The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 36

In a drugged stupor, Joe lay on the sofa in Lucid’s lobby and stared at his casted ankle. His laptop rested on the coffee table next to him, beeping every time someone left a subway platform to go into the tunnels. Not that there was much he could do about it. He couldn’t race to their aid, and he wasn’t even sure if the number that Dirk had given him would prove to be useful. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to find out.

Dr. Stauss had taken one look at the MRI of his foot and tried to persuade him to go to a hospital to get it fixed. When that failed, he’d doped him up and brought in some guy to set the foot in the MRI room since that was the closest thing they had to an operating room. Encased in a ridiculous plastic boot, his foot was propped up on the sofa’s armrest. He was supposed to get regular MRIs, and if the bones didn’t mesh together properly, they’d have to perform an operation after all. This was an uncertain reprieve.

He wasn’t even allowed to get around on crutches. He was supposed to rest, take pills, and heal. Later, if he was a good boy, someone could take him down to his house in a wheelchair, although how he’d manage the steps was anybody’s guess. Right now, he couldn’t even touch his nose with his finger. He’d tried right after the drugs had kicked in.

At least the pain was gone.

“If you ooze any further off that couch, you’ll be on the floor,” Marnie said. “Why don’t you go home?”

“Not classing up the joint?” he asked.

“You look like you’re plastered.”

“Plastered be more fun.”

“You sure can’t handle your morphine, or whatever they gave you.” Marnie laughed. “I’ll call Miss Torres to help you to your house. I’d get Mr. Parker here to do it, but he’s not on the approved visitor list.”

Mr. Parker was the bodyguard sent over by Joe’s lawyer, Mr. Rossi, after Vivian had suggested that Joe needed a guard. Like someone would attack him right in his office.

“Not a long list. Security reasons. Sorry, Parker.” Joe must not be making much sense, because Marnie gave him an exasperated look. Parker was a guy who looked like a refrigerator or — what was that word. “What are those big guys called in football?”

“Defensive linemen,” said Marnie. “And, yes, Mr. Parker does bear more than a passing resemblance to one. Stop pointing at him.”

Parker didn’t seem bothered, and neither did Edison. The dog was snoozing in front of the sofa. Things couldn’t be bad if Edison was sleeping at his post.

The laptop beeped, and Joe looked at it. Track workers again. “Lots of broken track down there.”

“Lots of broken track up here,” Marnie said.

“The Hyatt,” Joe said. “Always the Hyatt.”

“I’ll get you a room,” she said. “Mr. Parker can bring you there.”

And so it was that a few minutes later Joe was being wheeled across the concourse to the hotel by a former defensive lineman. Joe’s laptop was folded in his lap and Edison trotted along next to the wheels, completely comfortable with the situation. Edison could adapt to anything, even Joe turning into a drug-addled Professor Xavier.

“Good dog,” he said, and dropped some treats on the floor instead of handing them to him because his motor coordination wasn’t that great. Edison scarfed the treats without breaking stride.

The lineman seemed happier once they were out of the public areas and ensconced in Joe’s suite. Good that Marnie had thought to book a suite. He’d no idea what he’d do with a refrigerator-sized bodyguard without adequate space.

Something beeped, and Joe opened up his laptop.

“I think that was your phone, sir,” Parker said.

Joe’s phone had fallen out of his pocket when Parker had lifted him onto the bed like an infant. Joe was grateful that Mr. Rossi had sent him and not Vivian for that task. Once the drugs wore off, he expected to be embarrassed enough.

The phone beeped again, and Parker handed it to him. It must have synched up with the network when it fell out of his pocket Faraday cage. A text message from Vivian.

He read it twice. It was a picture of the dead woman’s wrist. He remembered the mark on her wrist. He probably touched it when he took her hand. He remembered the palm tree, bent over in the wind, looking ready to fall down. He sympathized with being ready to fall down. Vivian’s text said that she thought it might be a nightclub stamp.

That wasn’t an easy thing to track.

