Page 39 of Wild Fever

I found Piper at the bar. "How's it going?"

"It's going,” she said, her face buried in the screen.

"Are you making any progress?”

Her fingers stopped typing, and she glared at me. "It's a process. Every time you interrupt me, you're slowing down the process."

I raised my hands innocently. "Time is a factor.”

"So leave me alone and let me do my job."

I backed away and joined Kara and JD at the table. I took a seat, and we strategized next moves.

I asked Kara how she was feeling.

"I feel like I got hit by a freight train and a vice is squeezing my head, but other than that, I feel great," she said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Brenda buzzed my phone.

"You find anything?"

"I found something, but I don't know what the hell it is. Standard toxicology report came back clean. But she does have elevated troponin and D-dimer. Elevated liver enzymes suggest hepatocellular stress or damage. Elevated creatine kinase could suggest systemic inflammation or muscle breakdown. She's gota chemical structure in her blood that I've never seen before. It doesn't match anything in the database. It's acting like some type of endothelial disruptor."

"Can you send me the chemical structure and a copy of her results?”

"I certainly can. You figure out what this is, you let me know. Because it's got me baffled."

It was a rare day when Brenda got stumped.

“I’ll keep digging into it,” she said.

The conversation had piqued Kara's interest, and she hung on every word. When I ended the call, she said, “So, what's the verdict?”

I shrugged. "I don't know at this point. Whatever you’ve been poisoned with is new and novel.”

"Some type of designer toxin?”

“Looks that way.”

“You don’t just cook that kind of thing up in a bathtub, do you?”

JD said, “You’d be surprised by what people can cook up with readily available chemicals.”

“Everything’s readily available on the dark web,” I added.

Brenda sent the information to my phone, and I forwarded it to Isabella. If this were some high-level covert toxin, she’d be able to figure it out.

I tried to reassure Kara, but there wasn't much more I could do at the moment.

She grew more and more antsy. I didn't blame her. Kara said, "I feel like I'm sitting around, waiting to die."

I didn't have a response. The situation looked dire for her.

Sullen and introspective, Kara said, "What are you supposed to do with the last hours of your life?”

"Make the most of it," I said, trying not to sound trite.

"Just how am I supposed to do that? I feel like ass, someone's trying to kill me, and right now, I have no idea what my life was all about. What was the purpose? Did I make a difference? Did I leave the world a better place? Did it matter that I ever existed at all?”