Drop Dead Sexy

Catcher stepped behind the front bar. He started patting down the wall where the wood met the back bar. He gripped one of the ornate carvings and pulled, sending the back bar swinging out. Instead of a gaping hole in the wall, there was a door.

“Holy shit!” I cried, as I scurried over to join him.

“Eight years as an agent, and this is my first secret passage.” He turned to me and grinned. “I feel like I’m ten and stuck reading some of the Hardy Boys mysteries at my grandparents’ house.”

I laughed. “I had some Nancy Drew forced on me as a kid, too. But it was more reading about the secret passage at Dawn’s house in the Babysitter’s Club books.”

“Oh yeah, my little sister used to read those.”

It was at that moment I realized Catcher and I were purposely avoiding entering the passageway. We just stood there in the doorway, staring down the length of the tunnel. “Guess we better check it out, huh?” I prompted.

“Yeah. I guess so.” After digging out two pairs of rubber gloves from his kit, he passed one to me. Once we’d put them on, Catcher then reached over and flipped on the light switch, but nothing happened. “Dammit. The bulb’s burned out.”

But then we both still stood there, staring into the darkened abyss. When Catcher placed his hand on my shoulder, I jumped. “Ladies first,” he suggested.

“Oh that’s okay. You can go first.”

“That would be ungentlemanly of me.”

“Are you telling me that a strong, strapping GBI agent like yourself is scared of the basement?”

“I’m not scared of the basement. I’m just not a fan of creepy tunnels.”

I snorted. “That makes you sound like a real *, Agent Mains.”

Catcher scowled at me. “The truth is I get a little claustrophobic in confined places. It’s not something I like to spread around since agents aren’t supposed to have a weakness.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll go first,” I said. After I drew in a deep breath to fortify my strength, I took a tentative step into the tunnel with Catcher close on my heels.

We’d crept a few feet when Catcher said, “This kind of reminds me of that scene in Silence of the Lambs when Jodi Foster is in the basement and Buffalo Bill turns the lights out on her.”

A shiver ran through me. “You seriously had to bring that up now?”

Instead of answering, Catcher leaned forward and went “pffffffffft” in my ear like Lecter after his Chianti and fava beans line. I elbowed him in the ribs. “You’re an asshole.”

Catcher chuckled. “Sorry. I had to do something to get my mind off things.”

“I could think of a thousand other ways to do that.”

“Hmm, maybe a few hundred of those could be sexual?”

I rolled my eyes. “Spare me.”

At the end of the tunnel was another door. Although I imagined it having some kind keypad and code to get in, I was shocked to find it unlocked. Considering both the tunnel and room were hidden, I guess Randy didn’t think he needed to lock it.

When I swung it open, the fluorescent lights overhead flashed on, illuminating the four walls of the small, windowless room. In the center was a large table filled with different kinds of pharmaceutical tools like mortar and pestles and pill tiles. On one wall was a floor to ceiling shelf filled with different prescription bottles. Some were filled with pills while others contained liquid.

Catcher took a few in his hand, and we both peered at them. Instead of a having a person’s name, they just had numbers written on the labels for identification. “I guess that’s one way to keep things ultra-secretive,” Catcher said.

“I wonder if he has the numbers written down with the corresponding drugs, or if he just committed all that to memory.”

After looking at the shelf again, Catcher said, “Since there only looks like five to ten types of drugs, he most likely committed the preparation of them all to memory. Most likely this whole operation was based on memory. Without a paper or computer trail of ingredients or descriptions, he made it impossible for someone to steal his business. Not to mention if he was caught, it would make it hard on the authorities to prove what he was cooking up down here without extensive testing.”

“Pretty ingenious,” I remarked.

“It sure as hell was.” Catcher reached into his kit and pulled out a few plastic baggies. “I’m going to take a few of these, so our lab can analyze them.”

As Catcher bagged the bottles, I searched the room for anything else vital to the case like a record book. But I came up with nothing. Randy really ran a very tight and secretive ship.

“Okay. I think that’s everything. Let’s get out of here,” Catcher said.

I nodded and followed him out of the room and down the tunnel. When we got back to the basement, Catcher took out his phone to call in what he had found to the GBI field office.