Box Nine by Jack O'Connell Read Free Book Online

satanic dealers who lurk in the shadows of schoolyards.
    â€œYou are an underfunded, understaffed group of civil servants attempting, no, let’s be honest, staking your lives in a battle against what has become in just a few short decades one of our largest, most intricate and ruthless multinational industries. To be frank, people, you are in an absurd situation.”
    He takes a breath, comes behind his own chair, grips the back of it like the conference table was a speeding ride in an amusement park.
    â€œAnd detectives,” he says in a fake-tired voice, “things just got worse.”
    He pauses and looks around the table as if he were waiting for people to audibly sigh. No one obliges and he sits back down in his head chair and continues.
    â€œNow, I am not here today to break down what minimal morale you have left. But it is my duty to let you know about the extent of the problem we’re about to face. And I want each and every one of you to feel that we’re facing it together. You have my unlimited support in this effort. We can’t pull any punches here, ladies and gentlemen. The time for polite conversation is long over.”
    Lenore wants to lean over the man, scream at him in the same manner she’s grilled dozens of informants and suspects. She wants to be less than an inch from his face, take in a lungful of air, and yell, “Cut the bullshit and tell me what you know.”
    â€œI’m sure I sound melodramatic to some of you. But what you’ll soon hear about today is a worse plague than the crack explosion we suffered two summers ago. Worse than that heroin harvest out of Burma in the fall of …” he trails off, looking to the ceiling for the year.
    â€œEighty-three,” Miskewitz mutters, and Lenore knows he’s thrown out a random year.
    â€œEighty-three,” the mayor repeats. “It’s a different animal this time, people.”
    He takes a long pause for an effect that just doesn’t pan out and says, “At this point I think it’s best to turn the story over to Agent Lehmann.”
    Lehmann stays seated, but tosses his sunglasses out in front of him, like he’s tired of talking before he’s even begun.
    â€œThe substance Mayor Welby is talking about is a derivative of methyl-sermocilan. You’ll come to know it more commonly as ‘Lingo,’ the label Dr. Woo has given it.”
    Lehmann speaks like a man in a constant, simmering rage over having to walk among inferior people. He slaps a manila folder onto the table and opens it.
    â€œThese look familiar to anyone?” he asks, tossing a pile of 8 x 10 black-and-white photos onto the middle of the table. Everyone reaches for a picture. Lenore pulls up a full-body picture of a naked woman, laid out faceup on a silver slab, photographed from above. Even in black and white, maybe more so in black and white, she has that pasty but shadowy look of the dead. There are thick welts and contusions across her abdomen. The standard tag dangles from her toe in the corner of the photo.
    Richmond looks over her shoulder and says, “Last week’s murder-suicide up on Grimaldi Drive. Domestic bloodbath. The Swanns, right? He slit her throat and hung himself. Or do I have it backward?”
    â€œYou don’t have it at all,” Lehmann says. “Try to follow me on this. About six months back, some of my people based in Boston were asked to put a file together on a married couple, Leo and Inez Swann. Late thirties, both supposedly brilliant, degrees from Princeton, Cornell, and MIT, where they met. They lived here in the Windsor Hills section of Quinsigamond. Money spilling out of both their pockets. They worked, until recently, at the Institute for Experimental Biochemistry. They had a specialty that the doctor here can tell you more about—”
    The Oriental guy, Woo, takes this as a signal to speak, though it’s clear to everyone else that it’s