“That suddenly?” I said. “I doubt it.”
“What about some sort of prescription drug?” he suggested. “You know, she takes all the pills and tosses the bottle in the fire, maybe explaining the melted plastic you found in the fireplace and the fact we didn’t find no pill bottles or nothing in the house. Just over-the-counter crap.”
A drug overdose was certainly high on my list, and there wasn’t any point in my worrying about it at the moment. Despite my pleading, despite promises that her case would be a top priority, the toxicology results would take days, possibly weeks.
As for her brother, I had a theory.
“I think Gary Harper was struck with a homemade slapjack, Marino,” I said. “Possibly a segment of metal pipe filled with bird shot for weight, the ends packed with something like Play-Doh to hold in the shot. After several blows, a wad of the Play-Doh flew out and the shot scattered.”
He thoughtfully tapped an ash. “Don’t exactly fit with the ‘soldier of fortune’ shit we found in Price’s car. Not with anything Old Lady Harper might have thought up, either.”
“I assume you didn’t find anything like Play-Doh, mod eling clay, or birdshot inside her house.”
He shook his head and said, “Hell, no.”
My phone did not stop ringing the rest of the day.
Accounts of my alleged role in the disappearance of a “mysterious and valuable manuscript,” and exaggerated descriptions of my “disabling an attacker” who broke into my office, had made the wire services. Other reporters were trying to cash in on the scoop, some of them prowling the OCME’s parking lot or appearing in the lobby, their microphones and cameras ready like rifles.
One particularly irreverent local DJ was sending out over the airwaves that I was the only woman chief in the country who wore “golden gloves instead of rubber ones.”
The situation was quickly getting out of control, and I was beginning to take Mark’s warnings a little more seriously. Sparacino was perfectly capable of making my life miserable.
Whenever Thomas Ethridge IV had something on his mind, he dialed my direct line instead of going through Rose. I wasn’t surprised when he called. I suppose I was relieved. It was late afternoon and we were sitting inside his office. He was old enough to be my father, one of those men whose homeliness in youth is gradually transformed by age into a monument of character.
Ethridge had a Winston Churchill face that belonged in Parliament or a cigar smoke-filled drawing room. We had always gotten along extremely well.
“A publicity stunt? You think it likely anybody’s going to believe that, Kay?”
the attorney general asked as he absently fingered the rose-gold watch chain looped over his vest.
“I get the feeling you don’t believe me,” I said.
His response was to reach for a fat black Mont Blanc fountain pen and slowly unscrew the cap.
“I don’t suppose anyone will get the chance to believe or disbelieve me,” I added lamely. “My suspicions aren’t founded on anything concrete, Tom. I make an accusation of this nature to counter what Sparacino’s doing and he’s going to have all the more fun.”
“You’re feeling very isolated, aren’t you, Kay?”
“Yes. Because I am, Tom.”
“Situations like this have a way of taking on a life of their own,” he mused. “Problem’s going to be nipping this one in the bud without generating more attention.”
Rubbing his tired eyes behind hom-rimmed glasses, he turned to a fresh page in a legal pad and began making out one of his Nixonian lists, a line drawn down the center of the yellow page, advantages on one side, disadvantages on the other–advantages or disadvantages to what I had no idea. After filling half a page, one column dramatically longer than the other, he leaned back in his chair, looked up, and frowned.
“Kay,” he said, “does it ever strike you that you seem to get more involved in your cases than your predecessors did?”
“I didn’t know any of my predecessors,” I replied. He smiled a little. “That’s not an answer to my question, Counselor.”
“I honestly have never given the matter any thought,” I said.