The case of the woman who broke your heart began simply enough, as a cluster of pillbox felonies just on the other side of statistical significance. Another detective would have let it pass, but you had a personal grudge against pillbox breakers, who usually began their business day by hurting or killing an old person.
Not always, of course. Pillboxes were nearly ubiquitous (you had one yourself, filled mostly with the hypertension drugs that kept half of the police force alive), but older people were most often prescribed the expensive stuff that made it worth the risk of opening the seal. To have any chance of not getting caught, you had to do it inside a Faraday cage, and make sure you destroyed all of the pillbox’s circuitry, which was full of patient transponders, GPS devices, and bio-velcro that trapped every single skin cell you shed, together with its telltale DNA. It could be done, and it was. But not so often that you couldn’t see a new pattern in the stolen pillbox data you poured over every week.
The pattern that caught your attention was weak and strange. Not geographical or social in any obvious sense, but something had excited the bloodlust of the neural networks in your data scanner, and you fiddled with the data until you thought you understood what it was.
The statistical anomaly was Athenax. Not a star black market drug, actually not even a mild stimulant, just a very promising Alzheimer treatment that had been retired from the market not a year before. Something about a patent issue on an RNA sequence, you learned after a quick scan. The lawsuit had put an injunction order on all of the company’s assets, including all pills already distributed in pillboxes country-wide. A pillbox was legally a small, mobile medical dispensary, so whatever drugs it held belonged to the parent company, and it had a sophisticated set of locks and countermeasures to make sure it was kept that way. Medical fraud and illicit self-medication were among the biggest non-digital crimes fought by the FBI.
As a lowly city detective, your goals were more modest. Somebody was stealing pillboxes to get Athenax. You didn’t know who, you didn’t know where, but you thought you had an intuition about why. Sometimes that was enough to catch your man.
It took you days to set up the appropriate sequence, and then twice as many days to convince your boss to convince her FDA contact to make the call. It had taken you all of your outstanding favors, and indebted you for years to come, but it was worth it. When your boss told you that the call had been made, you sat on your desk, closed your eyes, and pictured the little packets of information bouncing between the buildings, weaving a web too tight to let your prey pass.
The wait felt eternal, but it was just after three days when your phone told you that someone had sprung the trap. You made an u-turn, risking life, limb, and car, while calling for headquarters to put cameras on your suspect and not let him get away.
The suspect was a woman, they told you a minute afterward, and you had her picture in your phone well before you reached the park. She was sitting on a bench looking at the sky. She seemed apprehensive, and you cursed under your breath. You didn’t feel the rush you had expected, although you said to yourself that you shouldn’t have.
You sat next to the woman, refusing the irrational impulse to move a strand of white hair away from her face. First things first. You took away, with a gentleness that surprised you, the pillbox she held on her hands. She looked at you.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
You shook your head. “No, madam.”
She turned her eyes back to the sky. “Sometimes I forget things,” she said. “Has been happening for a while.”
She moved her hand softly, as if asking your for the pillbox, or something it had inside. Athenax. You wondered, with some unease, if you would have done what she had. Go to such lengths to keep fighting a losing war to defend your mind. But you weren’t tempted to use your police code to open the pillbox and give her some Athenax. It would have been a drug trafficking felony. And you had had the Athenax remotely tampered by the FDA. The pill she had taken after stealing the pillbox and breaking into it had not delayed her Alzheimer, but catastrophically sped it up. A remote chemical safeguard. Standard.
Still, it was so very sad. You leaned against the back of the bench, and chose to wait a few minutes before taking her away.
.finis.
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