on the corpse’s neck.
“Least of his worries,” Grif muttered, though Kit cringed at the open sore.
“The last in a long line,” Ott confirmed. “His hands would have been shaking, either from the withdrawals or the pain. He missed the vein. That creates an immediate abscess.”
Grif fell silent. The lunch Kit forgot to have rose in her throat. Dita’s dress size, she thought dizzily, might not be out of reach after all.
“What really stumps me,” Ott went on, “is where the hell did he get the recipe?”
“Good question,” Grif said stiffly.
“Well, let me know when you get the answer.” Dr. Ott was replacing the sheet over Jeap’s face, but paused at Grif’s pointed look. He gave a humorless laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s the professional in me that wants to know. Because personally?” The doctor’s face darkened, the crazed look fell away, and his face went as dead as Jeap’s. “I’d check myself into rehab the moment I even thought about doing that.”
Chapter Six
Kit was on her phone before the morgue doors even slammed shut behind them, the Q&A between her and her aunt rapid-fire as she slid behind the wheel. Marin’s raspy staccato was an evenly matched rival as they exchanged information, and despite the long night and day, Kit had to smile. It was good to be able to move quickly beyond the niceties and get right to the point.
It was, Kit thought, good to have family.
Kit was still wearing a faint smile twenty minutes later, when she stepped into Marin’s office at the Las Vegas Tribune. However, the expression fell as she searched her aunt out over the mounds of papers and books threatening to topple from her desk. Kit heard the clacking of computer keys as she crossed the room and finally caught sight of Marin’s dark, spiky hair, though her shoulders remained hunched, her head bent.
“What the hell happened in here?” Kit asked, gesturing at the mutating pile of dead trees.
“What the hell are you wearing?” Marin shot back, never looking up, and not missing a key. Someone, Kit thought with a wry smile, was on a deadline.
“I’ve been up since three A.M.,” Kit said, wishing she’d said nothing when Grif, who’d trailed her in, gave her a knowing scowl. “But I still managed to spruce up.”
“Of course you did.” Still typing, Marin added, “I see you brought your lap dog.”
“That’s guard dog to you, Wilson.” Grif perched himself on the only free edge of Marin’s desk.
Her aunt looked up then, eyes narrowing into slits. “And how’re you doin’ on that count, champ?”
Grif jerked his head at Kit. “She’s still walking this mudflat.”
Marin leaned back in her chair. “Yeah, walked right into a drug den this morning. Where were you then?”
“That’s enough.” Kit stepped forward, and Marin’s hard gaze shifted. Marin and Grif might like sparring, but Kit’s idea of sport stopped short of drawing blood. “Grif’s only mistake was in trusting me too much.”
Marin turned back to her work. “Ran into that problem a few times myself.”
Grif said nothing, but Kit sighed. “And if it weren’t for Grif we would have never known about this Russian street drug.”
“Krokodil,” Marin said, mouth twisting like the word itself was poison. She punched a key, then shifted her laptop around so they could see the images she’d gathered there. “Crap makes chemo cocktails look like Kool-Aid.”
Not to mention chemo was meant to help its host, Kit thought, looking her aunt over. Three years past her last treatment and Marin was thriving.
“Yeah, we already got the Technicolor version of that,” Grif said, jerking his head at the gangrenous images offered up from the bowels of the Internet. “Question is, how’d it get here?”
“Know how to read Cyrillic script?” Marin asked, hitting a button on the computer so that the screen flashed to Russian text.
“No,” they both replied.
“Well, if you did you could print this baby out here and cook up your own fresh batch of crocodile soup. I’ve been using the Latin alphabet to transliterate it and decipher at least some of the ingredients. Did you know they put paint thinner in this garbage?”
“Don’t forget codeine,” Kit added. “Lots of it. So who’d be able to secure enough of it to boil it down into a street drug?”
“A doctor,” Grif guessed.
“Aren’t we smart?” Marin then switched her screen to another, this one in English. “A Russian one, in fact. I’ve already begun searching Russian surnames in the valley. It’s a long shot, and total cultural profiling, but it’s a start.”
“Ever