“Uh, up north.”
He gave a short nasal snort of amusement at her secrecy. “I see. Well,
what can you tell me about the victims?”
“Old. How do you kill someone undetectably?”
A throaty chuckle. “Just break up with him, Anna. You don’t have to
kill him.” This was his way of flirting.
“What about the old bolus of potassium chloride?” she said, politely
ignoring his joke. “Stops the heart, right? Barely changes the body’s
overall potassium level, so it’s undetectable?”
“Was he on an IV?” Higgins asked.
“I don’t think so. We didn’t find any of the usual puncture marks.”
“Then I doubt it. It’s far too messy. If he wasn’t on an IV, you’d
have to inject it right into a vein, and you’d find blood spewed all
over the place. Not to mention signs of a struggle.”
She took notes in her tiny leather-bound notebook.
“It was sudden, right? So we can rule out long-term heavy metal
poisoning. Too gradual. Do you mind if I go get a cup of coffee?”
“Go ahead.” She smiled to herself. He knew this stuff cold.
He returned in less than a minute. “Speaking of coffee,” he said. “It’s
either something in their drink or their food, or else an injection.”
“But we didn’t find any puncture marks. And believe me, we went over
that body carefully.”
“If they used a 25-gauge needle you won’t see it, probably. And there’s
always sux.”
She knew he meant succinylcholine chloride, synthetic curare. “Think
so?”
“Famous case back in ’67 or ’68 a doctor in Florida was convicted of
murdering his wife with sux, which I’m sure you know is a skeletal
muscle relaxant. You can’t move, can’t breathe. Looks like cardiac
arrest. Famous trial, baffled forensic experts around the world.”
She jotted a note.
“There’s a long list of skeletal muscle relaxants, all with different
properties. Of course, you know, with old folks, anything can tip ’em
over the edge. A little too much nitroglycerin will do it.”
“Under the tongue, right?”
“Usually… But there’s ampules of, say, amyl nitrite that could kill
you if inhaled. Poppers. Or butyl nitrite. You get a major
vasodilator response, drops their blood pressure, they keel over and
die.”
She wrote furiously.
“There’s even Spanish fly,” he said with a cackle. “Too much can kill
you. I think it’s called cantharidin.”
“The guy was eighty-seven.”
“All the more reason he might need an aphrodisiac.”
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“Was he a smoker?”
“Don’t know yet. I guess we’ll see from the lungs. Why do you ask?”
“There’s an interesting case I just worked on. Some old folks in South
Africa. They were killed with nicotine.”
“Nicotine?”
“You don’t have to give that much.”
“How?”
“It’s a liquid. Bitter taste, but it can be disguised. Can also be
injected. Death comes within minutes.”
“In a smoker you can’t tell, is that it?”
“You gotta be clever. I figured this out. The whole issue is the
amount of nicotine in the blood versus its metabolites. What nicotine
turns into after a while–”
“I know.”
“In a smoker, you see a lot more of the metabolites than pure nicotine.
If it’s acute poisoning, you’ll see a whole lot more nicotine and a lot
less metabolites.”
“What should I expect from the tox?”
“A normal toxicology screen is set up to detect drugs of abuse. Opiates,
synthetic opiates, morphine, cocaine, LSD, Darvon. PCP, amphetamine.
Benzodiazepines–Valium–and barbiturates. Sometimes tricyclic
antidepressants. Ask ’em to do the full tox screen plus all these
others. Chloral hydrate’s not on the screen, order that. Placidyl, an
old sleeping drug. Screen for barbiturates, sleeping drugs. Fentanyl’s
extremely hard to detect. Organophosphates–insecticides. DMSO–dim
ethyl sulfoxide-used on horses. See what you come up with. I assume
they’re going to be doing G.C. Mass. Spec.”
“I don’t know. What’s that?”
“Gas chromatography, mass spectrometry. It’s the gold standard. How
rural are you?”
“A city. Canada, actually.”
“Oh, RCMP is good. Their crime labs are far better than ours, but don’t
quote me on that. Just make sure they check for anything in the local
water or wells that might skew the tox. You said the body’s embalmed,
right? Have ’em get a sample of the embalming fluid and sub tract it
out. Ask ’em to do a full tox–blood, tissue, hair. Some proteins are
fat soluble. Cocaine stores in the heart tissue, keep that in mind. The
liver’s a sponge.”
