"I got a case for you. Two girls died within minutes of each other, separate locations. Uhura has the one that they brought to the morgue. The other is still on scene at Crissy Field," Pike said over the phone.
"What's the connection?" Leonard asked as he ran a hand though his hair.
"They were both students at Cerberus Academy. And it wasn't something they were exposed to on campus. School pathogen sensors, all green," Pike told him. Cerberus was a school for 'chromes', or genetically engineered humans. Designed to be perfect, chromes don't just drop dead.
"I'm on my way."
"No. Jemma says you're still at home," the captain chuckled. Leonard groaned, repeated his last sentence and hung up the phone. He took a deep breath before he pushed himself out of bed to take a quick shower and get dressed.
Leonard kept having dreams or nightmares… memories of Jocelyn. Every time he closed his eyes he could see her. He could feel her. As much as he used to hold on to that feeling, now, it just made him sick. She was a terrorist and she tried to kill him. Everything between them was fake. Maybe that's why it bothered him so much. He let her in and she tore him apart.
After finishing his shower and getting dressed, he headed over to Crissy Field. Jemma was already there. Leonard took a deep breath, "Well, look who it is. My keeper."
"Good morning to you, too, Bones."
"Look, don't ever tell anybody where I am, where I was, what time I arrived or what time I left," he told her bluntly.
"Captain Pike is our commanding officer," she said. "And he asked."
"He's on a need-to-know basis. Protect, serve, cover," Leonard said. They've only been partnered up for a week but he thought that she'd at least have those three things down.
"You want me to cover for you, why don't you tell me why you turned off your locator chip for two hours this morning?"
"What you don't know can't hurt me," he said. It's not that he couldn't tell her that he went back to the recollectionist last night, he just preferred not to.
"You do know that it's my job to know about you, right? You're not just a badge number and a cute haircut, you're my partner," Jemma told him. He raised an eyebrow at the comment about his hair as she motioned the body. "Victim's name is Scarlett Davis."
"Huh," he knelt near the dead girl's body. "What we've got? Was she stung?"
Jemma's eyes scanned the girl and her skin did that blue thing it does. "No bee stings on her. No signs of an allergic reaction either."
Leonard pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled up Uhura's number, "Uhura, Pike says we might be working the same case."
"It looks that way," the other detective chuckled.
"You got a cause of death?"
"They're calling it cardiac arrest," Uhura said.
"Which means they don't know. My girl's pupils are fixed and abnormally dilated. How about yours?" he asked.
"They're huge, I've never seen anything like it," Uhura told him. "I'm thinking OD, but from what I don't know. The hospital ran a standard drug panel. Over three hundred substances, all clean."
"Well, something stopped their hearts. There's always something new and exciting hitting the streets," Leonard muttered.
"Yea, I sent a blood sample to our lab. If there's something in this girl, we'll figure it out," Uhura said. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Jem handed him a container of some kind.
"We just found something," he said. "You got your vic's personals?"
"Just got them. There's not much here," Uhura replied.
"The container has a biometric lock circuit," Jemma said. "It's activated by an individual's DNA."
Leonard brushed the lock with their victim's hand and it opened. "It's empty."
"So is the one I found," Uhura told him.
"Well, we better find out what was inside, before we find any more dead kids," he said. "Jemma."
"Running an analysis," she said. "Substance: unknown. We will have to send it to the lab."
"Alright," Leonard gave her a nod. "Uhura, we'll meet you back at the precinct."
"We were right, this is new," Uhura looked up from her desk.
"What is it?" he asked, moving to look at her screen.
"The drug found in the blood of our victims contains a metabolite, it's a breakdown compound that indicates the presence of a drug or toxin," she said.
"Like what? Upper? Downer? Euphoric? Tremble stim? Hallucinogen? What are we talking about?"
"Good question," Uhura sighed.
"I thought chromes didn't do drugs," he said.
"Generally they don't. But that doesn't mean they don't experiment. They just don't have addiction issues. Those genetic defects get corrected in the womb."
Leonard glanced at the lab report, "Well, these two girls definitely experimented."
