2 Sisters Detective Agency(43)

I watched him becoming more animated as he spoke, his eyes wide, wandering over the water before us.

“This, all this, it’s like it sparkles.” He gestured to the world around us. “I can smell everything. I can feel everything. The breeze on my skin is like electricity. Everything I eat tastes like it was made in the kitchen of the gods. I’m high for weeks after a release. It’s like the high you get from heroin, you know? A full-body orgasm. Only it lasts days, not hours.”

I stared. Tuddy stood smiling at me.

“I wouldn’t know what the high from heroin is like,” I said. “Would you?”

“I spent eight years researching addictive chemicals,” he said. “You think I didn’t mess around with my own stock now and then?” He shook his head sadly. “That’s why all those companies began bidding for the patent on my methylamine alternative. They wanted to buy the product from me even though it wasn’t complete.”

“Because you were a liability,” I concluded. “Nobody wants to work with an addict.”

“That’s right,” he said. “In other circumstances, they would have hired me to continue my research. But I was so deeply addicted to heroin at the time, I was damaged goods. It was only the months-long incarcerations with the cartel that got me clean. The first time, I had a guard watching me twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t touch a gram.”

He turned to me, his eyes glittering.

“So, yes,” he concluded. “Freak. Big freak. How can I help you, my freaky friend?”





Chapter 54



I handed Tuddy my phone, then leaned over and flipped through the photographs of Derek Benstein’s crime scene for him. I hadn’t looked carefully at the images myself, only scrolled through them briefly, trying not to focus.

I paused at the photographs of police officers assisting a medical examiner in removing Benstein’s shirt at the scene. His torso was covered in bruises and marks. The photographer had paid particular interest to purple marks on Benstein’s thigh, visible at the hem of his boxer shorts.

“Huh,” Tuddy said.

“What do you see?”

“Something shocking.”

“Oh.” I stood back. “I’m sorry. I only—”

“That was a joke,” Tuddy said. “This young man has been tortured with some kind of electrical device. Probably a cattle prod. Shocking. You get it?”

“I do.” I sighed. “What tells you that?”

“These are electrical burns,” he said, pointing out blue and purple welts on Benstein’s body. “A cattle prod works by connecting two electrically charged prongs to the skin, thereby creating a closed electrical circuit that encompasses the human body. At the site of the connection, you get these burns. You see?”

I looked and immediately felt a little ill. “I see.”

“These were very big charges,” he continued. “Designed for cattle, not humans. So the extreme energy charge can’t just go into the flesh from one prong and turn around and head right back out again through the other prong. It tries to find somewhere else to go in the body. This is what happens when a person is struck by lightning. It’s called flashover. The charge travels through the muscle and skin and creates these bruises.”

He zoomed in on a big patch of blue skin that had burst like a flower on Benstein’s stomach.

“You can also see he’s been starved of oxygen,” Tuddy said, after enlarging the image to focus on Benstein’s face. “The capillaries in his eyeballs have burst. That’s consistent with sustained electrocution. Quite a good resolution in this shot to have captured that.”

I walked away, went to the edge of the pier and looked at the water, sucking in the sea air. I could taste Tornado Tower shake at the back of my throat.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time looking at pictures of dead bodies,” I said.

“Neither do I.” He shrugged. “But this young man is no longer in pain, if that’s what’s disturbing you.”

“How do you know so much about electricity and the human body?” I asked, trying to distract my mind from the pictures of Benstein’s twisted face, his bulging eyes.

“We did some experiments in my first residency with electroshock therapy and the electrical pulses that naturally occur in the brain. My professor was trying to develop a new therapy for depression. That’s how I got into the study of narcotics and Alzheimer’s.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried to take my phone back. “I think I have everything I need.”

“Perhaps worth mentioning is this boy’s other experimentation with electroshock.” Tuddy tried to show me another photograph.

“I can’t look.” I held a hand up. “Just describe it to me.”

“There are smaller, older marks on his thighs from a lesser charge,” Tuddy said. “The electrical pulse has gone in and right back out again, creating a site injury and nothing else. Probably a stun gun. And probably self-inflicted.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“The thigh is a natural place for a curious person to experiment with a dangerous instrument. Away from vital organs. Fleshy, hidden from casual view. And I was a curious boy with a dangerous instrument once.” He smiled. “I poured fluoroantimonic acid on my own thigh in freshman year to impress a female. The scars are still very unsightly.”