“How long are all these tests going to take?”
“Weeks. Months.”
“No way.” Her exhilaration over talking with him suddenly waned. Now
she was depressed.
“It’s true. Then again, you might get lucky. Could be months, or it
could be a day. But if you don’t know exactly what poison you’re
looking for, odds are you’re never going to find it.”
“There’s every evidence he died naturally,” Higgins announced when she’d
returned to the lab. “Cardiac arrhythmia, probably. Arteriosclerosis,
of course. An old MI there.”
Mailhot’s face had been pulled down from the top of the scalp, like a
latex mask. The top of his head was open, the pink ridges of brain
visible. Anna thought she might be sick. She saw a lung on a hanging
scale. “How heavy?” she asked, pointing.
He smiled in appreciation. “Light. Two hundred forty grams. Not
congested.”
“So he died quickly. We can rule out a CNS depressant.”
“As I said, it looks like a heart attack.” Higgins seemed to be running
out of patience.
She told him what she wanted from the toxicology screen, reading off her
notes. His eyes widened in disbelief. “Do you have any idea how costly
this is going to be?”
She exhaled. “The U.S. government will pick up the cost, of course. I
need to do this one thoroughly. If I don’t find it now, it’s likely I
never will. Now I need to ask a favor.”
He looked at her steadily. She sensed his annoyance.
“I’m going to ask you to flay the body.”
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”
“I’m not.”
“May I remind you, Agent Navarro, that the widow wants an open casket
funeral?”
“All they see are the hands and face, right?” To flay the body meant to
remove all the skin, in large chunks so it could be sewn back together.
This enabled you to examine the subcutaneous skin. Sometimes this was
the only way to discover injection marks. “Unless you object,” she
said. “I’m just a visiting fireman.”
Higgins’s face flushed. He turned to the body, jabbing in the scalpel a
bit too violently, and began removing the skin.
Anna felt light-headed. Once again she was afraid she might be sick.
She left the morgue and returned to the corridor in search of the rest
room. Ron Arsenault approached, clutching a giant cup of take-out
coffee. “Are we still slicing and dicing in there?” he asked, his good
humor seemingly restored.
“Worse than ever. We’re flaying the skin.”
“You can’t take it either?”
“I’m just using the little girl’s room.”
He looked skeptical. “No luck so far, I take it.”
She shook her head, frowned.
He shook his head. “Don’t you Yanks believe in old age?”
“I’ll be right back,” she said coolly.
She splashed her face with cold water from the sink, realizing too late
that there were no paper towels here, only one of those hot-air hand
dryers that never worked. She groaned, went to a stall, pulled a length
of toilet paper off the roll, and blotted her face with the tissue,
leaving white shreds here and there on her face. She looked in the
mirror, noticed the dark circles under her eyes, flecked off the strings
of toilet paper, reapplied her makeup and returned to Arsenault feeling
refreshed.
“He’s asking for you,” Arsenault said, excited.
Higgins held up a leathery yellow sheet of skin about three inches
square as if it were a trophy. “You’re lucky I did the hands, too,” he
said. “I’m going to catch hell from the funeral-home director, but
presumably they’ve got makeup they can cake on to cover the mending.”
“What is it?” she asked, heartbeat accelerating.
“The back of the hand. The web of the thumb, the abduct or pollucis.
Take a look at this.”
She came closer, as did Arsenault, but she saw nothing. Higgins pulled
the magnifying glass from the examination table. “You see this little
purplish-red flare, about half an inch long? Sort of flame-shaped?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s your injection mark. Believe me, that’s not where any nurse or
doctor puts a syringe. You may have something, after all.”
CHAPTER TEN.
Bedford, New York
Max Hartman sat in his high-backed leather desk chair, in the book lined
library where he usually received visitors. It was strange, Ben
thought, the way his father chose to sit behind the barrier of his
immense leather-topped mahogany desk, even when meeting with his own
son.
In the tall chair the old man, once tall and strong, looked wizened,
almost gnome like surely not the effect he’d intended. Ben sat on a