A8 Pharmacist (Patreon)

Another chapter of Executioner's Gambit. The last three quarters of this one is nearly the same as the previous version, but the first quarter is new content.

A3 New Lodging
A4 Argument
A5 Introductions
A6 Under Your Tongue
A7 Doctor Visit

———

Tori worked her way down the ship. Not every deck had their own med bay, but when she found one, she stopped to chat with whichever doctors were on duty.

The deeper she progressed, the bigger, busier, and noisier the bays became. She had to wait in longer and longer lines to speak to anyone, but on Deck 17, she got her first real break.

After half an hour in the waiting room and five minutes in a private exam room, she finally got to speak with a nurse. “You want … what?” the young male asked quietly.

“The autopsies,” repeated Tori, “on the killer’s victims. I need to see the autopsy reports.”

The nurse swallowed hard and then tapped some notes into his tablet. “I’ll tell the doctor,” he finally said, leaving her alone once more.

Another five minutes passed before the doctor stepped in, distracted and studying his slate. He introduced himself without looking up. “Hello, Tori, I’m Dr. Kirii, and I see that you have some questions about…”—his words paused while he studied the screen—“an autopsy report?”

At last, the doctor finally looked up. He startled and took a quick half-step back, but recovered his composure quickly enough.

“The Executioner’s victims,” said Tori, “I wanted to talk to you about your findings.”

“Why?”

Tori frowned. Although she was officially assigned to work this investigation, she didn’t exactly have any documentation to prove it. The doctor could always call Chief Tipohee to verify that she was who she claimed, but that assumed the chief wouldn’t sabotage her efforts by disavowing her.

Instead, she tried to play it cool. “Well, not for fun, doc,” she chuckled. “They transferred me aboard yesterday to investigate the crimes.”

Doctor Kirii scowled. “I only autopsied the first victim,” he said.

“Raksa,” Tori offered from memory.

“Yeah, him,” said Kirii, “but I already submitted my report. That was months ago.”

“I know you did,” said Tori, despite the fact that she hadn’t seen a copy of it. “I just wanted to run over it real quickly with you in person. See if anything unusual stood out.”

“Unusual?” he said in a confused tone. “That was the only time I ever cut up a murder victim. How much more unusual can you get? Of course, at the time, we’d presumed he’d died of a heart attack.”

“And you were the one to discover the poison?” she asked.

“The blood panel did, yeah,” he said, “but that was hours later. During the autopsy, I was looking for any of the usual causes of sudden death: wounds, trauma, heart attack, blood clot, aneurysm, that sort of thing.”

“And you found…?” she asked, her voice rising.

“Nothing,” he said. “It was a real head-scratcher at the time. If I remember right, he was a little overweight, probably drank too much, smoked too much, but I didn’t see any reason he should be dead. …Until the tox-screen revealed quinalbarbitone in his blood, obviously.”

“Obviously,” she agreed. “Okay, well, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today.”

As she stood from the exam table, the doctor offered her his paw. “I don’t suppose you know anyone I could ask more questions about quinalbarbitone?” said Tori. “Any of the ship’s scientists, perhaps? Someone who would know about lethal doses, antidotes, whatever?”

“Uh,” he muttered, his eyes studying the rafters for a moment. “I suppose you could speak with the pharmacy on fifteen. I know they stock it.”

# # #

Tori knocked on the heavy door, and after a pause, it slid open a dozen centimeters before striking a stop with a solid metallic thunk. An older female peeked out. Her ears, initially set in curiosity, fell to sadness on seeing Tori’s face, but she didn’t look away. “Can I get you something, dear?”

“Harti? My name is Tori. May I come in and ask you a few questions?”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry,” said the pharmacist. “I’m not supposed to let anyone inside.”

Tori glanced around the corridor. “Uh, there’s no chairs out here,” she sighed, “and I can’t stand for that long.”

“Oh, of course. I understand,” said Harti. She reached through the partially-open door and tapped her strand to the one on Tori’s arm. “Go home and put your paws up. Call me, and I’ll answer all of your questions.”

Tori frowned. “These are the sorts of questions best answered in person…” But the pharmacist showed no sign of relenting. “I’m investigating The Executioner killings.”

Harti’s eyes went wide. “Oh,” she whispered. “Well, I suppose in that case, it would be okay.” With a clunk, she unbolted the door, and it rumbled as it rolled the rest of the way open. Then, she dragged a chair out from behind her desk so that Tori could sit.

Tori thanked her and carefully lowered herself into the seat. While Harti secured the door once more, Tori looked around the laboratory. Something in the air here burned at her eyes and made them tear. She was thankful that she couldn’t smell it, whatever it was.

