Beg Me (22 page)

Her fingers dipped into me with reverence, with the skill born of knowing. “If you’re loud, bite me when you come,” she whispered. “Bite me here.” And she gestured to her breast.

I kissed her feverishly and let her drive me mad, my back arching, sweat pooling between my breasts, tossing and turning my head until the fluttering began, the all-encompassing wave from her fingers inside me, until I let out a sob that could have been mistaken for anguish and sank my teeth around her areola. She moaned with pleasure, and my hand strayed between her legs. She was sopping.

She came in high-pitched whimpers that relentlessly turned me on, but the best, the very best, was to hold each other afterward. To caress each other and feel each other’s breath, to have afterplay and whispers.

“We can’t tell anyone,” she whispered.

“Jeez, who would we tell?”

“No, really,” she said with a note of fear. “They really hate gays, and Danielle’s always talkin’ trash about how lesbians can’t be feminine. She says playing it up with a girl for a prince is one thing, like doing a scene, but if you have feelings for a girl, you’re confused or mentally ill. She says it’s a stage of sexual immaturity.”

Oh, really.

Of course—it undermined their whole deal of women submitting and directing all their sexual desires to a prince.

“So I guess she made a real mistake putting us in the same room,” I laughed.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Violet.

“About what?”

“About this. Do you like me?”

“Very much,” I assured her.

“But we’re not supposed to focus on one member of the temple,” she countered. “Let alone a…”

“Do you regret it?” I asked.

She smiled. “No.”

“Look, I could probably have chosen a better moment, but do you think you can trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“Not everything we’re told here is true, okay? You’ll have to take my word for that, Violet, but keep it to yourself for now, all right?”

“Teresa, what are you saying?”

I blew a long stream of air out of my cheeks and collapsed back into my deck chair. I didn’t want to dump so much of a load on her that she started to draw suspicion through her own worries and concerns. I knew what they did to Anna, to Oliver, to Craig Padmore. I had to protect her.

“We’ll figure it out, darling. We’ll keep us to ourselves for now, okay?”

She rose up and kissed me. She said okay.

I kept burrowing away in the library, still thankfully undetected, combing financial records and trying to piece together the background of Isaac Jackson and Danielle Zamani. Well, more Danielle than Isaac. On him, I kept finding nothing.

Okay, so what did I have?

Danielle had a master’s in chemistry from Princeton, which she had apparently never used in her professional life. She had worked as a real-estate agent, done a lot of homework on incorporating yourself and limited partnerships and blah, blah, blah, and just as the holding company managed the finances of the mansion (which was technically a church, thus avoiding a whole slew of taxes), it also ran a couple of other things in upstate New York. The most baffling of those was a small but apparently profitable insecticide manufacturer. Weird.

What would you want to own
that
for? Of all the places to invest your money. Not only that, but it was a franchise operation. In a franchise, you put out bug spray like your Uncle Ken might sell fries under McDonald’s or Burger King. Unusual, but perhaps it made sense from a corporate perspective. I don’t know. To me it said:
dodgy.

Because if cops wanted to snoop into an operation, they would look at the big picture, wouldn’t they? Right to headquarters, to look at the books on everything—the assumption would be it’s top-down guilt. Ah, but the beauty of franchise outlets was they had different owners. So if you wanted to hide something criminal, you might indeed hide it better by using a smaller, single operation.

Okay. Danielle knows chemistry. Insecticide involves chemicals—

How do you get heroin with insecticide chemicals? Maybe you don’t.

Sigh. I didn’t know where to go from there. I needed my own chemistry guy. Back in London, Jiro was my computers expert. Helena was my guide to all things posh and the latest scandals. My go-to guy over all things bubbling and fuming was Allen Walker, a prof pal of my dad’s who was at Cambridge.

I went for a walk with my cell in those nice private fields beyond the mansion.

As Allen came to the phone, my mind enjoyed a picture of him resting his sizable bulk on one of his lab stools, rubbing his square nut-brown jaw and adjusting his Coke-bottle spectacles. His voice had this musical quality, so that any question sounded like a hooting owl.

“Where are you?”

Right. A scolding. My dad’s friends continued to treat me like a fifteen-year-old runaway.

“In America,” I replied. “On a case.”

That sounded ridiculous to my ears. If I said that to my friends, they’d shoot back:
Ooooohh!

“America is so dangerous these days, Teresa! What are you thinking?”

“If it makes you feel any better, I was shot at a few weeks ago in Bangkok.”

“Very funny,” he sang. I knew he wouldn’t believe that one. “You know, Paul was asking about you this week, Teresa.”

“Isn’t he your research assistant?” Lord help me.

“He has a very promising career ahead of him, and he’s quite stable. Your father’s met him.”

I stifled a laugh. Allen did not say,
Your father
likes
him
—just that Daddy met him. My father wants security for me as much as any father, but he’s impatient with anyone who’s dull. Maybe it was why my brother and I had grown up quite determined to live full, exciting lives.

“Well, it’s kind of hard to go for drinks with Paul when I’m here and he’s there, so it’ll have to wait,” I said.

Like when Halley’s comet comes around next. I bet Violet knew when that was.

“In the meantime, I need your help,” I added.

