by Lora Roberts
For a moment everything stopped while Suzanne and I stared at him.
“This is just potassium,” he said conversationally, waving the hypodermic. “I got it out of the medication room on my morning walk around the halls. A pity they’re so understaffed here, isn’t it? Nobody noticed what I was doing.” His charming smile appeared. “I was going to tell Liz about my fears of Suzanne, and then when you came later to visit me, Suse, there’d be a struggle, a shout for the nurse. They’d all think you were trying to kill me—again.” He held the hypo up, squirting a few drops into the air. “Potassium’s lethal, you know. An overdose just causes the heart to stop. It’s untraceable injected into the IV, which is how you were planning to do it. I’ll be very shaken by my second near escape from death.”
Suzanne drew a deep breath. “It won’t happen that way, though. Now, there are two of us. One of you.”
“There’ll be one of you soon.” He lunged at her, holding the hypodermic like a dagger, pointed straight at her chest.
Suzanne dodged; Ed grabbed her. They fell back together on the unused bed as if they were urgent lovers instead of enemies. Ed was on top of her, the hospital gown flapping open at the back.
His IV stand teetered. It was tall, with a heavy wheeled base. I took it by the waist and forced it over. It landed on Ed’s naked backside.
He yelled and rolled aside, making a final effort to thrust the hypodermic home. Suzanne put out her hand to ward off the blow; the needle went into her palm, up to the hilt.
Ed didn’t notice that he hadn’t shot the syringe’s plunger. He was off the bed, righting the IV pole and then reaching for the discarded tubes he’d ripped out of his nose. His face was intent, focused. He pulled the tubes taut between both hands and came at me.
I backed up, not taking my eyes off his merciless face.
The IV stand rolled meekly behind him. He held the clear plastic tubes like a garrote; his gaze measured my neck. The backs of my knees hit the chair behind me, and I fell into it.
Ed was on me right away, his knee pressed intimately between my legs, his weight holding me down. He raised his hands and yanked the tubing down behind my head, lassoing my neck. I felt the cold plastic on my nape. Leaning back, he crossed his arms between us, grunting in satisfaction when the tubing tightened and I gagged and choked.
My eyes were being forced from their sockets. Blinking away the red haze that clouded my vision, I saw Suzanne stagger to her feet behind Ed. She grasped the syringe that protruded from her palm. I could see the glittery point of the needle coming out the other side of her hand. She squeezed her eyes shut and the point disappeared. A moment later a bright red bead took its place.
I managed to get my hand between my neck and the tubing, and sobbed with relief from the pressure. Ed’s look of concentration was replaced by a frown. He twisted the tubing together and transferred it to his left hand. Then he slapped me, hard. The pain exploded sharply inside my skull. My head rocked sideways against the chair’s scratchy welting. Instinctively I put both hands up to my face. He twisted the tubing again, and once more I couldn’t breathe.
“Ed.” Suzanne sounded so calm, so normal. “You said this stuff is fatal in IV?”
Ed went very still. He dropped the tubing, and my chest heaved reflexively. He turned, crouched beside me on the chair Suzanne stood beside the IV stand, holding the syringe.
The empty syringe.
“What did you do?” Ed’s cry was heartfelt. He launched himself, but Suzanne stepped aside, and he ended up sprawled on his bed. “Take it out, take it out—” He pawed at the IV in his right arm. Suzanne grabbed his left hand and twisted it behind his back.
“It’ll reach you pretty soon,” she said in that soft, polite voice. He writhed and bucked, but she kept his hand wrenched up behind him. “Then you’ll die, like they died. You’re evil, Ed. You have to be destroyed.”
The door banged open, and a nurse popped in. “What’s all this commotion,” she began. Her eyes widened. “Backup,” she yelled, squeezing between the chair where I still sat, collapsed, and the end of the unused bed.
My foot was in the way. I truly didn’t mean to trip her. Ed screamed, a horrible sound. He tried to gnaw the IV out of his arm with his teeth. His eyes were frantic, bulging with fear. I felt as if there were some force in the room besides us—some implacable judge who constrained Suzanne to keep her grip on Ed’s hand, who kept Ed from saving himself, who’d made me trip the nurse.
Then the nurse jumped up, another one ran in, and Suzanne, sighing, let go of Ed’s hand. He didn’t even notice. He still tried desperately to bite or pull out the IV line. The nurses rushed at him.
