The Abbey (17 page)

“I need you to fill me in,” he said. “Are you telling me these were actually packaged like this at a crime scene?”

“I pulled these tubes out of a safe. They were filled and sealed before anyone from
IMPD
touched them.”

Mack turned the vial over. The liquid cascaded down.

“Since I don’t have a mass spectrometer, I can’t tell you what’s in here definitively. That said, we can at least run a Scott test to see if it has cocaine in it. That cool with you?”

I had no idea what a Scott test was, but I trusted Mack knew what he was doing.

“This going to cost me extra?” I asked. “Maybe you’ve got a dead hooker in a trunk you need taken care of?”

“No, but I like the attitude,” he said, putting my tube back in the Styrofoam container. He walked to a gold supply cabinet along one wall, and I heard glass clink on glass as he moved things around. When he came back, he carried a tray holding two liquid–filled beakers, a couple of test tubes, and a number of eyedroppers. He had also put on some latex gloves.

“This is a simple test. We take a cobalt thiocyanate reagent, mix it with whatever’s in your vial, and see what happens.”

I didn’t know what a cobalt thiocyanate reagent was, but I nodded as if I did. He popped the top of one of my vials. The smell was light at first, but it grew in strength. Wintergreen breath mints. I shifted in my seat. Mack raised his eyebrow at me.

“You said somebody drank this?” he asked.

I nodded. He shook his head and muttered something about ‘fucking weirdos’ before reaching for an eyedropper from his tray. He put a measured amount of my mystery substance in a clean test tube. He then laid the eyedropper to the side and used a clean one to put about twice as much of one of the liquids he brought over into the same tube. After that, he put a stopper on top and shook it up. A bright–blue mass formed at the bottom of the vial.

“Does that mean anything?” I asked.

“Just the first step of the process,” he said, reaching for a third eyedropper. He put a couple drops of another liquid into the test tube he was working with. The mass at the bottom turned pink. He looked at me over the top of his glasses as he shook the test tube. “I hear Hannah’s pregnant. It’s your first, isn’t it?”

I shook my head.

“No, we have a little girl,” I said. I looked up. “And Hannah’s not pregnant.”

Mack stopped moving. I waited for him to say something, my stomach tightening slightly.

“Wow,” he said. “This is awkward.”

My stomach felt like it had dropped about ten stories. Mack stayed silent as I thought. I love being a father; it’s the most rewarding thing in my life. That didn’t mean I was ready to have another kid, though. At least not right then. I closed my eyes.

“Sorry,” said Mack. “I tested her blood a week ago. I thought she would have told you.”

I swallowed and tried to force the thought out of my head.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Can we focus on this?”

“Sure,” he said, taking the test tube he had been working with to a supply closet in the corner. I’m not sure what he did, but I heard glass bottles clink together. After that, he turned on some sort of tool that sounded like a dentist’s drill.

“I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you,” he said, shouting to be heard over the machine. “I bet you’re a good father. You’re calm.”

“Thank you,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.

“Anytime,” he said. He flipped off whatever machine he had been using and carried the tube back to our center island. The liquid inside had separated into two parts. It was clear on top, but the mass on the bottom had returned to a bright blue.

“It’s a boy,” he said. He pointed to the tube when I didn’t laugh. “It’s blue, you know,” he said again. He paused and smiled slightly. “I guess that’s still a little early, huh?”

I nodded, and Mack straightened up. He put the test tube in a wire holder and pulled off his latex gloves.

“Coke won’t stay suspended like this in many solutions,” he said. “My guess is that you have five vials of
agua rica
.”

I was a philosophy major in college, and as part of my major, I was required to take four semesters of a foreign language. I took Spanish. I rarely used it, but I still remembered a few vocabulary words.

“Rich water?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s what the farmers call it. It’s one of the steps in the extraction of cocaine from coca leaves. You want the crash course?”

“Sure.”

He nodded and walked back to his supply cabinet.

“Coke’s actually a pretty easy drug to extract,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Farmers will harvest about a ton of leaves from a coca plant and douse them in a bathtub or other pit with carbonate salt and water. After that, they’ll toss in a solvent like gasoline or kerosene and stir that around for a while.”