“Too many nightclubs,” Joe said. “Or so I read, not being able to go to any of them.”

“Maybe when you’re feeling better, sir,” Parker said.

Such a nice guy. “Even on two feet.”

Joe showed him the picture Vivian had texted. “Do you know what nightclub this is for?”

Parker studied it for several seconds. A thorough man, Parker. “I do not.”

“Me neither.” Joe tapped his phone screen. “I’ll find out though.”

Hoping to get lucky, he opened up his laptop and tried some easy searches. Nothing useful came up when he tried new york nightclub stamps and palm tree stamps. Lots of pages with actual stamps for stamp collectors and also some scrapbooking sites.

“I must make a phone call,” Joe said. “To a friend.”

Parker headed back to the living room, which hadn’t been Joe’s intent, but he thought it’d be easier to let Parker think it was than try to explain that Joe was stoned and narrating his life.

He called Leandro but it went straight to voice mail. “Calling to see how Celeste is. Are you back from Florida already? I think it’s tomorrow, but I’m not sure. It’s not tomorrow yet. I guess it never gets to tomorrow, does it? Because then it’d be today. Anyway, call me when you get back. I want to talk about your sister. But I guess I’ll see you at Lucid anyway. Because I need to get inside your brain. For the scan.”

He ended the call. He was pretty sure the message hadn’t gone the way he’d intended. He tried calling Celeste, too, but she didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message. He’d learned his lesson with the ridiculous message he’d left for Leandro.

Then he stared at the laptop screen until it resolved itself into a picture of a hand with a palm tree tattooed on the wrist. He’d been working on that. Matching it.

“This will have to be done the hard way, Parker,” he said. “I’ll create a search that trolls through thousands of Facebook photos tagged in New York and see if the app finds a match.”

Parker walked back into the room. “That does sound like the hard way, sir. Maybe not possible right this moment.”

Parker might look like a defensive lineman, but he sounded like an English butler. Joe liked the incongruity of it.

“Not impossible, Parker. Nothing’s impossible.” Joe was already typing away. “I wrote something similar a while ago while trolling for faces. Can’t be much harder to troll for palm tree stamps, can it?”

Parker petted Edison instead of answering. Very diplomatic.

It took Joe three times longer than it should have, because he had to keep checking his surveillance app and also because his brain was fuzzy. But, considering the amount of drugs in his system, a performance degradation of a third (black dot red recurring) was a victory.

“I have a result set,” he announced.

Parker came to look over his shoulder. Edison wasn’t impressed at all. He didn’t even look up. Joe would have to search for a steak to impress him.

He flipped through a set of photos. Palm tree tattoos on hands, arms and— “Why would anyone want to tattoo a palm tree there?”

Parker blinked. “To put them in a tropical state of mind.”

Joe was already on to the next one, and the one after that. “So many wrong palm trees.”

“Stop, please,” Parker said. “Go back.”

And there it was on screen. The exact palm tree the subway victim had worn on her wrist.

Parker read the text under it. “Hanging with my homeys at Calypso Club, Manhattan.”

Bingo, you bastard, Joe thought. “Bingo.”

He texted the club name to Vivian and Dirk.

Edison jumped up on the bed and stretched out next to him. The dog wasn’t usually allowed to sleep on the bed, but he clearly thought it was a special circumstance.

“You know, Parker,” Joe said, “I think I’ll take a nap.”

“Very good idea, sir,” Parker said.

“Would you mind monitoring this app here? If it beeps and you see a man and a woman, probably blond and in evening dress going into a tunnel, wake me up. I have numbers to call.”

“You’ve explained it before,” Parker said. “I can manage.”

He scooped up Joe’s laptop and retreated back to the suite’s living room. If he was single, Joe decided, he would have to introduce the man to Vivian. They could go to gun ranges and do martial arts and have tall, capable babies together.

“Did I say that aloud?” Joe asked.

“You did not, sir,” Parker answered. “Did you want to?”

“Nope,” Joe said, and fell asleep with his hand on Edison’s head.