I gave him a quick summary of how I figured the bug-spray plant must be a cover for something else.

Allen did consulting work for the police from time to time, so he was a good person to bounce around ideas with (I got teased during three dinners with Carl and his wife after he and Allen realized they both knew me, and Allen told him some very embarrassing tales of my childhood). I listened to Allen humming at so-many-ridiculous-pence a minute on the international call, and then he said, “I’d only be speculating.”

“Allen. Please speculate.”

“What you need is a list of their permits for hazardous controlled chemicals. And unless you know a good attorney who can—”

“I got better,” I said. “Are you going to be around at this number in an hour or so?”

“Yes, but, Teresa, how can you possibly get a list of their—”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call you back.”

Since it seemed I had patched things up more or less with Simon Highsmith and he was so concerned about my well-being, I thought he was ripe for a favor-plucking. He had the right intelligence contacts to put through a circuitous request to sources inside America’s Food and Drug Administration—or whoever grants the permits for such things.

Simon impressed me by calling back in the early afternoon, and I scribbled down a whole collection of names I could barely pronounce and certainly couldn’t spell without help.

“How are you holding up out there?”

“I’m okay,” I said evenly.

“Teresa, I have to be in Paris next month. If you’ve wrapped up your business by then, maybe we can hook up in France or I can jump on the Eurostar….”

I didn’t know what to say for a moment. “Yeah. Maybe.”

We had never been a long-term couple, and God knew we had clashed over ethics more than once. But somehow, just like a good boyfriend, he recognized my noises.

“Ah, a definite maybe!” he teased. “Listen, do you need me out there?”

As in wet-work-kick-ass-beat-the-baddies need, not the lover-in-Nigeria-guarding-against-bad-nightmares need.

“You’re still hunting Bishop.”

“He’ll keep. Say the word.”

“No,” I sighed. “At least not yet. It’s nothing personal, Simon. I told you, this case is grim. I can’t have…extra complications.”

In the background at his end, I could hear a train departure being announced in German. I didn’t bother to ask where he was and what he was doing.

“Fair enough,” he said. “If you change your mind, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Thanks.”

If Simon impressed me with a list yanked off an anonymous computer screen in a bureaucrat’s office, then Allen was even more blown away by my magic divining skills. I fumbled through the pronunciation of chemicals and could tell he was jotting them down. “Stop,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“Say the last one again.”

“Safrole.”

“Safrole,” said Allen. “I think you have a winner, my dear.”

“What? What is it?”

“Comes from a plant in Asia and Australia—sassafras. You said you think this bug-spray plant is a cover for something else, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“You use safrole to make piperonyl butoxide, which is for pesticides. But it’s also one of the main ingredients you need for methylenedioxymethamphetamine.”

“Excuse me?”

He chuckled softly, enjoying my ignorance. “You’ve heard of it as ecstasy.”

“You’re joking!”

“Noooo,” his musical voice sang again.

So much for the heroin angle. They must have forgotten all about a Nigerian pipeline when they came up with this idea. No need for middlemen at all.

“Their bug factory’s a perfect cover, like you thought,” said Allen. “You cannot simply walk into a manufacturer and say, ‘May I please have so many gallons of this stuff?’ Once upon a time they used it as a food additive, but it’s got carcinogenic properties, so there you go. And when this whole silly E thing got started…”

“It’s brilliant,” I said. “They buy the safrole legitimately and must truck it down to their lab somewhere close. Allen, how easy is it to make ecstasy?”

I heard him blow air out of his cheeks. “In my day we made LSD—the fun was in actually making it. We didn’t take the fool stuff! We just wanted to see what we could get away with. To answer your question, it’s easier than you think—but bloody dangerous too. We
are
dealing with chemicals here, and people have tried doing this in their basements with standard equipment. Do it wrong, and you can poison yourself. Or fumes could kill you, or you could blow yourself up.”

“Lovely.”

“What you get in nightclubs and on the street isn’t always the real thing, of course. Your detective friend Carl’s told me they sometimes put in caffeine, ketamine, stuff from cough syrups like dextromethorphan in huge doses, which is just criminally stupid—”

“Why?”

“These chemicals can cause hallucinations, drastic increases in body temperature, sweating…. But if the villains you’re after are using safrole, they must be going for some kind of, ahem, quality control. It’ll be sophisticated stuff. ’Course, that doesn’t mean they won’t mix it with some other fool thing.”

I thanked him and hung up.

Ecstasy.
Manufactured right in New York. No smuggling from Holland, no bringing it up from labs in the backwaters of South Carolina.

“Oh, this is bad,” I mumbled to myself. “This is very, very bad.”

It also made me go over Anna’s rescue of Jimmy in the house while Isaac and Danielle were away. Allergic reaction, my ass.

When no one else was around, I went through a list of Staten Island hospitals in the phone book. I phoned each one, pretending to work on behalf of that quintessentially American creature, an HMO. Oh, man, how Americans put up with no proper national health system has got to be—well, I won’t start in on
that
one.

I said I was following up an insurance claim for a young man
(first name James
…
yes, address is at
…
)
brought in by one Anna Lee to the emergency room, and this happened—
Oh, you do have him? Yes, that’s right, palpitations, respiratory distress, profuse sweating—