"Apparently three girls did," Jemma said. "The same compound was also found in the blood of a girl who died seven months ago. Irina Hoving, age fifteen. Also a student at Cerberus Academy."
"I'll look into it, see if the girls were friends," Uhura told them.
"This one's different," Jemma told them. "She didn't OD, she drowned."
"She could've been on her way to an OD and drowned before her heart stopped," Leonard said.
Jemma shook her head, "The original investigation couldn't find any conclusive evidence of drug use."
"Well, we've got more bodies than they do," he pointed out.
"There's a ton of chatter between these girls on social networks. They were definitely friends," Uhura said.
"Take a team to the school and see what you can find out. We'll meet you there after we talk to the mother of the girl who drowned," Leonard told her.
Uhura gave him a nod and left the bullpen. Leonard closed his eyes for second and caught a flash from the ambush. Not a full memory, just a flicker. He glanced around before he took one of the tiny red pills in his pocket. Maybe it'll come in clearer.
"Let's go," he said to his partner. She fell into step with him as he walked out the precinct.
"I know you've been taking Membliss, Bones. I'm required to give updates on your mental and physical condition every seventy-two hours. You thought I wouldn't detect it? Are you seeing that recollectionist after what happened last week?
"Look, I got it under control."
"Prolonged use of Membliss may result in paranoia, visual distortions…"
"Mm-hmm," he mumbled.
"Short-term memory loss, migraines…" Jemma kept going as they got into the car.
"Yeah."
"Heart palpitations, increased risk of aneurysms…"
He nodded, "Mm-hmm."
"Blackouts…" she said. At this point, he's mostly tuned her out.
"Right."
"And diarrhea."
"Diarrhea? Oh, I thought it was the burrito," he said.
"Just wanted to make sure you were listening," she chuckled.
"Look. I need those pills to help me. They open up memory clusters so I can..."
"Remember things about the ambush," Jemma said.
"Yes. I got it under control," Leonard told her.
"Pardon me if I don't take your word for it."
"I could never have afforded Cerberus on my own. Irina was special. And they let in a couple of naturals every year on scholarship," Misses Hoving, Irina's mother, told them.
"So she wasn't a chrome? Irina wasn't genetically modified?" he asked.
"She was born gifted. She worked really, really hard. Straight A's all the way," the woman smiled.
"Is there anything you can remember about your daughter's death? Anything that might've come to you in retrospect?" Leonard asked. "In your report, you said that Irina was a strong swimmer, that she never would've drowned. And that if she did have drugs in her system, that she wouldn't have done them alone."
"That's right. If those drugs helped kill Irina, someone knew where she got them. But none of her friends would say anything. So I hired a private detective to find out more about what happened that night. But they denied being her friends. He got recordings of some conversations that proved they knew each other," Misses Hoving said.
"What was on them?" he asked, he had a feeling.
"They were talking about being with Irina that night. Like I thought."
"Did they say anything about drugs?"
She shook her head, "No."
"Which friends?" Leonard asked.
"Elinor Church and Scarlett Davis. What is this about?"
"We found those two girls dead this morning," he told her. Leonard watched the woman's reaction, mildly surprised and a flicker of sadness, but that was it. "They had the same unknown drug in their system as Irina did. But a lot more of it."
"What did you do with the recordings?" Jemma asked.
"I gave everything to the police," Misses Hoving told them.
"There's no record of that," Jemma said, her face flickering blue for the half a second it took her to search.
"I know, when I followed up on it, they said the recordings were blank," the grieving woman said.
"What do you mean? You were told they were erased?" he asked.
"That's what I was told. They blamed it on a magnetic surge. They say that happens sometimes. Doesn't it?" Misses Hoving asked.
Leonard glanced at his partner, "Well, it can, but it's unlikely."
"Are you suggesting someone made it disappear?" Misses Hoving asked them.
"Anything's possible," he said. "Do you have the contact details of the private detective?"
"Let me get my phone."
"Thank you." Misses Hoving left the room and Leonard looked at Jemma. "Who was the cop that originally investigated the case?"
"Detective Jacobs, twenty-third precinct."
"Okay, well, let's find out what type of cop he was. Dirty? Clean? Put in a request."
