On the trail of a missing chemistry professor, Detective Gilly stumbles into a mind-boggling racist conspiracy to alter the ethnic make-up of the human race.
Excerpt
Chapter 6
A Red Jaguar Stamp
“MR. GILLY?”
Cameron raised his head from folded arms and looked up through narrow slits at the two men standing with their backs to the brightly illuminated cafeteria counter. It took a few seconds to remember where he was and to recognize the taller of the two men. “Yeah, it’s me, doctor. What is it? What’s going on?”
“Your daughter’s doing fine, Mr. Gilly,” Sharrard said. “May we sit down?”
“Yeah, sure. Have a seat.” He gestured across the table to the two empty chairs and then pushed his tray, with a half-eaten hamburger and cold cup of coffee, out of the way. “What the hell time is it, anyway?”
“It’s a little after four o’clock,” Sharrard said, sitting down directly across from him. The other man, also wearing a doctor’s lab coat, took the adjacent chair.
“In the morning?”
“Yes. Mr. Gilly, this is Dr. Lassiter.”
Lassiter held out a hand gnarled apparently with arthritis. “Jeffrey Lassiter, Mr. Gilly. Nice to meet you.” They shook hands.
“He’s a toxicology specialist, Mr. Gilly, an expert in identifying drugs and poisons, that sort of thing. He’s been looking at that stamp you brought in.”
“Oh? What did you find?”
Lassiter took from his coat pocket a small plastic vial, which he set on the table between them. Inside the vial was the red Jaguar stamp. “Where did you get this?”
Gilly looked over at Sharrard. “Didn’t you tell him?”
“I thought it would be best if you did.”
Exhaling, Gilly rubbed his eyes and then his temples. “It came in yesterday’s mail. It was in one of those stupid sweepstakes things. Didn’t you get the envelope?”
“Yes, I got it,” Lassiter said, glancing briefly at his colleague. “Mr. Gilly, you have to understand our legal obligations in matters like this.”
“What do you mean?”
Sharrard leaned forward against the table and spoke in a low tone. “Mr. Gilly, we’re required by law to notify the authorities in cases where there’s any evidence of illegal drugs or child abuse or foul play. I’m not sure which category if any this falls into, but you understand we had to report this.”
Gilly looked suspiciously at the two men and then at the stamp. “What did you find? What’s on that thing?”
“Nothing,” Lassiter said, picking up the vial, turning it this way and that. “At least nothing I’m familiar with.”
“What does that mean?” he asked hotly.
“It means what it means, Mr. Gilly. I ran the usual battery of chemical tests on it, put it through the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, the UV spectrometer and all that, and everything came up negative” no known drugs, no known toxins.” He paused for a breath. “But there’s certainly something besides glue on this stamp. When everything else failed, I prepared a small sample and injected a mouse with it. Right now that mouse appears to be in the same condition as your daughter.”
Sharrard cleared his throat. “Any idea where this thing came from, Mr. Gilly?”
Cameron shook his head. “You’ve got the return address on the envelope. That’s all I know.”
“I had to turn that envelope over to the police,” Lassiter said, apologetically. “I suspect they’ll be getting in touch with you soon. You’ll want to save everything that came in the original letter.”
Gilly gave a tired nod. “It’s all still lying there on my kitchen table, right where my daughter left it.”
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Lassiter continued, “but there was a somewhat similar incident out in California a year or so ago. Somebody mailed some kind of questionnaire to a bunch of students out in San Francisco. Apparently, the return envelope was tainted with this new drug, KC. It’s an extremely powerful hallucinogen.”
“I know what it is,” Gilly said. He seemed to recall reading something somewhere about the incident.
“If I’m not mistaken, a couple thousand students fell for it.”
“But they didn’t end up like my daughter.”
“No, that’s right. But whatever this is,” he paused to hold up the vial, ” for shear potency, it beats anything I’ve ever seen or heard of. There are some very potent nerve agents, a few of them predictably fatal in concentrations of a milligram or so, but even that’s a hell of lot more than you’re going to get from a lick of a stamp.”
“Besides,” Sharrard interjected, “your daughter shows absolutely no symptoms of poisoning. As I told you earlier, her blood and urine look perfectly normal. The radiologist told me her CT-scan was picture perfect” no scarring, no hemorrhaging, no evidence at all of any brain damage. Whatever is on that stamp, it’s had no affect whatever on her respiratory, digestive or circulatory system. In short, there’s no evidence of it at all, other than the curious effect of regressing her to infancy.”
“And so?” Gilly prompted him for the bottom line.
“And so there doesn’t appear to be any damage to the physical brain. That’s not to say there isn’t some major chemical imbalance going on. I think it’s pretty clear there is.”
“So what are you going to do for her?”
Trading glances with his colleague, Sharrard said, “Frankly, Mr. Gilly, I don’t know what more we can do for your daughter. We don’t even know how she got the way she is. We’ve got no experience base from which to make a prognosis. On the bright side, she seems to be stable at this point and doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger. I’m afraid all we can do is keep her under observation, make sure she gets adequate nourishment, and see what develops.”
Gilly looked at one, then the other, and finally shook his head. When he sighed, his entire body slumped with the expelled breath. “Can I see her?”
Sharrard smiled. “Sure thing, Mr. Gilly. That was the other thing I came to tell you. I’ve had her moved up to pediatrics. If you want, we can have a cot put in her room so you can stay with her.”
THE CORRIDOR WALLS were done up in brightly colored murals of Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, and other Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Somehow, Gilly found that anything but uplifting.
“When I checked on her a little while ago,” the nurse said, slowing as they came to the last door, “she was fast asleep.”
Taped to the door was a computer printout with Amanda’s name on it.
“Let me just take a peek” She opened the door and stuck her head in. “Yep. Still asleep.” She turned in the doorway and flashed sparkling blue eyes at him. “Would you like us to bring in a cot for you, Mr. Gilly?”
“No, I won’t be staying long.” He stepped quietly just to the foot of the bed.
“Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind.” She turned to leave and then stopped. “Do they know what’s wrong with her?”
Gilly shook his head, afraid that if he tried to speak, he would bust out bawling. Curled up in a fetal ball under the covers, his fourteen-year-old daughter was sucking her thumb.
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Copyright 2008 Ken Jasper. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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