Mack was quiet for another minute or so as he got things from his closet. When he turned around, he carried a metal tray laden with a squeeze bottle, a couple tablespoons of a purple powder, and a stack of beakers. He put the tray beside the test tubes he had been working with earlier.

“When the cocaine is extracted, the farmer will siphon off the solvent and filter it to remove any leaves or dirt. Then he’ll add diluted sulfuric acid to that mix. The acid converts the cocaine into cocaine sulfate. Once that’s done, the farmer will siphon off the solvent again to reuse it. The leftover diluted sulfuric acid solution with the cocaine in it is called
agua rica
. That’s what you’ve got here, I think.”

Mack picked up one of the vials I had brought and dumped its contents into an empty beaker on his tray. I furrowed my eyebrow and leaned against the counter.

“Why do you know this much about cocaine?”

“Went to South America a few years back with Doctors without Borders with some nurse I wanted to bang. I fixed up a bunch of kids and nailed her when I could. On our last day, a patient’s father asked if we wanted to see something the tourists don’t usually see. I figured he was going to take us to some Mayan ruins, but he took us to his coca farm. There was a lab nearby, so we saw the whole operation from cultivation to the production of cocaine base.”

“You’re quite the humanitarian,” I said, scratching my head. “Why does it smell like breath mints?”

He shrugged.

“Someone probably cut it with wintergreen oil to cover up the smell. I do that with acetone, too. Otherwise, it smells like a nail salon in here.”

I leaned back in my stool and nodded, trying to piece together everything Mack was telling me.

“So I brought you liquid cocaine?”

“I wish,” he said, chuckling as he pulled his ingredients tray closer to him. “And on a side note,
agua rica
doesn’t usually look like this. Most of the time, it’s yellowish brown. Someone dyed this lot. It usually looks like beer or even blood plasma.”

I nodded, taking it in.

“How do you go from this stuff to what’s on the street, then?”

“You oxidize it with potassium permanganate,” he said. He put a pinch of the purple powder he had brought into a beaker containing clear liquid. He then dumped that whole thing into the
agua rica
solution. A brownish black clump formed at the bottom of the beaker, leaving a clear liquid on top. “Once you do that, you filter the liquid and discard the crap left over.”

He put a piece of cheesecloth on top of a third beaker and poured the clear solution over it. The black clump stayed on the cloth while the liquid fell to the bottom. He took off the cloth and threw it, along with the black clump, in the trash.

“What do you think we get if we add a base to this?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Gummi bears?”

Mack grabbed a plastic squirt bottle labeled ammonia. He squirted a steady stream into the beaker. It was like a drug dealer’s version of a snow globe. White particulate formed and fell to the bottom.

“That fluffy stuff at the bottom is about ninety–five–percent pure coke. A lot of people smoke that and get high, actually. If we were at a production lab, that fluffy stuff would be dried and then sent to another lab for further processing. It’d be mixed with ether and acetone. When that’s done, it’d be packaged and sent to the streets for sale.”

“How much cocaine do you think is in these vials?”

Mack held up a vial and swirled it. He shrugged.

“Maybe five grams each. I can dispose of them if you want. I’m going to a party this weekend.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“My boss tends to frown on me when I supply cocaine for parties,” I said. “Just one of her crazy rules.”

He shrugged.

“Worth a shot.”

I ignored him and leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. If Mack’s figures were right, Robbie had been sitting on a fair amount of blow. It was no wonder Rachel had overdosed after ingesting part of a vial. I doubted she and Robbie would have done that if they had known what was inside.

“Do you think a dealer would have these?” I asked.

Mack shook his head.

“I’m not an expert, but I doubt it. I’ve never seen
agua rica
in the states before, and I’ve seen a lot of drugs in my time. These came from a lab. Even if your victim dealt kilos at a time, he wouldn’t have these.”

I nodded, trying and failing to fit the information into my puzzle. I was about to thank Mack for his time when my phone rang. I motioned to Mack that I’d be a minute before glancing at the caller ID. It was my wife.

