Page 67 of The Wrong Side of the Law

Chapter Twenty-One

Gabriel

At five minutes to five, I’m just starting to finally wake up. An hour-long nap, face down on ones desk, doth not a restful night make.

Emily notices me frowning up at the clock.

“No, no,no,” she says. “I see what you’re thinking, Gabriel. You’re not working late tonight, not again. Not after last night.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I laugh. “I’m not going to. I was looking to see if it’s a respectable time to leave, yet. Though, now that I’m awake enough to be productive…” I shrug, raising my eyebrows. “Maybe we should just make the workday start at five, instead of in the mornings?”

“You know you’re going to jinx yourself, right?”

“Never tell me the odds!” I bark at her, with my very best rakish, devil-may-care grin.

But no sooner are the words out of my mouth than the phone on my desk rings.

Emily smirks at me while I pick up the handset. Her lips silently form a sentence:I told you so.

“Cooper, Narcotics Unit,” I say into the phone, rolling my eyes at my red-haired office mate.

“Gabriel! The man himself!”

Nowthat’sa voice that perks me right up. Ken Sparks is a section chief at the state crime lab down in Miami, and he’s forgotten more about mass spectrometry and gas chromatography than most scientists will ever know.

“Hey, Sparky!” I say. “Didn’t expect to hear from you today. What’s up?”

“Got your email this morning,” he says. “It seemed pretty urgent, and since one of your officers dropped off a sample right when we opened the doors, well, I ran your tests.”

“Yeah? Get anything interesting out of it?”

My pulse quickens in anticipation. Emily, recognizing that something important may be happening, inches her chair closer and closer.

“Well, yes,” Ken answers. “Yes…but.”

“Always abut, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, somehow there always is,” he says. “So, here’s the thing…”

The lab scientist launches into a lecture full of words likeunderivatized regioisomersandmethoxybenzoyl fragmentsandside chain structures. I let him ramble for a bit, but I have to cut him short before even a full minute has passed.

“Sparky,” I interrupt. “Buddy. Hold up a sec.”

“Hm? Yeah?” The flow of his report broken, Ken seems almost disoriented.

“I know you love your work, man, but I was a political science major. I have no idea what any of this means. Put it all in the written report, but right now just give me the version for an audience of six-year-olds, okay?”

“Oh,” he says. “Right, then. In simple terms, this is a very interesting sample. The blend of adulterants is unique by itself, but the really fascinating part is the way that the methylenedioxymethamphetamine—sorry, I know, big word—molecule breaks down. Chemically, the complete molecule is indistinguishable from any other—it genuinely is MDMA, not a synthetic analog—but when the molecule comes apart into fragments, the breaks aren’t where they normally happen.”

“So it’s very unique?” I ask, hope surging. “You’d say there’s a fingerprint to it?”

Emily’s hands tighten on my forearm as she feeds off my excitement.

“Oh, absolutely!” Sparky answers. “This one stands out from the crowd, without a doubt. I’d really like to meet the chemist who synthesized it, if anyone ever finds him, or comes up with more samples.”

And just like that, disappointment. I slump back in my chair.

“No other matches on record, then?”

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