Page 9 of Forgotten Path
The path was clear: Find Joel, then find the source of the potential SUD cluster.
He returned to the kitchen to retrieve his phone.
“What is HABs?” Eliza Doolittle squawked as soon as he entered the room.
He smiled. She had an astonishing memory for a bird and the insatiable curiosity of a child.
“HABs is an abbreviation for harmful algae blooms,” he told her.
She cocked her head and peered at him as if she’d reached the limits of his understanding.
“Seraphina comes home tomorrow.”
She chirped out a sound of pure joy.
Eliza Doolittle wasn’t really Bodhi’s bird. And Bodhi’s house wasn’t really his house. He had a long-term tenant who frequently traveled for work. For many years, she’d rented Bodhi’s home (although it had been several years since he’d actually collected rent). When Seraphina was on the road—which was often—Bodhi housesat for her in his own home and cared for Eliza Doolittle. When she was in town, he often visited Bette in Illinois, stayed with friends, or took the opportunity to arrange a monastic retreat.
“Bodhi’s leaving?” The bird inquired. “Going to the monastery?”
“Bodhi’s leaving,” he agreed.
But he had a different destination in mind. He picked up the phone to arrange a flight to Florida.
CHAPTERSIX
Wednesday
The cubes in Felicia’s iced coffee had melted, leaving her with a cup of watery brew. She eyed it with disdain, then shrugged and gulped it down. She didn’t have time to run out for a fresh drink. Not if she wanted to fit in the rest of these calls to the county emergency rooms and walk-in clinics. She blew her bangs away from her forehead. Not that the search had borne fruit. Nobody reported any unusual or new overdoses. As the charge nurse at Little Key Clinic had grumped, “Aren’t the usual ones enough?”
Felicia rubbed her forehead. The overextended, cranky nurse had a point: there were plenty of fatal overdoses and hospital admissions in the Keys. But they all seemed to stem from the typical sources—meth, fentanyl, the occasional batch of tainted heroin. If there was a new designer drug making the rounds, she hadn’t seen any sign of it.
But if Joel hadn’t stumbled onto a drug epidemic, what could his cryptic notes possibly mean? And, more to the point, where was he?
Her desk phone rang. The shrill tone cut through her, setting her nerves on edge. She toyed with ignoring the call. But she couldn’t blow off her actual caseload to investigate the disappearance of a full-grown adult who wasn’t even an official missing person. Not even if he was one of her closest friends.
She grabbed the receiver and ground out a response. “Williams.”
“It’s me.”
Bodhi King’s melodious, measured voice rolled over her like an ocean breeze. Her shoulders relaxed on their own accord.
“Did you find something?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Patience, she counseled herself. She’d learned through experience that the pathologist couldn’t be rushed. He was methodical, thorough, and unhurried. Felicia, who was always in a hurry, had found it maddening at first, but she’d come to appreciate that there was something satisfying about proceeding at a deliberate pace—even if it wasn’t a pace she could maintain.
Finally, he said, “The neurotoxins I told you about yesterday aren’t the only ones. I think Joel may have encountered a group of toxins that made him think of Solo. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was dealing with the components of the drug itself.”
“That tracks,” she told him. “I’ve been calling around for the past day and a half. Nobody’s seen an uptick in sudden respiratory distress symptoms or paralysis or any unusual fatal ODs. Just the stuff they’d expect to see.”
“Mmm. Are the Keys experiencing a red tide, by chance?”
“What?” She shook her head at the apparent non sequitur.
“A red tide—a bloom ofKarenia bravis.It’s a dinoflagellate algae that turns the water red and foul-smelling. I checked the national oceanic databases and didn’t see anything, but I imagine the string test would be even more accurate.”
“The string test?” Her confusion mounted.
