Johan Kotton walked through the compound’s huge kitchen area, snagged a cinnamon bun, and poured himself a cup of coffee, then wandered into the adjoining room, where a large group sat around the dining room table, talking. As he took the last seat, Kai looked over at him, grinned, and said, “You’ll get fat here if you keep eating like that.”
Johan nodded sagely. “You could be right,” he said, “but I’ll worry about it later. These are too damn good to miss out on.”
“Those are Bailey’s cinnamon buns,” Kai said. “They’re to die for.”
He munched his way through it, thoroughly enjoying the different tastes of everything over here. He had traveled for years in his work, decades even, but he had spent the last five years with Bullard over in Africa, until Johan had been sent off the Galápagos Islands to help rescue a science team. He’d come back, along with Galen Alrick, to Ice and Levi’s compound in the outskirts of Houston for a week or two. He was hoping to do a mission or two here and see just how different it was.
He was originally from the US, but his parents had been missionaries and had traveled all over the world. He’d gone to school in England and in Michigan. School hadn’t really stuck, and he’d gone on to working in various trades in Germany and then in Switzerland. It was hard, as he looked back through his vagabond lifestyle, to place any area as home.
As he pondered the cinnamon bun in this strange path his world had taken, he heard Kai say, “I know, but it’s Joy, and she’s not one much for raising the alarm.”
“You know Joy. We don’t,” Harrison said. “And she might not be one to raise alarms, but that doesn’t mean she’s not making this a bigger deal than it is.”
Kai shrugged, sank back in her chair and said, “I think you’re wrong.”
“What did I miss out on?” Johan asked, as he took another bite of his cinnamon bun.
Kai turned toward him. “A friend of mine, Joy—well, it’s actually Joyce, but we’ve always called her Joy,” Kai said. “She’s working at the corporate office for a medical research center and says a mess of drugs are missing from her inventory.”
“Drugs are always missing,” Johan said. “I swear it goes along with every medical center I’ve ever seen.”
“I agree,” she said, “but, in this case, it’s knockout drugs.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are those a hot commodity on the black market here?”
“Yes,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately. And, in this case, the drug is ketamine, which is what they use to knock out horses.”
“Or men,” Johan said quietly. “We’ve had serial killers using that same drug before.”
“I never thought about a serial killer,” Kai said, her eyes round as she stared at him. “And I definitely won’t mention it to Joy.”
He chuckled. “No need to really put the panic into her. Besides, if it’s just one or two bottles, is that something everybody’s worried about, or is it a much bigger issue?”
“She’s new there,” Kai said. “She was hired by Westgroup as the inventory clerk, working in their corporate offices, which includes their oversight of a large research center. The two buildings are near each other on the same block, I believe. They don’t do any animal testing, but they’re doing a lot of work on various animals, so they knock them out to do surgeries.”
“Sounds like animal testing to me,” Johan said, as the last bite of the cinnamon bun went into his mouth.
“I hope not,” Kai said darkly. “It would make Joy very unhappy.”
“What’s the difference between animal testing and experimental surgery?” he asked curiously.
“Motivation, I think,” Harrison said, with a laugh.
“Either way,” Kai said, “the corporate office is near the medical research facility which is run alongside a large vet clinic, and, per Joy’s inventory records, a lot of ketamine went missing.”
“Nobody should stock a lot of ketamine,” Johan said. “It’s a very strong drug, and you don’t need very much of it. So, unless they’re dealing with a huge population of bovine, horses, or, say, elephants,” he said with a snort, “I can’t see anybody having a large stock of it.”
“True enough, but they did get a large amount in, and now it’s gone.”
Johan stared at her, his fingers tapping away on his knees. His mind raced as he thought about all the uses for ketamine. “If it was a serial killer, he won’t need a lot of ketamine anyway.”