“Can you take some samples of brain, some bile, kidney, heart, and so on?” she said.
Higgins smiled tartly: don’t tell me my business.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’d wager we’ll find arteriosclerosis,” Higgins said.
“No doubt,” she said. “The man was old. Is there a phone around here I can use?”
The pay phone was down the hall next to a vending machine that dispensed coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. The front of the machine was a large oversaturated color photograph of cups of hot chocolate and coffee, intended to look appetizing, but actually greenish and awful. As she dialed she could hear the buzz of the Stryker saw as Higgins cut through the rib cage.
Arthur Hammond, she knew, normally got to work early. He ran a poison-control center in Virginia and taught toxicology courses at a university. They’d met on a case and liked each other instantly. He was shy, spoke with an intermittent hesitation that hid an old stammer, rarely looked you in the eyes. Yet he had a wicked sense of humor. He was a scholar of poisons and poisonings back to the Dark Ages. Hammond was far better than anyone in the federal labs, better than any forensic pathologist, and certainly far more willing to help. He was not only brilliant but intuitive. From time to time she had brought him in as a paid consultant.
She caught him at home, on his way out the door, and explained.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“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—dimethyl 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 subtract 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 a
ll 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, flicked off the strings of toilet paper, reap-plied 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 abductor 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 leathertopped mahogany desk, even when meeting with his own son.
In the tall chair the old man, once tall and strong, looked wizened, almost gnomelike, surely not the effect he’d intended. Ben sat on a leather chair facing the desk.
“When you called, you sounded as if you had something you wanted to talk to me about,” Max said.
He spoke with a refined mid-Atlantic accent, the German long submerged, barely detectable. As a young man recently arrived in America, Max Hartman had taken speech training and elocution lessons, as if he’d wanted to banish all traces of his past.
Ben peered at his father closely, trying to make sense of the man. You were always an enigma to me. Distant, formidable, unknowable. “I do,” he said.
A stranger seeing Max Hartman for the first time would notice the large bald head, speckled with age spots, the prominent fleshy ears. The eyes, large and rheumy, grotesquely magnified behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. The jutting jaw, the nostrils permanently flared as if he were smelling a bad odor. Yet for all that age had wrought, it was evident that this was a man who’d once been quite handsome, even striking.
The old man was dressed, as he always was, in one of his bespoke suits, tailored for him on Savile Row, London. Today’s was a splendid charcoal, with a crisp white shirt, his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket; a blue and gold rep tie, heavy gold cuff links. Ten in the morning on a Sunday, and Max was dressed for a board meeting.
It was funny how your perceptions were shaped by your history, Ben reflected. At times he could observe his father as he was now, old and fragile, yet at other moments he couldn’t help seeing him through the eyes of an abashed child: powerful, intimidating.
The truth was, Ben and Peter had always been slightly afraid of their father, a little nervous around him. Max Hartman intimidated most people; why should his own sons be the exception? It took real effort to be Max’s son, to love and understand him and feel tenderness toward him. It was like learning a complex foreign language, one that Peter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn.
Ben suddenly flashed on Peter’s terrible, vindictive expression when he revealed what he’d discovered about Max. And then that image of Peter’s face gave way to a flood of memories of his adored brother. He felt his throat constrict, his eyes fill with tears.
Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think of Peter. Here, in this house where we played hide-and-seek and pummeled each other, conspired in whispers in the middle of the night, screamed and laughed and cried.
Peter’s gone, and now you’ve got to hang in there for him too.
Ben had no idea how to begin, how to broach the subject. On the plane out of Basel he’d rehearsed how he was going to confront his father. Now he’d forgotten everything he’d planned to say. The one thing he’d resolved was not to tell him about Peter, about his reappearance, his murder. For what? Why torture the old man? As far as Max Hartman knew, Peter had been killed years ago. Why should he be told the truth now that Peter really was dead?
Anyway, confrontation wasn’t Ben’s style. He let his father talk business, ask about the accounts Ben was managing. Man, he thought, the old guy is still sharp. He tried to change the subject, but there really wasn’t any easy or elegant way to say, By the way, Dad, were you a Nazi, if you don’t mind my asking?
Finally, Ben took a stab at it: “I guess being in Switzerland made me realize how little I know about, about when you were in Germany…”
His father’s eyes seemed to grow larger behind the magnifying lenses. He leaned forward. “Now, what inspires this sudden interest in family history?”
“Really, I think it was just being in Switzerland. It reminded me of Peter. This was the first time I’d been back there since his death.”
His father looked down at his hands. “I don’t dwell on the past, you know that. I never did. I only look ahead, not behind.”
“But your time at Dachau—we’ve never talked about that.”
“There’s really nothing to say. I was brought there, I was fortunate enough to survive, I was liberated on April 29, 1945. I will never forget the date, but it’s a part of my life I prefer to forget.”
Ben inhaled, then launched in. He was keenly aware that his relationship with his father was about to be altered forever, the fabric about to be torn. “Your name isn’t on the list of prisoners liberated by the Allies.”
It was a bluff. He watched his father’s reaction.
Max stared at Ben for a long moment, and then to Ben’s surprise he smiled. “You must always be wary of historical documents. Lists thrown together at a time of enormous chaos. Names spelled wrong, names omitted. If my name is missing from some list compiled by some U.S. Army sergeant, so what?”
“But you weren’t at Dachau, were you?” Ben asked quietly.
His father slowly swiveled his chair around, turning his back to Ben. His voice, when it came, was reedy, somehow distant. “What a strange thing to say.”
Ben felt his stomach flutter. “But true, right?”
Max swiveled back around. His face was expressionless, blank, but a blush had appeared on his papery cheeks. “There are people who make a profession out of denying that the Holocaust ever happened. So-called historians, writers—they publish books and articles saying the whole thing was a fake, a conspiracy. That millions of Jews weren�
��t murdered.”
Ben found his heart thudding, his mouth dry. “You were a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. Your name is on a document—a document of incorporation listing members of a board of directors of a secret company. You were the treasurer.”
When his father replied, it was in a terrible whisper. “I won’t listen to this,” he said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s why you never spoke about Dachau. Because it was all a fiction. You were never there. You were a Nazi.”
“How can you say such things?” the old man rasped. “How can you possibly believe this? How dare you insult me this way!”
“That document—it’s in Switzerland. Articles of incorporation. The whole truth is there.”
Max Hartman’s eyes flashed. “Someone showed you a fraudulent document, designed to discredit me. And you, Benjamin, chose to believe it. The real question is why.”
Ben could feel the room revolving around him slowly. “Because Peter told me himself!” he shouted. “Two days ago in Switzerland. He found a document! He found out the truth. Peter found out what you had done. He tried to protect us from it.”
“Peter—?” Max gasped.
The expression of his father’s face was terrible, but Ben forced himself to keep going.
“He told me about this corporation, who you really were. He was telling me everything when he was shot dead.”
The blood had drained from Max Hartman’s face, the gnarled hand that rested on his desk visibly trembling.
“Peter was killed before my eyes.” And now Ben almost spat the words: “My brother, your son—another one of your victims.”
“Lies!” his father shouted.
“No,” Ben said. “The truth. Something you’ve kept from us all our lives.”
Abruptly, Max’s voice became hushed and cold, an arctic wind. “You speak of things you cannot possibly understand.” He paused. “This conversation is over.”
“I understand who you are,” Ben said. “And it sickens me.”
“Leave,” Max Hartman shouted and he raised a quivering arm toward the door. Ben could picture that same arm raised in an SS salute, in a past that was distant but not distant enough. Never distant enough. And he recalled some writer’s often quoted words: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.
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