“Go. I’ll call you later,” I said.
I got out and slammed the door. I ran across the brick courtyard, between the trees and their plaques commemorating great quotes of Supreme Court Justices. I nearly tripped over “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” Justice William O. Douglas, 1959.
I turned and saw Blake peel away.
I tried to get a good signal with my eyes open, but nothing usable came through with so much light, so much to concentrate on like not falling down and not looking like a threat. Security at the courthouse stayed on permanent Orange alert.
I expected to enter the lobby and run into myself. That would be quite a show for the people waiting around to see a judge about their DUI. She wasn’t there. I could try to chase her, but then what? Another stand off? Honestly I had no idea how to stop her but I knew I couldn’t do it alone, not without being able to fight or shoot her.
What I really wanted to know was what the hell she was doing up on the fourth floor. A sharp pain spiked through my head like someone had run a needle and thread into my eye and pulled it out the back of my skull. When all this ended, if this ended, no way my brain would ever be the same.
I signed in and tried to act casual. I got one crooked look from a female guard on the metal detector who seemed like she thought I’d come through here not too long before, but then I think she resigned herself to the idea all white people look the same and she shrugged it off and went back to scanning waistbands and under jackets for bulges.
When I got off on four the receptionist, Melanie I think, greeted me with a sympathetic, “Forget something?”
It goes to show you how unobservant many people are. I walked by her, the same face but in a totally different outfit and she didn’t notice one bit.
“Yeah,” I said and made a beeline for Lucas’ office. I know it sounds paranoid, but even though everyone in the place said they hadn’t seen him, I needed to make sure for myself.
Empty. He always kept a neat workspace so it was hard to tell if he had been there and cleared anything out. At least there wasn’t a corpse on the floor or anything. The way my day had gone I started to be thankful for any small miracle.
I spun out of the room and headed deeper down the hall to Daniel Graves’ office. None of that talk to the underlings stuff for me. Straight to the top. I knocked once and entered without listening for any “come in.”
Graves was still behind his desk but he didn’t look well. His forehead glistened with sweat and he looked like he might throw up. He lifted his eyes using the barest minimum of effort.
“Samantha…” He choked down a dry heave. “I’m sorry, now is not really a good time.”
“What did I ask you before?”
He placed a hand on his desk to brace himself. “What?”
“When I was in here earlier, what did I ask you?”
“You asked if I’d seen Lucas.” His breathing got heavy. I thought asthma attack.
“Is that all?” He nodded, couldn’t speak. “Do you have an inhaler or something?”
The hand bracing him up on his desk slid off and he fell, clanking his chin on the corner of the desk and cracking his jaws together so hard my teeth hurt.
At the risk of being too Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws: this was no asthma attack.
I circled the desk to where Graves crumpled to the floor. I found his wrist pinned under his body and dug it out, putting two fingers on his artery. I got nothing. I pushed back his head to roll his face off the rug and saw a trickle of blood from his nose.
I backed out into the hall and shot forward toward the conference room. Through the wide glass wall I could see five of the six people inside all in the same state as Graves right before he dropped. I opened the door and the one man not hunched over ready to hurl turned to me with fear on his face usually reserved for the first guy to die in a zombie movie.
“What’s happening?” he said. I thought I knew.
“Did you drink any of that?” I pointed to the water pitcher Sam brought in.
“No.” He eyed it like a grenade about to go off.
“Did they?”
“I think so.”
The sound of the first person hitting the floor snapped his head around. Four other body falls followed quickly. He started crying. “Don’t drink anything and you’ll be fine,” I said. I left the conference room, leaving him with five fresh corpses.
Back down the hall I started to hear moaning, then another body hitting the carpet. Panicked voices of the few who hadn’t been dosed tried to revive the dead and dying. I crossed into a cluster of workspaces and two people stood rushing from desk to desk trying to tend to six more keeled over on the floor.
“Don’t drink anything!” I said. “Don’t touch any cups or coffee mugs. Not yours or any else’s.”
They took me for some sort of authority. In a time of crisis sometimes all it takes is the loudest voice to be the expert in the room.
I moved out to reception to find Melanie, or Melody, just as she took a dive for the floor. Blood spurt out of her nose as she gagged and spit on her way down.
I stopped and turned. I shut my eyes as tight as I could and tried for something I wasn’t sure would work. If I could see what she sees as she sees it, why not be able to conjure up some memories?
I had no idea how it might work so I ended up trying to remember extra hard. That undersells it a bit. It was the memory equivalent of reaching for something you lost that is slightly farther than arms length away. You stretch, you pull, you feel muscles tearing and tendons ripping in two but you know with one more push you can get one pinky finger on your lost car keys and this nightmare will be over.
Yeah, like that.
A hot skewer of pain bore a hole through my skull. All this straining at my brain couldn’t be good for me. Images started to come. At first they were my own memories of what I’d seen while I rode in the car with Blake. Don’t ask me how I knew the difference between my own memory of her view and her real memories. I just knew.
I felt the shift. I tapped into her memory bank. I felt like someone pulling off a heist. It took some work but my fingers spun the tumbler to the right combination and I was in.
I knew what to look for. The drinks. She didn’t look down very often so it was hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but finally I got one. She squeezed a dropper into a coffee mug on one of the paralegal’s desks. I cycled back the image four, then five times until I knew.
In the back of the gun locker back at the DEA, lived a tiny refrigerator. No one ever went in there. Most of us weren’t quite sure what they kept inside. We’d heard rumors. In addition to the guns, the Tasers, the mace, we kept some more heavy hitting weapons of the trade. Fast acting poison being one of them.
My whole head throbbed and I think I knew what it felt like to have brain surgery with no anesthesia as I willed a memory out of the thick grey matter. Her hands, still warm from snapping Adam’s neck, opening the squat refrigerator, removing the vial.