Blizzard (chpt. 6)
Sebastian questions Nigel, and questions Nigel's guilt. #SebastianWednesdays
Hello to the new eyeballs, and welcome back to the older ones. 🤓
Today installment of #SebastianWednesdays is another excerpt from the novel Blizzard and takes place after Nigel is released from jail on bail. Sebastian reviews the preliminary evidence against Nigel and has doubts; he questions Nigel and has even more.
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Partial excerpt from Blizzard: A Sebastian Scott Novel (written as Tee Emdee)
© 2014 Tiffany M. Davis
Sebastian turned the phone over in his hands as he contemplated another resource; one that was downstairs with the rest of their family. One that he really didn’t like to think about. He trudged back downstairs and signaled to Dante, who was in the kitchen again.
Dante brought along a hunk of rum cake on a napkin. “What’s up?” he asked as Sebastian pulled him into his father’s empty den.
“I need your help.”
Dante popped a chunk of cake into his mouth and chewed slowly, all the while staring at Sebastian. “You need my help?” he asked after swallowing.
“Yeah.”
“You need my help.” Dante’s grey eyes twinkled with amusement. “It’s killing you to admit that, isn’t it?”
It looked like Dante was going to make Sebastian pour his pride on the rocks and gulp it down. “Look, if it was anyone but Nigel--”
“Yeah, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, or any conversation at all. I get it.” He continued to stare at his estranged cousin. Finally, he sighed. “Go ahead. Ask your questions.”
“Did you make it?”
“Make what?” At Sebastian’s pointed look, Dante leaned back against his uncle’s desk and crossed his feet at the ankles. “Oh, Blizzard. Nope; I try to stay away from opioid derivatives. Too much federal heat.” He winked at Sebastian. “Plus, I’m a small-market kind of guy. I don’t have the time or inclination to make street quantities.”
Sebastian’s jaw clenched. “Do you know who did?”
Dante eyed Sebastian as he pinched off another piece of cake. “No. And before you ask, I operate on a need-to-know basis and right now, I have no need to know.”
Sebastian blew out a frustrated breath. “Could you do it? Make it, I mean.”
“There is very little that I can’t make.” Dante shrugged. “However, what I can or cannot do is irrelevant. It’s not going to help find out who planted those drugs in Nigel’s desk.”
“But if it’s a designer drug, and you say that you can make it, then it stands to reason that someone else can too. Someone who does deal in street-level quantities.”
“Blizzard isn’t hard to make,” Dante admitted. “Oxycontin, cocaine, Ritalin. Very commonly prescribed, and accessible, drugs. But to do kilograms, one would need a steady pipeline of all of the above. For Oxycontin and Ritalin, I’d be checking DEA numbers of physicians who’ve been prescribing a bit too much for comfort. Maybe even psychiatrists who consult with public schools; plenty of Ritalin prescriptions there, especially in lower-income communities. For the coke, I’d definitely check Manhattan: Upper East Side, Wall Street, clubs. The one percent do love their pick-me-ups.” He shifted his weight. “But that’s a long-term thing to look into. The more pressing issue is who framed Nigel, and why. I figure if you can find that out, they’ll tell you who the candy man is.”
Sebastian nodded as he processed Dante’s words. His brilliant, award-winning, published biochemist cousin knew what he was talking about; he’d built a successful, and extremely lucrative, shadow business creating and selling designer drugs. “Alright. Thanks, Dante.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Alex returned with the paperwork from Nigel’s case and found Sebastian in the den. He plopped down on the creaky leather couch with a sigh of relief as Sebastian took the papers and sat at his father’s desk. He quickly read through the arrest report and Alex’s notes on his interview with Nigel.
Jonathan walked past the den, then backed up at the sight of Sebastian, Alex, and Dante in there. “There you are. Aunt Janelle is wondering where you’d gotten to””
“Just going through the paperwork on Nigel’s case,” Sebastian answered absently as he continued to read.
Jonathan sat in a leather chair adjacent to the couch. “What of it?”
Sebastian pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s a setup, and an obvious one at that.” He tossed the papers on the desk. “Proving it, however, is going to be difficult.”
“What’s going to be difficult to prove?” Dante asked. “That Nigel did, or did not, do it?”
“So you don’t think Nigel did it?” Jonathan asked.
“Please,” Dante snorted. “Nigel couldn’t find his ass with GPS and a flashlight, let alone eight kilograms of a designer cocaine mix.”
“Don’t be so bloody crass,” Jonathan shot back with a smile.
Alex raised an eyebrow at Dante’s comment. “How do you know that Blizzard is a designer drug?”
Dante shot a glance at Sebastian, then answered Alex. “I know. Plus, such a mixture of three separate drugs--two of them only available by prescription--doesn’t occur in nature. Someone had to put them together.”
“Is that hard to do?” Jonathan asked.
Dante shrugged. “Not if you know what you’re doing.”
Jonathan looked from Dante to Sebastian as they avoided looking at each other. “Why do I get the feeling that I’m missing something significant from this conversation?”
Alex also picked up on something unsaid between the two cousins but decided to ask Sebastian about it privately.
“Anyway,” Dante ignored Jonathan, “you really think Nigel is innocent?”
Sebastian nodded as he sipped his coffee. “As much as I’d like him out of my life, he didn’t do this.”
“But the police have evidence, and a lot of it,” Jonathan argued. “Everything points to Nigel.”
“Exactly,” Sebastian agreed. “It’s too perfect, especially if you know Nigel.”
“True,” Dante concurred. “Nigel doesn’t have the ambition or the organization to carry off distributing drugs. Eight keys is significant weight to be moving, and Nigel can’t even open the childproof cap on a bottle of aspirin.” He looked at Alex. “What’s up with his legal counsel?”
