She closed the door behind her.
When Emmett returned to the room with a suitcase, she was using the couch for balance as she scraped blood off the bottom of her stilettos. “Thank god they’re Louboutins,” she said. In response to Emmett’s obvious confusion, she added, “Red soles. All set?”
“What about…?”
She followed his line of sight to the duffel oozing on the linoleum. She frowned. “I suppose your friend should come too.”
CHAPTER 48
“What’s going on?” Emmett said as Saito’s Tesla flew east down Interstate 8. “How did you know I was connected to the deaths?”
Her driving was fast but measured, her manicured hands gripped firmly at ten and two as the car wove through post–rush hour traffic. “We received a tip-off from the SDPD. A friend told us you were being investigated for Justin Matthews’s murder.”
“A friend?” Emmett reached to silence his phone. He’d asked Lizette to swing by the apartment to grab the dogs; judging by the string of profanity-laden texts that followed, the cleaning crew wasn’t quite finished when she arrived.
“Assistant Chief Bautista was a participant in our Phase One trial. Started a two-hundred-sixty-pound diabetic, finished a new man. We’ve been supplying him with maintenance doses in exchange for his help throwing the investigators off your scent.”
“How?”
“Compromising evidence, leading the detectives down rabbit holes. Didn’t you wonder why they were so slow to catch up with you?”
“You lied to me. You knew the drug was making me hurt people. You made me think I was crazy!”
She slowed before a flare of brake lights. “The product has had issues for a while. Phase One, a few participants reported experiencing mood swings, violent blackouts.”
“Tanya Swygert,” Emmett said. “She killed her husband. Ate him too, didn’t she? But the news didn’t report that part.”
“We wanted the story to die as quickly as possible. One of our participants shoots her husband, that’s bad enough, but cannibalism…”
“Sounds like Bautista’s been helping you out for a while.”
Saito smirked. “The point is, she couldn’t stop taking the drug. None of them could, even once they realized what it was doing to them. Theywere so addicted to finally being seen as people that they were willing to turn themselves into monsters.”
“And you kept it quiet to make sure you got your FDA approval. You didn’t care if people died as long as Monstera cashed in.”
“Don’t be so cynical. Obexity is a miracle cure. It could save people like us.”
“Then why not take the time to do it right? If you knew there was a problem after the first trial, why move forward before you’d fixed the side effects?”
“Who says I’m trying to fix them?”
After a quarter of an hour Saito took the off-ramp for Rancho Peñasquitos, a residential community not far from where Emmett grew up. “Have you eaten?”
He realized he was starving. She drove through a Wendy’s, and Emmett, despite his lingering shock at her admission, smiled in surprise when Saito ordered herself a Dave’s Triple combo and chocolate Frosty.
“Cut me some slack. It’s been a long day,” she said.
It was nearly dark when they pulled onto a residential street and into the driveway of a large Spanish-style house, clean white stucco and clay roof tiles. A pair of shaggy four-legged shadows cleared the way for their arrival, their eyes flashing ice blue as the headlights’ beam swung across them.
Saito got out and opened the trunk. “Want to grab your bag? The suitcase,” she clarified as he reached for the other. Surprisingly strong for her size, she hefted the duffel out and lugged it toward the side gate.
Who is this woman?Emmett thought. He was still thinking about what she’d said on the drive over. If she knew the treatment was turning people into murderers, why wouldn’t she want to fix the side effects?
With a backward click of her fob, the trunk closed automatically.
Emmett traced her steps, rolling his suitcase through a luxurious backyard lounge, past a resort-style pool and an up-lit tropical garden of monstera and birds-of-paradise. As he reached the edge of the yard, he saw that it backed up to a steep and untamed decline, part of the Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve.
Pausing at the waist-high wrought-iron fence, Saito swung the bag up onto the rail, unzipped it, and dumped the contents. They rolled into thescrub with a sudden fury of snarls and champing, the scavengers already tussling over Emmett’s scraps.
