Page 84 of Identity Unknown

“If she’s the one leaving it, what’s she doing with fake moon dust?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” Lucy says.

“What about perovskite and solar cells? What might she be doing with those?”

“Could be a lot of things. Electronics, including photovoltaic ones like lasers, LEDs, ceramic capacitors, aerospace technologies such as solar arrays,” Lucy answers. “Also, and more pervasively, solar panels. As you’ve probably noticed when we’re flying around, there are a lot of solar farms and solar-paneled rooftops.”

“More all the time as companies and everyday people use them to generate electricity and profits,” Tron adds. “I’m surprised a scientist like Sal Giordano didn’t have solar panels on his property.”

“Maybe that was something he was looking into,” I suggest as more updates land, this time from forensic chemist Rex Bonetta.

I read the preliminary report he’s sent, and Sal had high levels of haloperidol, lorazepam and Benadryl on board when he died. The powerful antipsychotic in combination with a benzodiazepine and antihistamine is known as aB-52. It’s used as a chemical restraint when prisoners and psychiatric patients are out of control.

“That may be the explanation for the redness of his skin. Haloperidol, or Haldol as it’s better known, has side effects.” I’m looking them up on my phone as I’m talking, and what I suspect is confirmed. “One of them is photosensitivity,” I add. “And Sal was fair-skinned to begin with.”

“So, while he was dying in the sunny clearing, he was getting sunburned,” Tron says.

“And he might have burned more quickly because he had Haldol in his system,” I explain.

“A mixture of that, lorazepam and Benadryl is what was injected in his neck and elsewhere,” Lucy surmises.

“It would be fast acting,” I reply. “A B-Fifty-Two would cause ataxia and heavy sedation. Explaining why it’s been used as a way of controlling violent and severely agitated people.”

“And it’s a favorite of the Russians,” Lucy answers. “Used in prison camps and mental asylums to keep inmates in a stupor. Particularly certain political enemies of the Kremlin. A B-Fifty-Two cocktail is something Carrie would be aware of and probably utilizes when it suits her purposes.”

As I’m listening, I imagine Sal driving his pickup truck away from the Red Caboose restaurant on Monday night. Minutes later, he stopped for someone. Perhaps it’s as Benton says, and the person pretended to be in distress. I imagine Sal getting out of his truck. Or perhaps he opened his window, and suddenly was stabbed in the neck with a hypodermic needle.

He would have felt the onset of the drug cocktail quickly, and that could be when he swallowed the blue-and-white capsule. Maybe it was in a pocket, and he managed to take it without the assailant knowing. I envision the injection sites on hisarm and buttocks. He was kept sedated possibly the entire time he was held captive. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t aware of everything happening.

The low sun tinges the edges of building clouds, spreading pink across the horizon as we reach the NASA Langley hangar. Two Secret Service agents are waiting, and one of them takes the Dodge Charger from Tron. He guns the engine, squealing out of the parking lot.

“Back to a boring SUV.” She stares wistfully after the blacked-out muscle car growling away.

“When we get to Washington National, I’ll be dropping the two of you off.” Lucy says this for my benefit. “Tron will drive you home. Benton’s there with Marino and Mom, getting dinner ready. And Shannon is on her way. I’ll meet you there later. First I’ve got to get the helicopter back to the training center and safely into the hangar.”

They climb up into the cockpit, and it’s the first time I’ve sat in the back cabin alone. I text Marino that I’m in the helicopter headed home. The weather’s supposed to turn nasty again, and I don’t want anyone on the roads if possible. I assume he and Dorothy are spending the night. He doesn’t answer, and I hope they’ve settled their differences for now.

It’s fiveP.M.when the Langley tower clears the Doomsday Bird to take off for Northern Virginia. The visibility is beginning to deteriorate, and Lucy has requested flight-following along the way. We’ll be handed off from one air traffic control frequency to the next while Lucy routes us as a crow flies overwater and forests. She wants to beat the storm barreling in, the hail predicted to be as big as gumballs.

Without Marino to worry about, the intercom is left on in the back cabin where I’m harnessed in my silvery-gray flame-retardant seat. The partition blocks my view of the cockpit, and every so often Tron gives me details about weather and our present location. As case information is updated, I’m given the details, and Blaise Fruge didn’t waste any time in the Luna Briley investigation.

A little while ago, she and other officers showed up with warrants at the Briley home. The couple was having drinks in the yard, enjoying the spring weather before it turns bad. I can imagine the looks on their faces as cops began searching their property for a second time. But now the stakes are different. They couldn’t be higher.

“Ryder and Piper Briley have been arrested,” Tron is saying. “They’re being transported to the city jail as we speak.”

“That’s just the beginning of the charges brought against them,” Lucy’s voice promises in my headset.

When we cross the York River, the helicopter is full throttle with a fierce tailwind at an altitude of two thousand feet. Our groundspeed is 210 knots, or more than 240 miles per hour, Tron informs me. At Colonial Beach we follow the western shoreline of the Potomac River as ominous clouds continue to gather, the wind gusting harder. Quantico is off to our left surrounded by miles of backcountry woods.

A pale gash in dark trees is all I can see of the storied FBI Academy where Benton and I carried on our torrid love affair. We were sneaking around while Lucy was interning there, andshe was none the wiser. I think of the two of us running the Yellow Brick Road obstacle course when she was in college. I remember getting rope burns and bruises together, cursing like sailors as we slipped in mud and climbed over walls.

Afterward Lucy and I would eat burgers in the academy’s watering hole, the Board Room, hanging out with FBI agents, and I couldn’t have been prouder. I believed that helping her land the internship was for her own good. She’d get physically fit and finally make a few friends. I thought it the right thing at that time in her development, but her mother had other ideas. To this day Dorothy reminds me what a terrible idea it was.

She was adamantly opposed to her only child pursuing a career in law enforcement, and I wasn’t supposed to encourage it. My sister said she didn’t want Lucy turning out like me. Morbid and fatalistic. Spending every waking minute focused on violence, death, cruelty and treachery. Always thinking about what might injure or kill something or someone.

Instead of dancing and making love under the moonlight,as Dorothy puts it.

In the end, none of us had control over what Lucy was drawn to or would become in life. But if she hadn’t been at the FBI Academy when Carrie was, they wouldn’t have met. They wouldn’t have become lovers hell-bent on dismantling each other. Unless it was an inevitable karma they couldn’t escape. Opposing forces colliding. A quantum entanglement, the two of them forever caught in a spin.

---