Her face lit up blue, "On it."
After hitting a dead end with Jacobs, he was clean, they went to Cerberus to help Uhura. Jemma went to have a look in the girls' dorm rooms while he and Uhura interviewed Cerberus students from the girls' classes. They didn't get much from anyone so far but they still had a few people left on the list. Next up was Lee Drake.
"You knew Scarlett and Elinor. You have any classes with them?" Uhura asked the teen.
"Computer science. Advanced," Lee bragged.
"We were wondering if…"
"There are no illegal drugs at Cerberus," Lee said, cutting Uhura off.
"You didn't even let her finish the question," Leonard said.
"Was she gonna say something else?" the kid asked him in the most condescending tone possible. This is why he hated dealing with kids.
"How can you be so sure there are no illegal drugs at Cerberus?" Uhura asked.
"Just am," Lee shrugged.
"Your friends are dead. Aren't you afraid that whatever happened to them is gonna happen to you?" she asked the kid.
Lee smirked, "I don't do illegal drugs."
"That's cute, 'illegal' drugs. What about legal drugs? Or new drugs that haven't been made illegal yet?" Leonard asked.
"You wouldn't understand," Lee told him.
Jocelyn handed him something.
Leonard shook his head clear, "Come on, Lee. Why don't you try and explain it? I mean, what are you trying to protect?"
"Like I said, you wouldn't understand."
"Please tell me you found something," he said to his partner as he walked into Scarlett's dorm room.
"I did," Jemma said. She had another bio-locked container like the one they found on Scarlett. Inside, there was a small pill. "I have her DNA on file, I used it to open the container. I already sent the information to Scotty. He said he'll have something for us by the time we get to the precinct."
"That's not bad, partner."
"Well, I am a cop," she said.
"I suppose you are," he smiled. "Come on."
"What's the drug do?" Uhura asked as they sat in the meeting room with Jemma, Pike and Scotty.
"Hard to say, lass. Kid in the lab is still working on it but he gave me the preliminary finding," Scotty told her. "It's the ultimate designer drug, there are some hallucinogenic elements but also things we just dinnae understand yet. It targets at least a dozen different neurotransmitter groups. Another thing is that Scarlett's DNA is attached to the molecules."
"That's not something an average metal meth head can cook up in their basement," Leonard said.
"The chemical layers are one point five microns thick and extremely uniform," Jemma said.
"Ahh, that sounds like they were made with a ChemPrinter," Scotty said.
"ChemPrinters are pricey and highly regulated, they even require a license. Let's find the ones in the city," Uhura said.
"Go," Chris told them.
The group, minus the captain, went to the bullpen to start pulling information. Of course, Jemma found the information they needed. "Bones, a Chemulon-Six ChemPrinter was licensed at a private residence in Embarcadero, less than a mile from Cerberus Academy. The owner is Edgar Kyle. He's been dead for seven months. But his son Julian was expelled from Cerberus last year."
"Let's go," he told her. They got into the car and headed to Kyle's residence.
"The Chemulon-Six has a very interesting safety feature: it automatically backs up a history of every drug it prints to a cloud. I've found the DNA of all of our victims in the log, this is definitely the machine that supplied them with the drug," she told him.
"Leonard," Jocelyn said.
"Bones, are you listening to me?" Jemma asked. "Did you just have another flash? Maybe I should drive."
"No, no, I'm good. I've got it under control. Go on," he lied. It was stupid, he knew it but his pride wouldn't let him admit that he was having some trouble. He sure as hell couldn't admit it to his perfectly perfect partner.
"Irina Hoving only took one dose, one time; the night she died. Scarlett and Elinor had been taking the drug a while," she said.
"How long?"
"Roughly a year. But their fatal doses were a thousand times stronger than their previous ones. It looks as if this dealer intentionally overdosed them."
Gunshots.
Phil going down.
Jocelyn.
"Bones!" Jemma called, her hand reaching over to hold the wheel. It was a good thing that her reflexes were fast, because he almost crashed the car into a bus. "Is that what you call control? Pull over. I'm driving."
"Jem…"
"I'm driving."