Head On_A Novel of the Near Future Read online

  I thought about that for a second. “Hold on,” I said to Vann, and made a phone call.

  “I was sleeping,” Tayla Givens, my flatmate, said to me as she answered.

  “It’s noon,” I said.

  “I’m a doctor at a hospital,” she said. “I have long shifts. I’m going to have another long shift real soon. You’re lucky you don’t keep your body at the house or I’d walk my threep over to your room and punch you.”

  “Sorry. I have a quick question. Medical related.”

  “Medical related for you, or for your job?”

  “For the job.”

  “Does this mean I get a consulting fee, like Tony?”

  “Sure, if you want to fill in all the federal government contracting forms and submit to the required background check. I can send you all that paperwork today.”

  Tayla groaned. “What’s your stupid question?” she asked.

  “You know about Haden-specific pharmaceuticals, right?”

  “Yes, because I’m a doctor and a Haden.”

  “Can you think of any that we know increase a Haden’s susceptibility to pain?”

  “You mean, aside from the ones that would do the same to anyone, not just Hadens?”

  “Right.”

  “As an intended result, no. That’s not something we generally aim for, medically speaking. As a side effect, I can think of a couple. Not their specific names, because you woke me up and my brain is fuzzy.”

  “Would any of those also be used as a performance enhancer?”

  “Like, say, on a Hilketa field?” Tayla asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be a Hilketa field.”

  “Right.”

  “This is entirely a hypothetical question.”

  “Of course it is,” Tayla said, and the sarcasm in her voice was notable. “The short answer is no. The longer answer is more complicated and for a question you didn’t actually ask.”

  “What question is that?”

  “Whether any drug can increase a Haden’s susceptibility to pain.”

  “I did ask that!” I protested.

  “No, you asked if we knew of any drug that did that. The question is whether any known drug could do that, or whether increasing pain sensitivity is the drug’s intended function or a known side effect.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that every Haden brain is significantly different,” Tayla said. “The disease rearranges our gray matter differently in each case, and each brain recovers differently from the attack. As a result every Haden brain is idiosyncratic. It’s one of the difficulties of Haden-specific medicine. We can’t just assume that any one Haden isn’t going to have that same reaction to a drug as another Haden, or as a non-Haden patient.”

  “So you’re saying that aspirin could make a Haden more pain-sensitive.”

  “Probably not aspirin or a drug designed to lessen pain. But any other drug idiosyncratically decreasing pain tolerance? It’s possible, sure. Likely? No. But possible. That’s why we call it ‘idiosyncratic.’”

  “So theoretically a Haden could take a performance enhancer that has no known side effects to anyone else, and have a reaction to it no one else ever has.”

  “Yes,” Tayla said. “Performance enhancer or any other drug. And now you know why your doctors have always been very, very careful with your medicines, Chris.”

  “Can you get me the names of the drugs we know have pain-enhancing qualities for Hadens?”

  “That’s actual work, Chris.”

  “You’d be my favorite flatmate.”

  Tayla groaned again. “Whatever. I’ll see what I can come up with. Not now, though. I’m going back to sleep. And I’m blocking your call signal.”

  “Fair enough. Sweet dreams.”

  Tayla grunted and disconnected.

  “So basically anything could have made this happen,” Vann said, after I caught her up on the conversation.

  “Basically,” I agreed. “And, if there was something different in the supplement bag, something knowingly put in there, Marla Chapman and Alton Ortiz lied to me.”

  “Or they didn’t know.”

  “Marla Chapman, maybe,” I said. “Duane was keeping secrets from her. But how could Ortiz not know? That’s part of his job.”

  Vann shrugged. “Ortiz is on our schedule today, so we ask him again. Much less nicely this time. But first we go to Philadelphia’s medical examiner. No point going ‘good cop, bad cop’ on Ortiz if there’s nothing there.”

  “Having nothing hasn’t stopped you from doing that before,” I noted.