“Hannah, what’s going on?”

“You need to come home.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No. There’s a detective with a search warrant on our porch.”

I thanked Mack for his time and promised to make it up to him before jogging to the parking garage. My mind was running in about nine directions at ninety miles an hour each. I couldn’t focus. I took a breath, forcing myself to focus on one thing at a time. There were detectives at the house, but at least Hannah and Megan were safe for the moment. I didn’t know what was going on, but at least I didn’t have to worry about that. I was considerably less confident about my case.

I turned on my car. Within five minutes, I was on I–465, a seventy–five–mile loop of asphalt ringing the city. The monotony of expressway driving gave me a moment to order my thoughts. I had known Azrael was pushing drugs, but evidently it was more than that. He and Karen were tapped into a lab somewhere. That took the case to a different level, but it still didn’t tell me why Rachel and Robbie were killed. They were kids; even if they were involved with drugs, they wouldn’t know enough to bring down the whole enterprise. All I knew for sure was that they had gotten into something over their heads and died for it. That was starting to frustrate me.

I pulled off the interstate and turned onto my street about fifteen minutes later. There were three marked patrol vehicles on my front lawn and an unmarked Crown Vic taking up most of the driveway. Hannah sat on the front steps while a uniformed officer stood watch. Since my driveway was taken, I parked in front of Mrs. Phelps’ house and jogged towards my front door. Hannah saw me, but she didn’t move. Her shoulders were pulled back, and her posture was uncomfortably straight. She was in handcuffs.

Shit.

I ran onto the lawn. The uniformed officer put his hand up as if he were directing traffic, stopping me. He was older than I was, maybe fifty, and his skin was pitted and gray. He looked like a smoker who should have quit years earlier. At his age, he must have pissed somebody important off to still be on patrol.

“This is none of your concern,” he said. “Move along.”

“Like hell it isn’t,” I said. “That’s my pregnant wife, you moron.”

He took a step back and brought one hand up in a stop motion while the other went to the butt of his gun. I put my hands up, palms towards him to show that I wasn’t going for a weapon, and took a step toward the sidewalk.

“We have a search warrant,” he said. “She was interfering with that search. She didn’t tell us she was pregnant.”

“That’s because it’s none of your business,” said Hannah, her voice gruff. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

“We have a search warrant, lady,” said the officer. “We have every right to be here.”

“I’d like to see that search warrant,” I said. “Get these handcuffs off my wife and get your CO out here right now.”

He glared at me as if I had affronted him terribly.

“You don’t give me orders, son,” he said. “Now back off, or I’m going to put you in cuffs like your wife.”

I’d like to see you try.

“I’m going to show you something. I’m not reaching for a weapon.”

The guy nodded, but he didn’t remove his hand from his gun. I reached to my belt and unhooked my badge. The patrol officer took a step forward to get a better look. He took his hand off the butt of his gun and shifted on his feet uncomfortably.

“You’re a detective?”

“Detective Sergeant,” I said. “Now I’d suggest you get the handcuffs off my wife before I file an excessive force grievance against you for handcuffing a pregnant woman.”

The guy didn’t even hesitate. His shoulders sagged.

“I’ll be right back.”

I nodded as he disappeared. When he was gone, I helped Hannah stand up. She was sweating, and her face was red. Police–issue handcuffs use a standard key because it keeps things simple when transferring prisoners, and thankfully, I still had mine. I fished my key chain out of my pocket and unlocked Hannah’s cuffs. She leaned against me, so I pulled her into an embrace and kissed her forehead.

“How long have you known I was pregnant?”

“About twenty minutes,” I said, pressing my face against her hair. It smelled like lilacs. “Are you okay?”

I felt her nod against me.

“Mrs. Phelps called my cell when she saw them kick down the door. That officer put me in cuffs as soon as I got here.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

She shook her head no.

“He locked me up as soon as I got here. I was just going to ask if I could watch.”

I nodded and ground my teeth.

“I’ll take care of it from here,” I said. “If you want, you can sit in my car. Hopefully it won’t be too long.”