Free Sudden Vacancies by James Kipling Page A

same exchange about it. They have the same vendor and they said they had the same smell in their flowers.”
    “Okay, thanks for letting me know, I’ll pass that over to Tommy as soon as I see him.” Detective Young’s suspicions grew even more. Were there other places in the country that had contaminated flowers and dead people as a result?
    Determined to get some answers, he tried the vendor’s phone number again.
    “Rose City Flowers, Andrea speaking.”
    “Hello, madam, this is Michael Young and I am a detective with the Columbus Police Department here in Ohio. I’m working on a case involving flowers that are contaminated with a toxin. The florist gets his shipments from your warehouse. A shipment was delivered today and all of the flowers in it were contaminated as well. What can you tell me about this?”
    “Well, we have received several calls from people complaining about a strange odor coming from their flowers from recent shipments. We hadn’t been aware of any issues until yesterday and our phones have been ringing off the hook ever since.
    “We’ve been told that some local forensics offices have scanned these materials and three of them say they contain Scopolamine or at least something like it. We honestly don’t know what’s happening here.
    “We get our flowers from South Korea and they are shipped here into San Francisco before we take them out to florists like the one you might be calling from.”
    This announcement was a surprise to Michael; he honestly thought Tommy was hiding something. “Well, I’ll need you to provide me with a list of florist shops that also received flowers from the same shipment in the last week. “
    After arranging for the company to fax over the list, he inspected the website for Rose City Flowers—and didn’t come up with anything suspicious.
    After looking up information on the florists that work with Rose City, he spent two hours getting in touch with eight different florists from around the country who worked with that vendor. All of them said the same thing—their recent flower shipments had been contaminated with some unusual materials. In addition, two of them stated that their flowers were indeed hit with Scopolamine according to police reports. This included one case where a man fell ill after leaving the florist with flowers and ran his car headfirst into a roadside guardrail, killing him.
    It was clear to see that Tommy was just caught up as an innocent bystander in this mess. Eager to follow up on some other leads, he left the florist shop. “Well, you’re good to go,” Michael said to Tommy.
    That was the last thing Michael said to him; Tommy assumed that he was off the hook.

Chapter 20
     
    Tommy was not aware that his sisters were dealing with the same problem until two weeks after the investigation. Detective Young had disrupted Tommy’s life, but that was inconsequential. Only the facts mattered. So is the life of a police detective—the detective always makes sure that the facts come out even if it means ignoring the emotional needs of a person who is in distress. In this case, he didn’t have much of a need for Tommy.
    Tommy Williams was officially cleared from the investigation after he was released. The police found that he was ignorant to what was going on and that he had absolutely no idea about the use of Scopolamine in any of the plants that he got for sale.
    Tommy began to think about what was going on at the hotel after the investigation—what had he gotten himself into? Is this really what happens at the hotel? Is he really being an accessory to people around here? Or maybe it’s just the vendor that’s a problem; after all, not every part of South Korea was immune to the North’s influences.
    Either way, it was clear that he needed to change things in order to be happy. The events of the last several days had shaken his confidence in his life choices. He definitely needed to change flower vendors, the sooner the better.