Beyond Harti’s desk stood a wall of unfamiliar machinery that was peppered with warning placards: do not touch, hot surface, respiratory gear required, and the like. The machine hummed and rumbled but not so loudly that they would have to shout over it.

Toward the opposite wall stood a pair of shelves—the larger one filled with neatly organized boxes and bottles, the smaller one hidden behind metal grates.

Tori explained, “I just got finished interviewing Dr. Kirii. He autopsied Raksa, the killer’s first victim. He’s the one to find quinalbarbitone in the victim’s bloodstream.”

Harti’s ears drooped. She looked … not so much guilty as she did anxious about being questioned. Tori was just going to ask her about the poison’s properties, but she hadn’t expected a reaction quite like this. She paused, giving the pharmacist a moment to sweat before asking, “What can you tell me about this?”

Harti sighed. “Well, as I explained before, I don’t know who took it. I noticed it was missing, but we don’t know when it went missing. It could have been during my shift, during someone else’s shifts, perhaps even when the pharmacy was closed. There’s no saying.”

Tori nodded as if she had known that Harti had discovered the theft. “Can you walk me through that day—when you realized it was gone?”

Harti tapped the screen on her desk to pull up a report. “A couple months ago, I got a restock request for the quinalbarbitone. The requests look like this one here.” With a pad, she scrolled through the text. “They include precautions I’m supposed to follow, ingredients, a checklist of instructions. Down below the checklist, it said that we should have eight tablets in stock, that I was to make fifty more, and that there should be fifty-eight in stock when I finish.”

Tori’s eyes opened wider. “You remember those specific quantities from months ago?”

The older geroo paused as if surprised by the question. “Well, I didn’t,” she admitted. “Security brought the records with them when they interviewed me. I remembered the order, but you’re right, I couldn’t recall the exact numbers at the time. I doubt I’ll forget them now.”

Harti slipped a small metal bar from the pocket in her strand holster and then slid the key into a mechanical lock. Tori had never seen a purely mechanical lock before, so she watched closely as the padlock clicked open. Harti slid open the metal grate, and after a moment of searching, she plucked a bottle from its labeled location. She unscrewed the top and handed it to Tori.

Tori peeked inside and immediately recognized the big orange pills. Less than a month before, she had stolen one for herself and had dissolved it in wine. She would have drunk it too had her friend Aziz not stopped her. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she found herself trying to count the horrible tablets. Each one, she knew, represented a geroo who would be euthanized when they hit sixty.

No one was allowed to live longer than that aboard a generation ship.

She wondered briefly if one of these pills had her name on it. When this case was closed, she probably wouldn’t be able to find more work she’d be qualified to do. She’d been hoping to bribe her way into getting a new body, but Dr. Amhela wasn’t going to take the risk. And even if she could bribe the captain into approving the surgery, how could she ever get permission from the commissioner?

Tori handed the bottle back, her paw trembling slightly. Harti touched her paw in a comforting manner. “It’s okay, Investigator Tori. I found them scary at first too. But in time, you get used to being around them.” She paused for another moment, staring into Tori’s eyes before pulling her paw back away.

The pharmacist continued, “Anyhow, when I went to fetch the bottle from stock, it was missing. I searched the entire cabinet, the entire lab. I even searched the secure cabinet,” she said with a finger pointed toward the shelf she’d unlocked. “But I couldn’t find it.”

Tori looked confused, and her eyes darted between the two sets of shelves. “The secure cabinet?”

Harti replaced the bottle’s lid and put it back into stock. “Painkillers, depressants, stimulants, anything addictive or that could be abused goes in here—drugs that could be stolen. I was required to keep the door locked whenever that cabinet was open or whenever I was restocking something that went in there.”

“You said ‘was’ not ‘am’,” Tori pointed out. “I take it the policy changed?”

The older female nodded. “Yeah, we have new rules in place ever since they realized that the quinalbarbitone came from our pharmacy. Now, we have to keep the door locked all the time.”

“I see,” said Tori. “And the big orange pills used to be stocked on the regular shelves.”

“Right,” said Harti. “The policy change also moved them to the secure cabinet. It had been in standard stock because quinalbarbitone isn’t the sort of drug that anyone would want to steal. It won’t get you high, just dead. If anyone’s foolish enough to experiment with it, they’d just end up punishing themselves.”

“But someone did steal them.”

A pause. “Clearly, the original policy was short-sighted.” Harti’s voice turned sad. “I remembered refilling that order because it’s really rare for a bottle to go missing. It just doesn’t happen. And I’ve been beating myself up ever since I heard about its connection to the murders. It wasn’t necessarily my fault that someone got them, but I still worry that I was responsible.”