“I have some leads, but no one has committed yet. So, right now, I’m still it.”
“You sound real happy about that.”
“Well...Nigel isn’t the most difficult client I’ve ever had, but he’s creeping into the top twenty.” He looked over at Sebastian. “Now, I get it.” Sebastian raised his coffee cup in acknowledgement.
Sebastian rubbed his hands across his face. “I need to talk to Nigel.” He looked over at Alex.
“As his legal counsel, I’ll have to be present.”
“Fine with me.”
“You want I should collect him?” Jonathan asked. He left at Sebastian’s nod and returned shortly with Nigel in tow. He shut the door to the den behind him.
Nigel still had a shell-shocked look from his foray into the wrong side of the judicial system. His grey eyes danced over Dante and Alex, then drilled Sebastian in suspicion. “Jonathan said you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes. I have some questions about what happened before you were arrested.”
“Okay.” When Jonathan and Dante made to leave the room, Nigel stopped them. “No, you guys can stay. It’s okay.” The two men went back to their seats.
Sebastian pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the voice recorder app. “I’m going to record this, so I can go over it later.” He recited his name, date and time, and both Nigel and Alex’s names. “Nigel, you work at Quasar Financial Services, correct?”
Nigel nodded. “Yes. I’m a Junior Financial Analyst.”
“What do you do?”
“I review client contracts, set up client profiles, perform cost/benefit analyses, create financial projections, set up the initial portions of loan swaps. It’s a lot of research and presentations, basically. I do whatever needs to be done, or whatever work the partners give me.”
“Who has access to your cubicle, Nigel?”
“Everyone, I guess,” Nigel said in a puzzled tone. “I mean, it’s a cubicle; it’s not like I have a door that I can lock. I’m not usually away from it for very long.”
“Do you lock your desk up when you leave?”
Nigel shook his head. “No, unless I’m leaving for the day. There’s really no need.”
“Have any strange people been in your cubicle?”
Nigel raised an eyebrow. “I have clients coming into the office sometimes, but I don’t know that you would consider them strangers, exactly. And I usually meet with them in one of the smaller conference rooms.”
Sebastian felt a headache coming on. “I mean complete strangers, Nigel. Someone you wouldn’t recognize or had never seen before.”
Nigel’s brow furrowed. “Well, there was a new UPS man not too long ago.”
“Did he come into your cubicle?”
“No. All packages are left with Assata, at the receptionist’s desk. Then she distributes them.”
Sebastian closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the better to keep from throttling Nigel. Had his cousin always been this dense? “Nigel,” he said in a quiet tone, “how did that Blizzard get into your filing cabinets?”
“I don’t know!” Nigel’s face screwed up. He would not cry in front of his cousins. He would not give Sebastian or any of the others anymore reason to look at him with contempt. “I hardly use those drawers. Most of my files are within reaching distance. The last time I looked in those drawers was before I went to Miami.”
“Why did you go to Miami?”
“I went because my job sent me there,” Nigel said in an exasperated voice. “We were working on a loan swap with the Miami-Dade County waterworks department. Then we went back to work on the swap between the county and a Cuban-American art museum.”
“When did you go?” Sebastian did not consciously realize it, but he had shifted into a familiar interrogation pattern. He was no longer Nigel’s cousin; he was a federal cop. The transition made Nigel even more nervous and was not lost on the other three men in the room, either.
“Two, three months ago. I was gone for a week.”
“By yourself?”
Nigel’s eyes narrowed. He was getting tired of all these questions. He just wanted to go home and go to sleep. “I went with a senior partner, who was the lead on that account.”
“Name?”
“Malcolm Jennings. And what do my whereabouts have to do with anything?”
“Plenty, if you’re innocent.”
“You don’t have to be so mean.”
“Mean?” Sebastian looked at Nigel as if he’d lost his mind. “The prosecution will be even harder on you. You have to be prepared, Nigel.” Alex nodded in agreement, but otherwise remained quiet.
“You’re just loving this, aren’t you?” Nigel snarled. “You love lording this over me.”
“Lording what?”
“This whole arrest thing.” Nigel glowered at Sebastian. “You always have to show off how smart and perfect you are.”
Sebastian was fed up with Nigel, his situation, being dragged into it due to family pressure--all of it. “Nigel, I have no idea what you are talking about. But right now, my smarts are all that is standing between your freedom, and you becoming someone’s bitch in a federal pen.”
Nigel rose, fists clenched, and took two steps toward Sebastian. “I’m sick of taking your shit, Sebastian.”
Sebastian straightened and balled his own fist. “If you’re feeling froggy, then leap.” The ice in his tone matched the chill in his eyes.
“Alright, you two,” Alex warned. He bit back a smirk; though a fight between those two would be quite entertaining and long overdue, Sebastian would have mopped the floor with Nigel. “Cut it out. Nigel, Sebastian is only trying to help, which is what you wanted. And Sebastian, chill with the cop mode, a’ight?”
A knock on the door, then Priscilla entered with Miles on her hip. “I thought I heard you, Nigel.” She looked at the other men and sensed the tension in the air. “What’s going on in here?”
“I’m just trying to get some clarity on the timeline up until Nigel’s arrest,” Sebastian answered. Nigel downgraded his glower to a mere frown.
“Oh.” She fought to keep the warring emotions of guilt and relief off her face as she buried her face in Miles’s soft curls.
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed at the shadow that had passed over Priscilla’s face. If he didn’t know better, he’d say that Priscilla looked guilty. He pushed that thought away. Priscilla? No, she couldn’t possibly be mixed up in any of this; she was Nigel’s wife, and didn’t seem to be the deceptive type, not that he had reason to be around her much over the years. Still, Sebastian filed the impression away in the back of his mind.
〜〜〜