  “Yeah, but we have a busy schedule today,” Vann said. “And I don’t want to be in Philadelphia any longer than I have to.”

  “Drugs? What kind of drugs?” asked Sara Powell, the medical examiner assigned to Duane Chapman. We met her in her office, which was all right by me. I didn’t actually like visiting the morgue.

  “You tell us,” Vann said.

  “Well, if you’re talking recreational, our initial toxicology work-up didn’t catch anything like that in Mr. Chapman’s system,” Powell said. “And nothing in my initial examination suggests any long-term abuse of drugs or alcohol.”

  “No cirrhosis of the liver or anything like that.”

  “Definitely no cirrhosis. Mr. Chapman’s liver looked pristine. This isn’t unusual for Hadens. Statistically fewer of them drink than the general non-Haden population. It’s not the same sort of social activity.”

  “It can be managed,” I said.

  “Of course,” Powell allowed. “I didn’t say it was nonexistent. Just not at the same level as the non-Haden population. That said, while I didn’t find any evidence of casual drug or alcohol use, Mr. Chapman’s work-up turned up a lot of pharmacological elements consistent with his status as a Haden and other known issues. He had an autoimmune disorder so drugs relating to that disorder are present in his system.”

  “Can we get a list of those?” I asked.

  “It’ll all be in my full report.”

  “Anything else?” Vann asked.

  “You’d have to be more specific,” Powell said.

  “Chapman was a professional athlete. Anything in there that might have been performance enhancing?”

  Powell frowned. “You’re the third person to ask me that today.”

  “Who were the first two?” Vann asked.

  “The first said he was a representative of the sports league Mr. Chapman was involved in. A lawyer.”

  “Oliver Medina?” I asked.

  Powell nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Who was the other?”

  “A reporter of some sort. Called me on my personal phone, which really kind of pissed me off. That number isn’t public. Name escapes me at the moment. Started with a ‘c’ or ‘k.’”

  “Cary Wise,” I said.

  Powell blinked. “Do you know these people?”

  “It’s a small world, at least as far as the death of Duane Chapman is concerned,” Vann said. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them both the same thing. That they could wait for my initial public report, which will be later this week.”

  “Is that what you’re going to tell us, too?”

  “I’m going to tell you that I don’t know. I don’t know what qualifies as performance enhancing for a Haden athlete. That’s outside my normal experience.” She turned to me. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “I’m not much of an athlete anyway.”

  Powell smiled at this and turned back to Vann. “The work-up for recreational drug use is something we do a lot, and we know Mr. Chapman’s medical history so we know to look for those specific drugs as well. Everything else, all the stuff we don’t know to expect, takes a little longer.”

  “So it’ll take you a while, is what you’re saying to me.”

  “What I’m saying to you is that if you know what I’m supposed to be looking for, then you can tell me, and I’ll
look for it.”

  “Do you know how much a threep costs these days, Agent Shane?” Lara Burgess, head of the Philadelphia FBI office, asked me. Vann and I were there for our requested meet-up, and for my scheduled dressing-down. Along with the three of us, another agent was in Burgess’s office with us: Rachel Ramsey, whom Vann famously did not think much of.

  “All too well, ma’am,” I admitted. “I also know that the particular model threep I borrowed from your office runs about fifty thousand dollars.”

  “You understand that our current president and Congress aren’t all that keen on expanding government agency budgets,” Burgess said. “Fifty-thousand-dollar vehicles don’t exactly grow on trees.” Burgess pointed to Ramsey. “If Agent Ramsey here took a fifty-thousand-dollar car and rammed it into a tree, how do you think that would go over?”

  “To be fair, Shane did rescue an unconscious woman from a burning building,” Vann said.

  “And then went back inside the building,” Ramsey said. Vann shot her a look.

