“Tyrell.” Cain grinned without warmth. “Thought we’d seen the last of you downtown yesterday.”
“So did I,” Tyrell murmured, noting that for once Cain wasn’t grinding his chops around a piece of gum. “What brings the Bureau here?”
Captain Powell, sitting at the head of the table, gestured to the two agents.
“Agents Cain and Denny want the Potomac Gardens case shut down due to lack of manpower. Commissioner Cathy Devereux wants to know what your handle on the investigation is.”
Tyrell nodded at the commissioner, a high-flying and well-respected officer who had begun her career as a beat cop. Before he had a chance to speak, Cain had a stab at grabbing center stage.
“We’ve uncovered some anomalies with the case but don’t consider them worthy of investigation.”
“You’ve uncovered?” Lopez uttered beside Tyrell, and before he could intervene she pointed a finger at Cain. “This joker would have shut us down yesterday if it weren’t for our work at the scene.”
A shadow of displeasure creased Cain’s features. “Charming.”
“What’s your angle here?” Cathy Devereux asked Cain.
“The case has crossed state lines as one of the victims was from Maryland. That makes it a federal case, not a district one. Not to mention the near fatality this morning at the medical examiner’s office. We’re here to find out exactly what’s been happening and what the Bureau can do to bring this to a close.”
Tyrell considered Cain to be a card-carrying member of the asshole club but he realized that he was now in a particularly delicate position. He had the tricky job of defending the validity of his case in front of Powell and the brass, while at the same time preventing it from passing into Cain’s jurisdiction or being shut down. Cathy Devereux turned to look at him expectantly.
Tyrell gestured to the file Lopez was holding. She passed it across the table to Cain, who leafed through it as though it were a travel brochure while Tyrell spoke.
“Three victims of an apparent group overdose. One of the victims was a respected scientist by the name of Joseph Coogan, a biochemist working in the District with no history of substance abuse of any kind. Autopsy shows that he underwent a medical procedure before having his blood contaminated with crack cocaine to approximate the appearance of an overdose.”
Cain frowned as he flicked through the file. “Meaning?”
“That his true cause of death was disguised amid crack-addict overdoses.”
“The medical examiner hasn’t even been able to confirm a time of death,” Cain said, scanning the last page of the file before closing it.
“What’s to say that it just looks that way and that this guy did indeed die from an overdose?” Commissioner Cathy Devereux asked.
“Pathology from the lab reports,” Lopez said. “The examiner’s on the record as saying that the victim’s blood had been entirely transfused, meaning that the drugs had to be administered after the procedure not before, as his blood type had changed. Either that or he decided to shoot up about a half hour after dying.”
“Maybe,” Cain said offhandedly.
“Maybe?” Tyrell muttered. “Either we’ve got a homicide or the city’s first case of zombie drug abuse. What’s the problem?”
“Occasionally,” Cain said with a smug smile, “an individual’s blood type can change as a result of antigens in infection, malignancy, or autoimmune disease. It’s been known to occur after liver transplants. We’ve done the research.”
Commissioner Devereux spoke quietly to Tyrell.
“Why do you think that you have enough information to produce a prosecution?”
“The fact that we have both a possible perpetrator and a motive.” Cain raised an eyebrow, but Tyrell kept going. “If you’d looked at the file more carefully than you looked at the crime scene, you’d have noticed that it names a suspect, a neurologist. He’s got a history of experimental procedures on mammals going back years, involving research into homeostasis and the use of induced hypothermia to treat victims of trauma.”
Cain squinted at Tyrell’s advanced terminology, but did not reach again for the file.
“Go on,” Devereux encouraged.
“This surgeon is central to all of this. One of the victims of these procedures survived and remained lucid enough to inform his mother of the basic details, which jibed with the assessment of a clinical surgeon at General Hospital. These people were experimented on illegally and against their will, and those experiments led to their deaths and the scene downtown yesterday morning.”
“What kind of experiments?” Cain demanded impatiently.
Tyrell took a deep breath. In for a penny …
“We talked to a surgeon, and he said that the only possible