“Sorry, man.” I let my resentment melt away. It was hard to stay mad at a man who’d stayed up all night processing semen samples for you.
“I tell you,” he said, “some days I wish I were a vampire.”
“Nah,” I shot back, “you’d look terrible with a widow’s peak.”
“I’d rock a cape, though.”
“True enough.” I wandered over to the lab setup, which had green and blue liquids simmering away in Erlenmeyer flasks while other liquids crawled through clear tubing. “All right, let’s start with the arson labs.”
He pulled out a file folder filled with handwritten notes and computer printouts. “We got about two hundred potion patches of Buffalo.”
Buffalo was one of the main potions currently being peddled by the Votary coven. Its full name was White Buffalo, which was due to its main ingredient being peyote. It was a potion that promised to expand consciousness, but usually ended up making its addicts schizophrenic.
I whistled. “Damn.”
He nodded. “It’s a nice haul, but that’s not all we got.” He tapped his pen on the clipboard where he had all his data. “There was also a stash of Chains. A big one.”
“Chains” was one of the most abused dirty potions sold in the Cauldron. They called it that because it was super addictive, but it also created a paralytic affect in the user, akin to being bound in chains. Recently we’d had reports that it had started leaking to other cities, which meant the regional office was going to be really happy once news of the eventual bust hit the front page.
“That’s a great haul. Did you tell Gardner?”
“I will once we’re done here.” He motioned for me to join him at a microscope set up near the windows.
“There was a third potion in the freezer. The stash was small—only about fifteen vials.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
A rack near the microscope held three vials containing a red liquid. On the rubber lid of each, there was an Asian symbol I didn’t recognize. “What’s that symbol?”
“It’s Chinese,” he said. “Cinnabar.”
“That’s odd.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this in Babylon. Have you?”
“The cinnabar, yes. It was a trademark ingredient of my Uncle Abe’s potions. But you don’t normally see Chinese symbols on anything here.”
“Okay, so in the same stash, I also found about fifty red pills.” He poured a few pills out on a scale. They were red with the number 69 on them.
“I’ve never seen those before either, but someone’s not into subtlety, are they?” I asked, referring to the sophomoric symbolism.
“So, here’s the thing,” Mez said. “Based on my lab work, I think that the stuff in the vials is pretty similar to the formula in the pills.”
“How so?”
“Look in the microscope.”
Closing my right eye, I looked with my left. Had I been looking at a Mundane chemical compound, I would have seen a bunch of squiggles. But since I had the ability to read magic and the compound was arcane in nature, there was a sort of hologram of a dragon hovering just above the squiggles. Problem was, I couldn’t tell Mez that I saw the hologram, because he didn’t know I could read. The reasons I’d hidden it from most of the team were complicated, but normally, it wasn’t an issue because evidence collected via arcane means, such as reading potions to find out who made them, wasn’t admissible in court.
“What am I looking for here?” I asked.
“That’s the slide containing the liquid potion. See how there are wiggly bits and straight bits?”
I focused on looking past the roaring dragon to the potion itself. “Okay, I see them.”
“Move aside for a moment.”
I stepped over to let him put a new slide in the ’scope. “Okay, this slide has the powdered pill on it.”
He moved out of the way and I looked again. This slide had the dragon, but the image was weaker. In addition, a cupid with a bow was superimposed. I pulled away, blinking to clear my eyes from the confusing imagery. I wondered if the cupid was Basil’s signature. When I looked again, I looked past the holograms to the potion itself for more clues.
“I see straight and wiggly pieces and—” I blinked and looked again.
“You see them?” he asked.
I adjusted the focus on the microscope. “Little black Xs.”
“Right, those are consistent with yohimbe bark.”
I stood up and crossed my arms. The holograms had told me part of the story, but I couldn’t tell Mez that. So, I played dumb and let him connect the dots. “Yohimbe is found in diet and impotence potions, right?”
“Right,” he said. “The pill contains the potion from the vials. But whoever made the pills was an idiot, because the lines were cinnabar and the squiggles were yerba mate. They’re commonly used in Asian lust potions, but the idiot who made the pills added the yohimbe, too.” He shook his head at what he clearly felt was a rookie move.
“So, basically, they took a lust potion and turned it into a super-lust potion?”
“Pretty much. Anyone who took that pill would have to have the heart of an ox to survive it.”
I froze. “Have you tested the samples from the morgue yet?”
“I conducted some preliminary tests. Why?”
“Didn’t Franklin fill you in on the situation?”
“He was busy, so his assistant gave me the samples.”
“The body he called us to view was a seventy-year-old who’d died from an eighteen-hour erection made his heart fail. He knew of at least two other cases that had died in the last few days, including a sixteen-year-old.”
“Shit,” Mez said. “That definitely sounds consistent with what that pill would do.”
“If we can tie all those bodies to whoever killed Valentine, the case would go from big to massive. I need you to test Franklin’s samples for yohimbe.”
“I’ll start on those right away, then.”
I stared down at the vials and pills, thinking through all the angles. “What I can’t figure out is why there were so few pills and vials.”
He nodded. “Especially since there was so much of the other potions.”
I paced for a minute before a theory formed. “When I worked for Abe, he’d sometimes give free samples out to the hexheads. Said it accomplished two things. First, if all the junkies died, the batch clearly wasn’t ready.”
“Charming,” Mez said.
“The man’s a sweetheart, right? Anyway, the other reason was that if the potion was good, giving samples to the hexheads created the market.”
Mez nodded. “Makes sense in a really fucked-up way. But something else has my instincts firing off.”
“Agreed. Whoever made those vials isn’t a Votary wizard.”
“How do you know?”
I froze, realizing I’d revealed more about what I’d seen than I intended. “I mean, that Chinese symbol, right?”
“Right,” he said. “The Votary coven uses European alchemical symbolism on their potions.”
“And sometimes the Sangs use Egyptian hieroglyphs, but I’ve never seen Asian symbolism in Babylon.” I tapped my chin, playing along. “It could mean the Votary wizards are using new suppliers.”
“I’d say that’s a strong possibility,” he said, “and that the suppliers are probably Fangshi.”
I kept myself from pumping my fist as he came to the proper conclusion.
“What about the Fangshi?” Morales said from the doorway.
I turned and filled him in quickly on what we knew. “Do you think the Fangshi could be making a play in Babylon?”
“Anything’s possible,” he said.
“Didn’t you work undercover with the Fangshi in Los Angeles?” Mez asked.
Morales gave him a curt nod. “Yeah, but I’d be shocked if any of the big players in the Fangshi would waste their time with a low-level guy like Basil Valentine.” He avoided looking at me, but I could feel the tension coming off of him. We’d have a lot to discuss once we were alone.
“All right,” Mez said, “We’ll know more once I get the morgue samples processed. I’ll let you know as soon as I know something.”
I nodded and started to go.
“Kate?” he said, his voice suddenly hesitant.
“What’s up?” I said, looking toward the door. Morales hovered there, looking impatient for me to wrap it up.