Super Meals: Part Twenty Nine

            Doctor Ralph was giddy.

            It wasn’t an emotion that he really identified with as he had felt it so rarely he almost didn’t recognize it when it occurred, but he was definitely giddy now.

            His portable science kit was laid out across the bathroom counter in his hotel room. Beakers, vials, tubes, jars; even a Bunsen burner was lit and the solution he had placed in a stand above it was bubbling away while he analyzed results. Were he back in the lab with full access to all of his equipment, he would have dropped a sample of the vomit into his chemical analyzer and hit a button. Seventy-two hours later he would have known the full spectrum of chemical compounds present in Walter’s body and just ruled out the ones he knew were from the food.

            But here, in the bathroom, he had to do things the old fashioned way, and the idea honestly excited him. Something about the challenge of identifying and separating the assorted compounds, and then narrowing down the results...it was like being back in college, or working the early days of this job for the fast food company, when things were new and he was making real discoveries. Anymore these days, even though he didn’t realize it, the majority of his job consisted of trying to find new ways to do the same thing using existing chemicals he’d already either discovered or invented himself.

            Walter was new, and a challenge, and Doctor Ralph loved a challenge.

            First he boiled out the substances that originated from the food; it broke down at body temperature, so it was easy to isolate and remove from the solution.

            Then he used his centrifuge to pull out the blood and isolate it, then the other bodily fluids like bile, spit, mucus…

            To most people it would be quite disgusting.

            To Doctor Ralph it was the most fun he’d had in years.

            A block away, unbeknownst to any of the involved parties, Detective Mimi and Plain Walter were sitting in the police station giving their statements. Mimi was filling out page four of her report, and Walter was sitting in an interrogation room with a uniformed officer recording his statement on an old fashioned reel-to-reel tape.

            “Why were you in the park?”

            Walter remembered what Mimi had told him – to stick to the story and don’t change it, ever, for any reason (cops liked to ask the same question over and over again to try and trip you up and get you to answer differently and catch you in a lie).

            “No reason of consequence, considering I was the victim in this situation.”

            “But it would really help us out if you—”

            “No, it wouldn’t. You’re trying to find a reason to blow me off and not help me by saying this is somehow my fault. Like there’s something wrong with eating breakfast in a public park at 9am with a friend. But there’s not. What is illegal, however, is jumping out of a bush and sucker punching me and attacking a cop, like your superior officer sergeant Detective Mimi Spatchcock.”

            “Mister Elliot I really don’t appreciate that tone of voice when I’m trying to help you out here.”

            “Really? You gonna call Mimi in here next and interrogate her, too? Is this standard operating procedure for people who file police reports? I thought you were supposed to interrogate bad guys.”

            The officer sighed, and Walter sighed right back at him. He wasn’t worried about his power-shouts, as he was calling them, now, since he tried using it on the ride over and found it wouldn’t come.

            He was, however, starting to suspect why, and he wanted to see Mimi again so they could talk about it.

            Mimi wanted to talk to Walter, too.

            She’d called the fast food place where they’d gotten breakfast that morning and asked about the people working the drive-thru window that day. Three of the names were nobodies – register monkeys who weren’t the guy she was looking for.

            Then the manager mentioned that they’d received a visit from corporate and Doctor Ralph Quinlan had taken a turn on the window that morning before leaving quite unexpectedly and, I’m sorry, no, I don’t know where he’s staying.

            It didn’t matter, though. She had a name, which she Googled immediately and found pictures of him online from throughout the years. Never in the foreground, of course, but always at the side or in the background of significant events in the history of the fast food chain over the last ten years or so. In one shot he was back and to the left of the CEO as they announced the opening of their first store in the Phillipines. In another photo, commemorating the opening of a processing plant in China, he was skulking in the background behind the fast food chain’s international division.

            For fun, while she was waiting for Walter to get out of his questioning, she flipped through the police blotter sections of the newspapers where she’d found photos of Doctor Ralph. Nothing new or unusual stood out in any of them, except one, from a year previous when the fast food chain had launched a new product in France. The mayor of some small, tourist-trap of a wine town had attended the festivities along with several members of his extended family, but the event was marred by the disappearance of his nephew.

            His nephew, the article said, was a serious drug user who had spent time on and off the streets and in and out of rehabs. He was supposed to be clean at the time of the launch, but his family feared that he had relapsed and was living back on the streets again.

            Intrigued, Mimi Googled the nephew’s name and found another article about him from two weeks later. He’d been found dead in an alley behind a crack house, surrounded by drug paraphernalia…

            …and several half-eaten bags of fast food.