control.”

  Bishop put two and two together. “They need to be getting their supply of Chamalla from somewhere.”

  “When we kept visiting the pharmacy, they must have thought we already knew about the role of the prescription patches in Zachariah Nettle’s murder and that we planned on shutting down the operation. By running us off, they could move back in and press somebody else under their thumb.” Brennan thought of how easily the other pharmacist had rolled under his pressure, and he had barely even been trying. “We need to solve this soon,” he said, “before they draw in anybody else.”

  Bishop faced Brennan squarely, hands on her hips, her mouth set in a stern frown. “We aren’t going to keep them from rolling on Nettle’s pharmacy?”

  Brennan shook his head. “If we stay there, they’ll just move to another pharmacy. The patches are easy, and it would be impossible to cover every store that sells them. There can only be a handful of places that can supply the amount of Chamalla that they need, though. If we hit their source of the drug, we’ll put them out of business.”

  “This is so cool,” Wally said, watching the exchange with wide eyes.

  Brennan placed the damp NicoClean patch over one of the corpse’s empty eye sockets; its edges lined up neatly with the red, ruined skin.

  Bishop made a sign of the cross.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When the sun rose, it did so in secret.

  Thick clouds, dark and foreboding, moved in from the west and settled over the valley. The light drizzle of the night before had been replaced by a steady downpour that hammered against the roof and drenched the valley. Every so often, the fabric of the sky would be torn asunder by a bolt of fire, followed by the beat of a god’s drum that left the earth trembling. Wind howled outside the Scott ranch like a horde of banshees.

  Storms like these were not infrequent in the Midwest, and each time one came along, it was a terrible thing to behold.

  “Out of nowhere!” Uncle Rick remarked, his loud voice managing to rise over the cacophony around them. Though it was impossible to tell by lookin
g at the sky, it was midmorning, and everybody was gathered around the table for breakfast. His father and Uncle Rick had been talking about their plans to renovate the valley when Jeremy joined them, though that conversation fell quiet when his mother emerged from his parents’ bedroom. The topic had abruptly shifted to the weather.

  “Oh, please,” Annabelle said. “You two don’t fool me for a second. Go on talking about whatever it is I interrupted,” she added, feigning indifference.

  It’s a trap! Jeremy mouthed, and his uncle hid a smile behind a napkin as he pretended to dab at his mouth.

  “I have never seen such temperamental weather,” Uncle Rick blustered. He gestured at the rain that pelted against the windows; pellets of hail had joined the mix. “Sunny just yesterday, without a cloud in the sky! A light drizzle last night, sure, but this is just obscene!”

  “Come on, Derrick,” his father said. “You’re exaggerating now. You’ve been all around the globe! A little rain isn’t anything new to you.”

  “This is not a little rain.” Uncle Rick shook his head. “You Midwesterners.”

  “You were born here, too, you know.”

  He ignored Nathaniel’s comment. “One time,” Uncle Rick began, looking between Ellie and Jeremy, “I was in South America, in Brazil. The climate down there is damp. Humid. The clothes were clinging to my back, but my sweat must have smelled like honey, because we were getting bitten left and right by mosquitoes. The air was so thick with them that we couldn’t open our mouths, in case we accidentally swallowed one.”

  “Eww!” Ellie exclaimed, wrinkling her nose.

  Uncle Rick laughed. “It’s true! My buddy Jimmy and I, we shed all but our lightest fatigues, and there was still no respite from the heat.”

  “Fatigues? You were never in any military,” Annabelle argued.

  “We were dressed as local militia,” he confided, “so we had to look the part. Anyway, we were lost and dying of thirst. The closest town was over thirty miles away through dense rainforest.” Jeremy opened his mouth to talk, but his uncle overrode him. “I can guess what you’re thinking: we were in the rainforest, so there was water everywhere for us to drink. But there wasn’t.”

  Uncle Rick licked his lips, the phantom sensation of thirst apparently getting to him. “We were disguised as local militia, but the men we encountered were nothing but thugs, men who offered their ‘protection’ services and burned down entire villages if they refused. Their boss was a drug lord dealing mostly with heroin, and—”

  “I don’t think this is a story you should be telling the kids,” Annabelle said, frowning.

  “But he was just getting to the good part,” Jeremy pleaded.

  His sister echoed him. “Yeah, the good part!”

  “Ellie, you’re definitely too young to hear this.” Annabelle looked sharply at Uncle Rick. “Another time in more adult company, perhaps.”

  Her tone would brook no argument. Ellie protested by refusing to eat the rest of her breakfast, which would only make her more irritable later when she got hungry. Jeremy had finished eating by then, as had his father and uncle, and they excused themselves quietly from the table.

  “Breakfast was delicious, thanks, honey,” Nathaniel said, kissing his wife on the cheek.

  Uncle Rick mirrored the gesture, and a peculiar expression flashed across her face. ‘Pleasant surprise’ was how Jeremy would have described it. Everybody helped clear the table, with the exception of Ellie, who stalked off to her room.

  “She adores his tales,” Nathaniel said.