  “To rescue a cat,” Burgess said. “Had Agent Shane destroyed a fifty-thousand-dollar vehicle rescuing an old lady, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. But I think we can all agree that as fond as we might be of our pets, very few are worth destroying fifty thousand dollars’ worth of government property over. And in this case it wasn’t even your cat, Agent Shane.”

  “Where is the cat?” Ramsey asked.

  “It ran away,” I said.

  “Huh,” Ramsey said.

  “Did you follow up on the information I sent you?” Vann asked Ramsey.

  “About the supplement bag?”

  “The supplement bag and the box bar code Agent Shane found in the apartment.”

  “We sent an agent to retrieve the bag and ran the code from the box and from the bag.” Ramsey said. “The bag was from a batch that Labram produced three weeks ago. The box in question was part of a shipment that was sent to the Boston Bays offices about two weeks ago.”

  “What about the contents of the bag?” Vann asked.

  “We have the lab folks looking into it right now.”

  “So it’s a reasonable assumption that the bag came out of that box.”

  “What’s your point?” Burgess asked.

  “My point is that in going back into the building and scanning that room, Agent Shane retrieved information relevant to the current investigation,” Vann said. “It wasn’t just a matter of rescuing a cat. We have two deaths under suspicious circumstances and this is a material piece of information.”

  Burgess looked at me, coolly. “And do you think a box code was worth my fifty-thousand-dollar vehicle, Agent Shane?”

  “I couldn’t say, ma’am,” I said. “We’re still investigating. But I will say that this opens up an interesting new avenue in the investigation.”

  “How so?”

  “The supplement bag is a different brand than Chapman was supposed to be using.” I was echoing what Tony was saying earlier in the day, but Burgess didn’t know that, and I wasn’t going to tell her. “The box was apparently originally shipped to the Boston Bays. That means it was probably meant for a player there. Chapman probably got the supplements from that player. We find out which Bays players have Labram IV supplement endorsement deals, and we likely have a connection to follow up on. Especially if your lab people find anything interesting in the contents of that bag. I don’t know if the box code is worth a threep, but this lead could be.”

  Burgess looked at Ramsey, who gave a shrug. “We already had the bag,” she said. “The information from the box code is useful but it doesn’t tell us anything we probably wouldn’t have figured out without it. Chapman was a player on the Bays. It would have made sense to look at the players there anyway.”

  “I agree,” Burgess said. “It was reckless of you to go back into that building, Agent Shane. As a result this office doesn’t have a threep and Agent Ramsey here”—Burgess nodded at her subordinate—“has to deal with a ridiculous amount of paperwork in order to explain how it burned up and why we should be able to requisition another one. It also means that until a new threep is approved, any Haden agent—including you, Agent Shane—who needs to work with our office has to rent one and jump through all the requisition hoops that requires. You know what a pain in the ass that is.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “I’m putting a disciplinary note in your record,” Burgess said to me. “And I want to be clear that if you hadn’t saved that old woman from the building, I’d be doing more than filing a disciplinary note. I’d have you fired. I don’t care who you are or who your dad is, Agent Shane. Agents work for a living and we owe it to taxpayers not to waste their taxes on stunts like rescuing cats. Do you understand me?”

  “I do, ma’am.”

  “Good. I’ll send that note to the D.C. office today.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Vann said.

  “Excuse me?” Burgess said, to Vann.

  “You heard me,” Vann said.

  “I did hear you,” Burgess agreed. “I’m just not sure why you thought you needed to offer an opinion, Agent Vann.”

  “I’m offering an opinion here because Shane might not know what you’re up to, Director Burgess, but I do.”

  “And what am I doing, Vann?”

  Vann jerked a thumb at Ramsey. “You’re trying to cover her dumb ass.”

  “Oh, Christ, Vann,” Ramsey said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Vann ignored Ramsey and kept looking at Burgess. “This idiot is the one responsible for the threep, yes? Because she’s the Haden affairs desk here. And as soon as you file the disciplinary note, Director Burgess, Ramsey here is going to petition for the official responsibility for the condition of the threep to be put on Shane’s head, not hers, and the cost of its replacement to come out of the D.C. office’s budget, not yours.”

