“Maybe,” Brett said. “But what’s the connection to our zombies?”
“That’s the interesting thing,” Matt replied. “They’d been struck on the head. Sure, people are murdered often enough by being struck on the head. But with everything that’s going on, I’m thinking we ought to be testing for puffer fish poison. And,” he added with a shrug, “who do you choose, who’s your ideal victim, if you’re doing something criminal? Someone with no name. A forgotten person. People die—they drown—when boats go down at sea. They don’t usually wind up with their heads bashed in.”
“But I still can’t figure out why someone would do it,” Lara said.
“Because he can?” Matt asked.
Brett thought about the question. “I don’t know. Unless we really do have a would-be Papa Doc Duvalier out there, someone who really believes he can create an army of zombies who’ll do anything they’re programmed to do?”
“Is that really possible?” Lara asked.
“Possible, maybe, but certainly not feasible here,” Brett said. “I think that local law enforcement is more than capable of stopping an army of what amounts to automatons.”
Lara sat back, frowning. “You think someone has been actively kidnapping people—starting out with people no would notice were gone, or at least wouldn’t dare report? And then they upped the game when they weren’t caught?”
“I certainly think it’s possible,” Matt said.
“I’ll go one step further and say I firmly believe they set out kidnapping the forgotten people and experimenting on them,” Brett said.
Lara turned to him. “You’ve got me thinking. I went to talk to Nelson Amory today. He was out with three of our high-powered sponsors a few days ago. Meg and I saw him when we went to lunch with Sonia Larson. Their conversation looked...heated. I had the feeling he might be accepting a job offer from one of them. Today I flat-out asked him what was going on. If he was going to work for one of them, I thought he needed to tell Grady. In fact, Ely Taggerly had asked him to leave Sea Life and go to work for a new pharmaceutical company Ely is starting up to look at what Dr. Amory says is a whole new class of drugs. Apparently he used some of his time at Sea Life events trying to gather some funding for his project. So here we are talking about a zombie drug made from puffer fish, and now there’s a Sea Life connection to pharmaceuticals. It might not mean a thing, but it seems worth thinking about, at least.”
“You think Ely might be looking for something—some magic drug—that’s found in the brains of the dead?” Meg asked. “That’s...gruesome.”
“Very gruesome,” Matt agreed. He looked at Lara. “I’m not sure how that fits with zombies going around killing people, but who knows? You could be on to something.”
“A cure,” Brett said. “Someone might be looking for a cure for something. A brain disease. Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s. Any one of the dozens of neuro diseases out there.”
Lara cleared her throat. “So,” she said, looking at Brett, “let’s say that you’re all right and this started out with someone kidnapping illegal immigrants trying to get into the United States. The forgotten people, as you say. They performed experiments on their brains, which they covered up when disposing of the corpses by smashing in their heads. Then...”
“Then,” Brett picked up, “they took Antoine Deveau. They knew he was illegal and that Pierre couldn’t raise a stink, because he was illegal, too. And given that we’re talking illegals, there may be more people missing than we’ll ever know. So Antoine ‘dies’ and they have a funeral, and when they bring him back they send him to kill Pierre. Maybe they were trying to see if he still recognized his brother after what they’d done to him. Who knows?”
“And then,” Meg continued, “they graduated to cruising the hospital to see if they could get away with fooling the doctors with their toxin. At least they had some scruples. They looked for someone who was dying anyway and found Randy Nicholson.”
“What about Miguel and Maria Gomez?” Lara asked.
Brett felt his muscles tighten. “Miguel was on purpose. They knew that he’d contacted the FBI. They wanted to torture him before they killed him. And even if he didn’t know what he was doing, they wanted his final torture to be killing his own wife, the woman he loved. I’m hoping tomorrow we’ll find out more about how it was done, how the drug actually works.” He took a drink of his water and went on, “We stopped in to see Dr. Treme, too. We’re pretty sure he wasn’t complicit in any way, and it seems unlikely he had anything to do with a body being found in the bay. He made a mistake, one that’s going to cost him. But we’re pretty sure he wasn’t involved in any criminal way.”