Tori sat back and tapped her fingers idly for a moment. Harti seemed very distraught, but could that just be an act? Despite how it pained her, she felt it was her duty to grill her. “I just transferred here yesterday,” said Tori, “but the pattern is hard to miss. Someone killing authority figures like officers and supervisors, the crew celebrating new episodes of a highly anti-authority video… Clearly, it’s not just a single geroo with an agenda here…”

Harti raised her palms in alarm and took a step backward. “Hang on,” she said defensively, “I didn’t—”

“I didn’t say you did,” said Tori, “but if someone—you, one of the other pharmacists, someone else—aided the killer by allowing him to steal the big orange pills—even if they did so by simply turning a blind eye to what they knew was happening—that still makes them an accessory to seven murders. And we’re not talking about the E’jii confession here, these murders were assassinations of the command of this ship!”

Harti looked terrified. “The E’jii—?”

Tori dismissed it with a wave of a paw. “The E’jii case was famous on my previous ship. Runabout strikes a small cub, killing her instantly. Grief pushed her father into a rage, and he beat the driver to death with his bare fists,” she explained. “When he realized what he’d done, he immediately confessed. It was a landmark case—one of the few where the courts actually showed any mercy for a murderer—and I doubt the courts will find anything in common with this case at all.”

Tears streamed down Harti’s cheeks, and Tori felt terrible for having made her cry. She wanted to apologize for having done it, but she steeled her resolve and asked, “Are you absolutely certain that you don’t know how the pills could have gone missing?”

The pharmacist wiped her face and shook her head. “No, Investigator,” she said. “Even before the policy change, we were supposed to keep others out of here. Things were much more lax though, so long as we kept the secure cabinet locked. There’s been times when patients have had questions about drug interactions or what they should do if their medicines make them feel ill, and so we used to let the patients come inside instead of forcing them to talk to us through a gap in the door.”

Harti drew a deep breath and released it slowly. “They must have disappeared before I restocked them and after the last time an administrator checked some out of stock, but that only narrows it down to a few weeks!”

“But you didn’t report them missing at the time.” It wasn’t a question.

“No, I didn’t, and yes, I should have,” she admitted. “Had it been something from the secure cabinet, I absolutely would have. Everyone’s really careful about tracking the secure inventory, but we’ve been far more casual about the regular stock. I presumed that the pills had just been thrown out—that maybe they got ruined, and someone forgot to log it.”

“So, what did you do?” asked Tori.

“I just started a new bottle and made fifty-eight pills instead of fifty.”

Tori cocked an ear. “The system will let you do that? It’ll let you make more than were requested in the restock request? That sounds like a security flaw.”

Harti winced and sat down on the edge of her desk. “It won’t. I had to cheat. I logged the first eight as ‘rejected and recycled’, even though they were perfectly fine.”

“Rejected?”

“Yeah, if something goes wrong in the machine, and they come out crushed or malformed or something, we throw them out and make replacements. We really shouldn’t cheat the paperwork, obviously, but I thought it would be simpler. I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble.”

Tori frowned. “So, you covered up the loss, despite how dangerous the pills are?”

The older female put her paws over her chest, and her ears drooped. “Please don’t make me feel any worse about this than I already do, Inspector! I’ve been beating myself up over it ever since I found out. I really try to do this job the best that I can.”

Tori lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt you. I’m just looking for any clues that could help catch this killer before he strikes again.”

Harti nodded, sniffled.

“You said that someone might have taken them during your shift, someone else’s shift, or when the pharmacy was closed. I can see how someone might have stolen them in the first two cases, but what made you think about them being taken after hours?”

“Well, I don’t think anyone could kick in our door, and we would have noticed if it had been broken down. We can lock it from the inside, but if no one were around … well, the lock isn’t really any different than ones you’d find elsewhere on the ship. You stand next to it and type in your access code on your strand. If you’re authorized, the door unlocks.”

“Just like the lock on an apartment’s door,” Tori muttered.

“Mostly,” said the older geroo. “It’s more like the access I put on my grandcub’s strand. He can enter my apartment with it, but he doesn’t have the authority to add someone else to my access list like I can. All of the pharmacists can open this door, but none of us can transfer that authority to someone else’s strand. Make sense?”

“Got it. So, it could have been stolen by a pharmacist?” asked Tori, not understanding where Harti was leading.

“Not that any of us would, but the pharmacists could have just taken them during their shifts. I was thinking more along the lines of someone borrowing one of our strands without us noticing. If someone knew our access code and then returned it before we noticed it gone, they could have snuck in here and stolen the pills.”

“A family member, you mean,” said Tori.

“Perhaps?” said Harti. “I think most everyone knows their mate’s access code. I know Doni would never steal pills, and I’m sure the other pharmacist families are just as trustworthy, but…”—she shrugged helplessly—“you know that sort of thing is possible, right?”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j1TdE0tquCv6tlqJ6RnC6ej3U1iXm4QcxivsofPvxDE/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?