Tess Gerritsen - Bloodstream

“This is Eddie and J.D.,“ said Grace.

“I’m Dr. Elliot,” said Claire. She looked at Grace, who understood the meaning of that glance, and quietly left the room.

The boys plopped down on the couch, their gazes automatically shifting to the TV. Even when Claire reached for the remote and turned it off, their gazes remained fixed on the blank screen, as though by habit.

“Your friend Scotty Braxton’s in the hospital,” she said. “Did you know that?”

There was a long silence. Then Eddie, the younger boy, perhaps fourteen, said:

“We heard he went crazy last night.”

“That’s right. I’m his doctor, Eddie, and I’m trying to find out why. Whatever you tell me, it’s just between us. I need to know what drug he’s taken.”

The boys exchanged a look that Claire didn’t understand.

“I know he took something,” she said. “So did Taylor Darnell. It showed up in both their blood tests.”

“So why’re you asking us?” It was J.D. talking now, his voice deeper than Eddie’s, and vibrating with contempt. “Sounds like you already know”

“I don’t know what the drug is.”

“Is it a pill?” asked Eddie.

“Not necessarily. I believe it’s some kind of hormone. It could be a pill, a shot, or even a plant of some kind. Hormones are chemicals made by living things. Plants and animals, insects. They affect our bodies in a lot of different ways. This particular hormone makes people violent. It makes them kill. Do you know how he got it?”

Eddie’s gaze dropped, as though he was suddenly afraid to look at her.

In frustration she said, “I just saw Scotty this morning, at the hospital, and he’s tied down like an animal. Oh, it’s bad for him now, but it’s going to be a lot worse when the drug wears off. When he wakes up and remembers what he did to his mother. To his sister.” She paused, hoping her words were penetrating their thick skulls. “His mother is dead. His sister is still recovering from her wounds. For the rest of her life, Kitty will remember her brother as the boy who tried to kill her. This drug has ruined Scotty’s life. And Taylor’s. You have to tell me where they got it.”

Both boys stared down at the coffee table, and she saw only the bristly tops of their heads. In boredom, J.D. picked up the remote and turned on the TV The shopping channel blared out a sales pitch for a genuine man-made emerald pendant on a fourteen-carat gold chain. High-fashion elegance for only seventy-nine ninety-nine.

Claire snatched the remote from J.D.’s hand and angrily shut off the TV “Since you two don’t have anything to say to me, I guess you’ll have to talk to Chief Kelly.”

Eddie started to speak, then glanced at his older brother and clammed up again.

Only then did Claire notice the essential difference between the two. Eddie was afraid of J.D.

She set her business card down on the coffee table. “If you change your minds, that’s where you can reach me,” she said, her gaze directed at Eddie. Then she walked out of the house.

As she stepped off the porch, the two pit bulls came charging at her, only to be yanked to a stop by their chains. Jack Reid was chopping kindling in the front yard, his ax ringing out against a tree stump. He made no effort to quiet his animals; maybe he enjoyed the spectacle of watching them terrify this unwanted visitor. Claire continued across the yard, past the rusting clothes dryer and a car gutted of engine parts. As she walked past Reid, he stopped swinging his ax and looked at her. Sweat beaded his brow and dampened the pale mustache. He leaned against the ax handle, the blade at rest on the stump, and there was mean satisfaction in his eyes.

“Had nothing to say to you, did they?”

“I think they have plenty to say. It will all come out eventually?’

The dogs were barking with renewed agitation, their chains scraping against the maple tree. She cast a glance their way, then looked back at Reid, whose hands had tightened around the ax handle.

“If you’re hunting for trouble,” he said, “best check under your own roof.”

“What?”

He gave her an ugly smile, then raised his ax and brought it down, hard, on a log of firewood.

Claire was in her office later that afternoon when the call came. She heard the phone ringing in the outer office, and then Vera appeared in the doorway.

“She wants to talk to you. She says you were over at her house today.”

“Who’s caffing?”

“Amelia Reid.”

At once Claire picked up her extension. “This is Dr. Effiot.”

Amelia’s voice was muffled. “My brother Eddie-he asked me to call you. He’s afraid to do it himself.”

“And what does Eddie want to tell me?”

“He wants you to know-” There was a pause, as though the girl had stopped to listen. Then her voice came back on, so soft it was almost inaudible. “He said to tell you about the mushrooms.”

“What mushrooms?”

“They were all eating them. Taylor and Scotty and my brothers. The little blue mushrooms, in the woods.”

Lincoln Kelly stepped out of his truck and his boot landed on a twig, the snap of dead wood echoing like gunshot across the still lake. It was late afternoon, the sky leaden with rain clouds, the water flat as black glass. “A little late in the year to go hunting for mushrooms, Claire,” he said dryly.

“But a-hunting we will go.” She reached into the back of her pickup and grabbed two leaf rakes, one of which she handed to Lincoln. He took it with obvious reluctance. “They’re supposed to be a hundred yards upstream from the Boulders,” she said. “They’re growing under some oak trees. Little blue mushrooms with narrow stalks.”

She turned to face the woods. They were not at all inviting, the trees bare and absolutely still, the gloom thickening beneath them. She had not wanted to come out here this late in the day, but a storm was predicted. Already a half inch of rain had fallen, and with the temperature expected to plummet tonight, by tomorrow everything would be covered with snow. This was their last chance to comb bare ground.

“This could be the common factor, Lincoln. A natural toxin from plants growing right in these woods.”

“And the kids were eating these mushrooms?”

“They made it some sort of ritual. Eat a mushroom, prove you’re a man.”

They walked along the riverbed, hiking through ankle-deep leaves and thickets of wild raspberry canes. Twigs littered the forest floor, and every step made a sharp explosion of sound. A walk in the woods in late fall is not a silent experience.

The forest opened to a small clearing, where the oak trees had grown to towering heights.

“I think this is the place,” she said.

They began to rake aside the leaves. They worked with quiet urgency as sleet fell, stinging pellets of it mixed with rain, coating everything with a glaze of ice. They uncovered toadstools and white fairy rings and brilliant orange fungi.

It was Lincoln who found the blue one. He spotted the tiny nubbin poking up from a crevice formed by two tree roots. He brushed away the oak leaves and uncovered the cap. Darkness was already falling, and the mushroom’s color was apparent only under the direct beam of his flashlight. They crouched side by side, battered by rain and sleet, both of them too chilled and miserable to feel much sense of triumph as Claire slipped the specimen into a Ziploc bag.

“There’s a wetlands biologist up the road,” she said. “Maybe he’ll know what it is.”

In silence they sloshed back through the mud and emerged from the woods. On the bank of Locust Lake, they both halted in surprise. Half the shoreline was almost completely dark. Where the lights of houses should have glowed, there was only the occasional glimmer of candlelight through a window.