returning to the OSI unit. And a message from Sergeant Arsenault of the
RCMP. The toxicology results were in. He didn’t say what they were.
When she reached RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, she was put on hold for a
solid five minutes while they chased down Ron Arsenault.
“How’re you doin’ there, Anna?”
She could tell from his voice. “Nothing, huh?”
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. “I guess you wasted your time
here.”
“I don’t think so.” She tried to mask her disappointment. “The
injection mark is significant. You mind if I talk to the toxicologist?”
He hesitated a moment. “I don’t see why not, but it’s not going to
change anything.”
“I’d just feel better about it.”
“Hey, why not?” Arsenault gave her a Halifax number.
The airport was loud and chaotic. It was hard to hear the voice on the
phone.
The toxicologist’s name was Denis Weese. His voice was high and hoarse
and ageless he could have been in his sixties or in his twenties.
“We ran every single test you requested and then some,” he said
defensively.
She tried to imagine him: small and bald, she decided. “I’m grateful to
you.”
“They were extremely costly, you know.”
“We’re paying for them. But let me ask you this: Aren’t there
substances, toxins, that cross the blood-brain barrier, and then don’t
cross back?” Arthur Hammond, her poison expert, had suggested such a
scenario in passing.
“I suppose there are.”
“Which might be found only in the spinal fluid?”
“I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s possible.” He was grudging: he didn’t
appreciate her theories.
She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she asked the obvious: “How about
a spinal tap?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, it’s just about impossible to do a spinal tap on a dead
body. There’s no pressure. It won’t come out. For another, the body’s
gone.”
“Buried?” She bit her lower lip. Damn.
“The funeral’s this afternoon, I think. The body’s been moved back to
the funeral home. Burial’s tomorrow morning.”
“But you could go there, couldn’t you?”
“Theoretically, but what for?”
“Isn’t the eye–the ocular fluid–the same as the spinal fluid?”
“Yeah.”
“You can draw that, can’t you?”
A pause. “But you didn’t order it.”
“I just did,” she said.
Mettlenberg, St. Gotten, Switzerland
Now Liesl had fallen silent. The tears, which had coursed down her
cheeks, dampening her denim workshirt, were beginning to dry.
Of course it was she. How could he not have known?
They were sitting in the front seat of her car. Standing on the asphalt
island of the gas station was too exposed, she said, after she’d
regained her composure. Ben remembered sitting in the front seat of
Peter’s truck.
She looked ahead, through the windshield. There was only the sound of
the occasional car roaring by, a truck’s deep-throated horn.
At last she spoke. “It is not safe for you to be here.”
“I took precautions.”
“If anyone sees you with me–”
“They’ll think it’s Peter, your husband–”
“But if the people who killed him, who know he is dead, have somehow
tracked me down–”
“If they’d tracked you down, you wouldn’t be here,” Ben said. “You’d be
dead.”
She was silent for a moment. Then: “How did you get here?”
He told her in detail about the private planes and cars, his circuitous
route. He knew- she would find his caution reassuring. She nodded
appreciatively.
“I imagine those kinds of security precautions became second nature to
you and Peter,” he said. “Peter told me it was you who devised his fake
death. That was brilliant.”
“If it was so brilliant,” she said mordantly, “they’d never have found
him again.”
“No. I blame myself for that. I should never have come to Switzerland,
brought them out of the woodwork.”
“But how could you have known? You didn’t think Peter was alive!” She
turned to face him.
Her skin was pale, almost translucent, her hair chestnut with golden
highlights. She was slender, with perfect smallish breasts under a
simple white blouse. She was extravagantly beautiful.
No wonder Peter had been willing to give up everything else in his life
to spend it with her. Ben felt a powerful attraction, but he knew he
would never act on it.
“You don’t go by your real name,” he said.
“Of course not. All of my friends here know me by another name. It’s
legally changed. Margarethe Hubli was the name of a great-aunt,
actually. All they knew about Peter was that he was a boyfriend, a
Canadian writer I was supporting. They knew him under a different name,
too …”
Her words trailed off, and she fell silent, once again staring out the
window. “He kept up some of his contacts, though, the ones he trusted.
He called them his ‘early warning system.” And then a few days ago,
when he got a call telling him about the blood bath at the
Bahnhofstrasse… He understood what had happened. I begged him not to
do anything. But no, he insisted on it! He said he had no choice.” Her
face had twisted into an expression of contempt, her voice a wail. Ben’s
heart was squeezed.
She went on in a small, choked voice, “He had to protect you. Persuade
you to get out of the country. He had to save your life even if it
meant putting his own in danger. Oh, God, I warned him not to go. I
begged, pleaded with him.”
Ben took her hand. “I’m so sorry.” What could he say, really? That he
was anguished beyond words that Peter had to die instead of himself?
That he wished it was the other way around? That he had loved Peter for
far longer than she had?
She said softly, “I can’t even claim his body, can I?”
“No. Neither of us can.”
She swallowed. “Peter loved you so much, you know.”
It was painful to hear. He winced. “We fought a lot. I guess it’s
like that law of physics, about how every action has an equal and
opposite reaction.”
“You two didn’t just look alike, you were alike.”
“Not really.”
“Only a twin would say that.”
“You don’t know me. Temperamentally, emotionally, we were totally
different.”
“Maybe in the way that two snowflakes are different. They’re still
snowflakes.”
Ben smiled appreciatively. “I’m not sure I’d call the two of us
snowflakes. We were always too much trouble.”
Something in that set her off again. Now she was weeping, her agony
heartbreaking. “Oh, God, why did they have to kill him? For what. To
what end? He would never talk, he was no fool!”
Ben waited patiently until she found some composure. “Peter told me he
found a document, a list of names. Twenty-three names of high ranking
statesmen and industrialists. “Companies you’ve heard of,” he said. He
said it was an incorporation document, setting up some organization in
Switzerland.”
“Yes.”
“You saw the document.”
“I did.”
“It seemed genuine to you?”
“From what I could tell, yes. All the markings, even the typewriting,
looked like papers I’ve seen from the 1940s.”
“Where is it now?”
She pursed her lips. “Just before we left Zurich for good, he opened a
bank account. He said it was mostly for the vault the bank would rent
him. He wanted to keep papers in it. I don’t know for sure, but I’d
guess he must have put it there.”
“Is it possible he hid it at home, in your cabin?”
“No,” she said quickly, “there is nothing hidden in our cabin.”
Ben made a mental note of her reaction. “Did he leave a key to this
vault?”
“No.”
“If the account was in his name, wouldn’t these, these bad guys have
ways of learning about its existence?”
“That is why he didn’t open it in his name. It’s in the name of an
attorney.”
“Do you remember who?”
“Of course. My cousin, Dr. Matthias Deschner. Actually, he’s my
second cousin. A distant relative, distant enough that no one would
connect him with us–with me. But he’s a good man, a trustworthy man.
His office is in Zurich, on St. Annagasse.”
“You trust him.”
“Totally. I trusted him with our lives, after all. He never betrayed
us; he never would.”
“If people today, people with influence and power and far-reaching
contacts, are so desperate to get this document, it must be extremely
important.” Ben’s mind abruptly filled with a horrific image of Peter’s
crumpled body gouting blood. His chest was so tight he couldn’t
breathe. He thought: Peter was in the way, and they killed him.
“They must be afraid their names will get out,” she said.
“But which of them can be alive after all these years?”
“There are also the inheritors. Powerful men can have powerful
successors.”
“And some who aren’t so powerful. There must be a weak link somewhere.”
Ben broke off. “It’s madness, all of this. The idea that anyone would
care about a corporation set up half a century ago–it just sounds