the air around Ott’s body. He’d once told her that he could see the imprint near-death left on those who’d narrowly escaped it, and he read those etheric outlines as easily as a palm reader scanned a hand.
Ott’s must have been bad for Grif to mention it, and the man confirmed it with a dark, drawn nod. “My last hit was eleven years ago, and it put me down hard. The withdrawals lasted about ten days, or so they told me. I lost count.”
“I bet even an hour is like a lifetime when you’re in that kind of pain,” Kit sympathized.
He moved his shoulders, as if the memory made him uncomfortable. “And all you have to do is shoot up to make it all go away.”
“So how is krokodil different from that?” Grif asked, as Ott covered Jeap’s chest cavity.
“Other than a desperate need to keep using it even after your flesh starts decaying?” Dr. Ott blew out a breath. “Imagine that painful week of detox being extended a whole month.”
“After how long of using?” Kit asked, eyes gone wide.
“One hit,” he said grimly. “And that month of agony is non negotiable. You can’t tough it out. A colleague of mine went to Russia, did a paper on it. He said they had to tranq the patients just to keep them from passing out.”
Kit let out a low breath, gaze flicking back to the scaly sites on Jeap’s upper body. “Now the name makes sense.”
“The Russian doctors call desomorphine addicts ‘the walking dead.’ ” Ott shook his head, staring at the remains of what had once been a whole, if not perfect, boy. “The drug literally eats you alive.”
“C’mon, Doc,” Grif said, tone round with disbelief. “Surely word spreads on the street about a drug like that. If people know their flesh is going to fall from their bones, and their mind will break if they try to quit it, why would they still do it?”
Now the doctor looked amused. “Because they’re poor, Mr. Shaw. Making illegal drugs more expensive doesn’t result in fewer junkies, just more desperate ones. Come here.” He motioned Grif closer to the corpse, and when they were all as tightly gathered as they were going to get, the doctor bent low and sniffed. “Smell that? It’s acrid. Like ash if it could still burn.”
Grif looked at Kit, and she knew he wasn’t going to be sniffing anything. Kit wasn’t exactly excited about the prospect, but she was curious despite herself. The more she learned about this drug, and what it’d done to Jeap, the more ammo she had to chase down its supplier. She sniffed, and immediately pulled back. “Irritating.”
“Think how it felt to him,” the coroner said.
Hands in his pockets, Grif finally leaned over as well. “What the hell is that?”
“Iodine,” the doctor answered evenly. “And some lighter fluid, maybe some industrial-strength cleaning oil, and—most important—some over-the-counter codeine.”
Kit waved a hand like she could rewind the conversation. “Like in cough syrup?”
“Over the counter?” Grif tilted his head. “Sounds harmless.”
“That’s just the thing,” Ott said, inhaling deeply, though he appeared more fascinated than repulsed. “It’s only over the counter in Russia. You need a prescription here. And it’s not harmless once you put those things together. Then you’ve created a poison the body can’t resist.”
He gestured again at Jeap’s body, and Kit’s gaze followed the movement. The white bone of Jeap’s elbow lay exposed, perfectly formed and almost pretty through the tattered tissue.
“It’s cheap.” Kit closed her eyes to fight back the tears. And Jeap had been poor. And desperate. And in the end? Alone.
“Heroin has to be grown,” Ott said, covering the body. “Someone has to plant poppies, convert them to opium, turn that into heroin. Then they gotta transport it. None of that’s necessary with krok. It’s a synthetic, so anyone with the recipe can whip it up. Ol’ Emeril Lagasse over here probably did all this with a kitchen spoon, a lighter, and a syringe.”
“You do know a lot about it,” Grif commented.
“I wasn’t just an addict, I was an addict with access to the medical library.”
“And would you have ever done something like this?” Grif asked, jerking his head at Jeap’s destroyed remains.
“I’m lucky I didn’t have to make that choice,” Ott replied, frowning. “Krok’s relentless. Thirty minutes to cook, but only a ninety-minute high. Using this shit is a full-time job.”
One you couldn’t quit, Kit thought, breathing out again.
“See that?” Ott said, pointing at a wound that had oozed openly