“We’ve got a possible suspect in your tire-slashing case,” he said, adjusting the focus as he moved the blade.
“This bayonet?” I knew the answer before I asked.
“That’s right. It was just turned in this morning.”
“By whom?” I said as my suspicions grew.
He looked at a folded paper bag on a nearby table. I saw the case number and date, and the last name “Roche.”
. “Chesapeake,” Frost replied.
“Do you know anything about where it came from?” I felt enraged.
“The trunk of a car. That’s all I was told. Apparently, there’s a hellfire rush on it for some reason.”
I went upstairs to Toxicology because it was a last round I certainly needed to make. But my mood was bad, and I was not cheered when I finally found someone home who could confirm what my nose had told me in the Norfolk morgue. Dr. Rathbone was a big, older man whose hair was still very black. I found him at his desk signing lab reports.
“I just called you.” He looked up at me. “How was your New Year?”
“it was new and different. How about you?”
“I got a son in Utah, so we were there. I swear I’d move if I could find a job, but I reckon Mormons don’t have much use for my trade.”
“I think your trade is good anywhere,” I said. “And I assume you’ve got results on the Eddings case,” I added as I thought of the bayonet.
“The concentration of cyanide in his blood sample is point five milligrams per liter, which is lethal, as you know.” He continued signing his name.
“What about the hookah’s intake valve and tubes and so on?”
“Inconclusive.”
I was not surprised, nor did it really matter since there was now no doubt that Eddings had been poisoned with cyanide gas, his manner of death unequivocally a homicide.
I knew the prosecutor in Chesapeake and stopped by my office long enough to give her a call so she could encourage the police to do the right thing.
“You shouldn’t have to ring me up for that,” she said.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t.”
“Don’t give it another thought.” She sounded angry.
“What a bunch of idiots. Has the FBI gotten into this one at all?”
“Chesapeake doesn’t need their help.”
“Oh good. I guess they work homicidal cyanide gas poisonings in diving deaths all the time. I’ll get back to you.”
Hanging up, I collected coat and bag and walked out into what was becoming a beautiful day. Marino’s car was parked on the side of Franklin Street, and he was sitting inside with the engine running and his window down. As I headed toward him he opened his door and released the trunk.
“Where is it?” he said.
I held up a manila envelope, and he looked shocked.
“That’s all you’ve got it in?” he exclaimed, eyes wide.
“I thought you’d at least put it in one of those metal paint cans.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You could hold uranium in your bare hand and it wouldn’t hurt you.”
I shut the envelope inside the trunk.
“Then how come the Geiger counter went off?” he continued arguing as I climbed in. “It went off because the friggin’ shit is radioactive, right?”
“Without a doubt, uranium is radioactive, but by itself, not very, because it is decaying at such a slow rate. Plus, the sample in your trunk is extremely small.”
“Look, a little radioactive is like a little pregnant or a little dead, in my opinion. And if you ain’t worried about it how come you sold your Benz?”
“That’s not why I sold it.”
“I don’t want to be rayed, if it’s all the same to you,” he irritably said.
“You’re not going to be rayed.”
But he railed on, “I can’t believe you’d expose me and my car to uranium.”
“Marino,” I tried again, “a lot of my patients come into the morgue with very grim diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis, meningitis, AIDS. And you’ve been present for their autopsies, and you’ve always been safe with me.”
He drove fast along the interstate, cutting in and out of traffic.