  Annabelle accepted his dirty plate. “She’s too young for that kind of story,” she insisted.

  Nathaniel nodded. “You’re right, there. But Jeremy isn’t.”

  She vigorously scrubbed the plate clean before placing it in the drying rack with a little more force than was necessary.

  Jeremy listened discreetly; he had his face turned toward the window, as if he were wholly focused on the tempest outside. His face gave no indication otherwise; he had long ago learned the art of eavesdropping.

  He found it difficult to think of them as Mom and Dad anymore. Ever since he had absorbed their memories—a fact which still freaked him out—he remembered every moment of both their lives with crystal clarity and surround sound. They had been together since their time at the university, and to each other they were simply Annabelle and Nathaniel. Jeremy rubbed at his uninjured temple. The memories were affecting his own perception of them as well. And then there were the nightmares.

  For the past two nights, he had had cripplingly terrifying dreams. He never remembered what they were when he woke up—not like he remembered his encounter with Old Ben—but rather they left a kind of psychic scar. Sometimes, he had difficulty reaching a memory of his father’s, or he couldn’t recall a particular day in his mother’s life. They were little things, the kind of absence that would go unnoticed over a lifetime. But he, Jeremy, who had taken in those lifetimes in a matter of seconds, saw them as clearly as missing pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.

  Somehow, whatever he had done to absorb his parents’ memories had been incomplete.

  The scarred memories lived out their existence in forgotten dreams, though; his unconscious mind suffered each night from whatever horror resided in those missing moments. And each morning, he awoke with an awful feeling inside, like a sickness in his heart.

  Even now, as he watched the rain fall and listened in on his parents’ now idle chit-chat, he felt the phantom memories.

  He looked across the room at Uncle Rick, who reclined easily in a chair that was decidedly not facing one of the windows. He considered taking his uncle’s memories, too, but quickly decided against it. There was already too much to absorb right now; between his father, his mother, and himself, he had almost a solid century of memories. No wonder he had stood out so clearly to the Sleeper.

  Jeremy bit his lip. Old Ben was a mystery, too. Jeremy had never given much consideration of what to do after high school; he had assumed that the university would be the next logical step for him, just as his parents had done. But what if that wasn’t the case?

  What if my destiny is to become a Sleeper?

  He frowned. When he was younger, Sleepers had always been the boogeymen. Every child in Odols grew up with that belief. Over the years, he had come to know them as a make-believe tale, something told to children to make them behave, similar to Santa giving coal to those on his naughty list. If the encounter last night was any indication, Jeremy realized, it meant that his entire upbringing had been a lie. Sleepers were real, and they were keepers of the peace.

  Old Ben had offered him the chance to be an agent for good in Odols. By operating in the shadows, never mentioned outside of old wives’ tales, the Sleepers were rendered all the more effective.

  The aching in his head returned. He didn’t mention it outwardly to his family, especially not after the fainting episode from last night, but he felt their eyes watching as he abruptly left his spot by the window. He thought about grabbing a few painkillers before heading back to bed to sleep out the storm, but it would have only confirmed their suspicions. He gritted his teeth and walked straight to his room. He threw a log on the fireplace and it fell with a burst of sparks before slowly catching flame. Within minutes, the room was dry and warm from the crackling fire as a deluge poured down just outside.

  He looked at the summer reading book that he had set aside on the table. It was still open to the first page, face down, just as he had left it. Near it was a small stack of other books, also on the reading list, none of which Jeremy had bothered to open. Now he had no need; they had all been read before by either Annabelle or Nathaniel. There was something conspicuously off about the surface of his reading table, though, and it took Jeremy a moment to realize what was different.

  The sheet of paper on which he had written his father’s signature was missing.

  It wasn’t hidden beneath any of the books, nor had an errant gust of wind blown it to the floor.
It was simply gone. Neither hidden nor misplaced, there was only one other option: it had been taken. Jeremy’s stomach pooled in his feet. His parents had been in here last night after his collapse; surely his father must have seen the paper. Would they suspect it had been a simple forgery? He had done it before for class field trips. It had its flaw, of course, with the awkward ending to the double-T that deviated from his father’s muscle memory signature.

  But then where was the paper now? And why had it not been mentioned at breakfast?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Noel walked Brennan across the street to his apartment and shoved him firmly onto the bed.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I’m half-hoping this is heading in the direction it looks like.”

  She punched him on the shoulder, and it wasn’t gentle. “You’re a pig.” He tried to rise, but she pushed him down again until he was resting against the pillow. It felt like an angel’s bosom beneath his head.

  Brennan patted the open space next to him. “You’re welcome to join.”

  Bishop cocked an eyebrow. “I think not,” she said flatly.

  “Sorry,” he slurred. “Get tired when I’m weird.” He frowned. “Wait, that didn’t come out right.”

  “I understood what you meant,” she said, smiling slightly before her expression sobered. “The answer is still no. Sleep now. You haven’t had a decent night’s rest since this all started.”

  It had been years, actually, but he thought it best not to correct her. The bedspread was heavy and warm, especially since he still wore all his clothes from the previous day.