Dark Tidings (Coastal Vigilante Book 5) by Matt Lincoln

Author:Matt Lincoln [Lincoln, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

13

Jake

The entire table fell silent, blinking as we stared at Cal and Xavier. I glanced down at the packet in my hands, trying to make heads or tails of the technical and medical jargon on the page, but it all looked like gibberish to me.

“Walk us through it,” Rachel instructed. The others seemed to be in the same boat as I was—utterly unable to comprehend the mass of data placed before us.

Xavier cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses again. “The case had five different phony pharmaceuticals in it. We’ve got insulin—pretty easy and basic—and the rest get more complicated from there. There are HIV meds and a type of birth control, as well as some sleep meds and antidepressants. But…” He looked at Cal, who nodded for him to continue. “But none of them are properly manufactured. Maybe they do what they’re supposed to, say, a quarter of the time, but they’ve got serious side effects. They’re basically poisonous.”

“We poked through hospital records in some of the countries where we know Morales is dealing, like Cuba,” Cal added. “If you flip to the back of your packets, you’ll find some reports of overdoses and people admitted to the ER with inexplicable and nasty symptoms, though toxicology had trouble pinpointing the cause for the most part.”

I did as I was told and turned to the last few pages, skimming through the notes there. This, I understood more. Person after person admitted to the hospital, sick as a dog, doctors unable to figure out what was wrong with them before they succumbed. Cal and Xavier had picked out the common denominators between them, but it didn’t look like the doctors had been able to do the same.

“So, either the chemist isn’t as good as we thought…” I began.

“Or he just doesn’t care,” Jace finished for me.

I nodded. “And neither does Morales, so long as he’s making money.”

The table fell silent for a couple of long moments, a pall of darkness overtaking the room. I clutched the packet tightly in both hands as a wash of anger roared over me, crumpling the paper. I could understand the manufacture and sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals to help people who couldn’t afford or access the meds they needed to live otherwise. That I could even condone so long as the end goal was to try to help people. But Morales and his chemist were promising people false hope with this stuff, actively endangering not only these poor saps but the immigrants he was threatening and coercing into doing his dirty work.

“We think the chemist has to know what they’re doing,” Xavier said. “The fake pharmaceuticals still follow the same formula as the real stuff. Whoever made them just cut a few corners in the process, probably to save money. And the chemist would still have to know where to get all the ingredients and have access to the equipment to combine them.”

“Do we know enough to build a profile or list of potential suspects?” Jace asked.

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