A few seconds later, Richie called me again. “What have you found down there?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said. “This case has no patterns. The perp, no clear motive. No reason why he moves from one geography to the other.”
As I said this, a thought occurred to me.
El Médico had worn a mask.
When the sketch artist mentioned this, we understood it through the prism of infectious disease. Things like the flu or Covid-19. I had assumed he was a careful medical practitioner or even a germophobe. But El Médico didn’t work with humans. He worked with animals.
So maybe it was to cover his face.
My head pounded. I computed the sleep I’d had recently, between the raid in D.C. and taking turns sleeping in the van. Five hours over the last two and a half days.
“Do you know what I was injected with?” Richie asked.
I was incapable of lying to anyone on my team.
“Xylazine,” I said. “It’s a tranquilizer. Used in veterinary practices. And lately cut into other drugs and sold on the street.”
Richie went quiet then.
Of all the drugs El Médico could have stolen from an emergency vet clinic, why had he taken xylazine? Why had he usedthison his victims?
The medicine acted on the central alpha-2 receptor and suppressed norepinephrine release from nearby nerves. It caused central nervous system depression and eventually respiratory depression, both of which would start within minutes and last for four hours.
What was he doing to his victims that took four hours but didn’t show up on their skeletons?
The taxi driver had burned through most of the forty dollars. He glanced back at me. “Buddy,” he said. “Am I dropping you at one of these hotels? Or somewhere else?”
I saw the pair of signs where I’d pulled over earlier with Frank. The Olive. The Aurora House. Something clicked.
“The Olive,” I said to the driver. “That’s fine.” The cabbie turned onto the drive, and I held the phone to my ear again. “I have to go, Richie.”
“You figured something out,” Richie said, his voice a mix of surprise and curiosity.
“I might have a lead,” I said. “A riddle that, until now, I didn’t notice.”
“What?” he asked. Then the phone went silent again.
“You there?” I inquired.
“Be careful,” Richie said. “I was close, and he got away. He’s been a step ahead of us this whole time.”
The phone cut out again, and I raised my voice, hoping Richie could hear. “Rest up,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
I hung up, and the cab driver pulled off the palm tree–lined drive, just past the place where Frank had hopped out of the car earlier. The cabbie slowed at a turnaround, where a white Mediterranean structure was lit up, surrounded by windswept banana palms.
The Olive was a three-story boutique hotel that couldn’t have held more than twenty rooms. Large hand-cut casement windowslined the second and third floors. I opened the cab door, but a rush of wind shoved it shut again on my face.
“Geez,” I said, pushing it back open.
Entering the lobby, I headed toward the check-in desk with just my workbag in hand.
A teenage girl with reddish hair and green eyes stood behind a desk. I told her I’d like a room for the night. After she checked me in, I badged her to wake up the night manager.
A few minutes later, a man who identified himself as Clive came out from a pocket door. His hair was combed, but his suit jacket and pants bore wrinkles.
I needed to crash and be up by 5 a.m. like Frank had said. But I needed information first. I asked Clive who owned the estates on either side of the hotel.