  “Shane did run back into a flaming building,” Ramsey said. “This might seem like a trivial matter to you, but I think it might be considered relevant.”

  Vann turned to me. “Why did the threep burn up?”

  “Because I ran out of power,” I said.

  “And why did you run out of power?”

  “Because the threep was at about thirteen percent when I arrived,” I said. “It was off its induction pad and the pad wasn’t plugged in anyway.”

  “It’s plugged in,” Ramsey said.

  “It is now,” I agreed. “Because I plugged it in when I got here.”

  “And you have a record of this,” Vann prompted me.

  “I was on duty,” I said. “Of course I was recording.”

  Vann nodded and turned to Burgess. “If Shane had been given a fully topped-off threep, as FBI regulations specify, I might add, none of us would be in this office right now having this little conversation.”

  “Agent Shane could have waited to charge sufficiently, but didn’t. Likewise, Shane could have chosen not going back into the building and powering down while it was burning down, but again didn’t. As a result, we are here in this office, having this conversation,” Burgess said. “I see what you’re trying to do, Agent Vann. It’s admirable you’re sticking up for your partner, but it doesn’t change the facts.”

  “The facts,” Vann said. “Okay, try this fact on for size. You try to pin this on Shane, and both you and Ramsey here are going to get hauled up for violating the ADA.”

  “What?” Ramsey said.

  “The Americans with Disabilities Act,” Vann said. “You may have heard of it.”

  “Of course I know what it is!” Ramsey said.

  “Good, because in giving Shane an underpowered threep to work in, you engaged in discrimination.” Vann looked back at Burgess. “And when you tried to railroad Shane into accepting discipline for Ramsey’s fuckup, you engaged in discrimination, too.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Burgess said.

  “It could be,” Vann agreed. “But you said it yourself, budgets are stretched thin. You
’re about to try to suck fifty thousand dollars out of the D.C. office. I know my bosses. They will be delighted if Shane here punts up an ADA grievance to keep that money in our till. In the meantime, you two will look like assholes trying to pin Ramsey’s incompetence on a Haden. A really famous Haden, since you went out of your way to bash Shane for that. And if you lose, well.” Vann smiled at both of them. “Disciplinary notes in your files probably aren’t going to cut it.”

  Burgess and Ramsey were both dead silent for a good fifteen seconds. Then Burgess turned to me. “And you’ll go along with this stupidity, Agent Shane?”

  “I mean, I was given a threep at thirteen percent power when I was working on an investigation where timeliness was critical,” I said, and let that hang in the air.

  “Christ,” Burgess said.

  “Well, now that that’s settled,” Vann said, and turned to Ramsey. “What do we know about the fire?”

  Ramsey looked for a moment like she was going to tell Vann to cram her question up her ass but then sucked it up. “The fire department investigators think it was an electrical fire,” she said, tightly. “The building’s electrical system’s old and not up to code. It’s possible Chapman’s apartment was drawing more power than the system could handle.”

  “Because of all the threeps in the place,” Vann said.

  Ramsey nodded. “There were several there. If they were all drawing power into the induction plates at the same time, there could have been an overload. Or enough of a strain that when anyone else drew power, it tipped the system over.”

  “This building didn’t have circuit breakers?” I asked.

  Ramsey shrugged. “Not up to code, remember.”

  “Has anyone talked to the old lady yet?” Vann asked.

  “Shaniqa Miller,” I said.

  “She’s still out of it,” Ramsey said. “The hospital will call when she’s conscious and able to talk to us. The fire department and the police want to talk to her too.”

  “What about the landlord or the property manager?”

  “We can’t find either,” Ramsey said. “The landlord’s apparently on vacation in Amalfi, wherever that is.”

  “Italy,” I said. My family had vacationed there before.