“Was he having a seizure? What happened?” The first nurse questioned us while she and the other one grabbed Ed’s legs, strapped him to the bed, and then managed to pry his hands down long enough to give them the same treatment. His head flailed from side to side, his mouth working. It must have looked as if he had had a fit, and Suzanne had been subduing him.
“Potassium,” he gasped out. “She—they—potassium in my IV line.”
The nurses looked at him, then at each other. One of them examined the IV. “No sign of a puncture.”
The other one shook her head. “Delusions. Sometimes an aftereffect of these poisonings.”
Suzanne smiled wearily at me. “Okay. Call your cop friend.” She glanced back at Ed. “I just wanted to let him know how it felt.”
“You—didn’t—” My throat was raw. It was hard to talk.
“Of course not.” She walked toward the door. “I’ll be in the waiting room down the hall. The air in here is too foul.”
The nurses hovered busily over Ed, who still watched the IV line with a panic-stricken gaze. I picked up the phone, got an outside line, and called Drake at home. For once he was there.
“You sound like shit. Are you okay? I was just leaving for the hospital,” he said as soon as he heard me. “For God’s sake, Sully. I warned you to be careful. Don’t you know better than to keep assignations with people who are mixed up in a murder case?”
“I didn’t suspect Ed—he was poisoned,” I pointed out. The words came out hoarsely. One of the nurses turned to look at me. “But as it turns out, he wasn’t really.”
Drake’s impatient sigh hissed down the phone line. “That’s why I left that message for you to stay put. We tested that tonic of his. It has minute amounts of strychnine in it—enough to make Ed’s bodily fluids test positive, but not enough to cause any symptoms. He could have poisoned Larry’s coffee and faked his own symptoms.”
“Very clever, Drake.” I felt tired. “Come on over to the hospital. Ed’s pretty much confessed to the murders, in front of two witnesses.”
Ed hadn’t even heard me. He was still waiting to die. “What’s this about murder?” The first nurse scowled at me. “I understood this man was administered poison yesterday. This room is restricted. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not.” I followed Suzanne down the hall. It would do Ed good to expect death for a while longer.
Chapter 27
We were crowded into Drake’s tiny office, Suzanne with her long legs wound around a folding chair, Bruno Morales perched on Drake’s desk. We’d had our statements taken separately, and then they’d herded us together. It looked like Suzanne was going to avoid an attempted-homicide charge. I hadn’t mentioned the final twist she’d applied to Ed with the syringe. Evidently she hadn’t either.
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why did he kill Jenifer? Why did he have to do that? Or did she really commit suicide after all?”
Bruno and Drake exchanged glances. “You know, Paolo,” Bruno said, getting up from his desk, “we’ve been working on this for quite a while. I feel like taking a break, walking over to Jim’s for some coffee. How about you?”
Drake grimaced. “How about Rodger’s? Coffee’s better.”
“But they only have those fancy desserts, not doughnuts.” Bruno grinned.
“Jim’s it is.” Drake got up and stretched. “We’ll probably discuss the case. Unofficially, of course. If you ladies— women—want to listen in—”
“They may have insights to contribute, Paolo.” Bruno held the door open courteously.
“And we’re free—I’m free—to go?” Suzanne glanced at me, then at the policemen. “We can just walk out if we want?”
“If you’re tired of our company, certainly.” Drake strode down the corridor, not waiting for anyone else.
I trailed Suzanne out the door, and Bruno Morales followed, shutting it carefully behind him. He glanced at Drake’s receding form and tsked, shaking his head.
“No excuse for rudeness,” he murmured, walking up the hall between the two of us. When we reached the street, Suzanne hesitated, but shrugged and came with us. Drake slowed down, and she walked beside him, her lanky form nearly topping his. That didn’t seem to bother him.
Beside me, Bruno kept up a gentle flow of conversation, centering around his three children, his wife’s activities on the Children’s Theatre board, the way his tomatoes were growing. The couple ahead of us turned at University, but Bruno held me back with a hand on my arm. “Miss Sullivan,” he began, gazing earnestly at me with his soft brown eyes. “Paolo is—he’s been very concerned about you getting mixed up in this case.”
“I’m not really mixed up—my participation was totally involuntary.” I didn’t want to hear this—it was almost as bad as being called into the principal’s office.
Bruno sighed. “That’s true. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was concerned for Paolo, and for you. And do not tell me to mind my own business. I will tell myself.” He moved on down the sidewalk to the door of Jim’s. I wanted to pull away and stalk on back to my house, but I knew it was still occupied by the invading relatives. And besides, I burned with unassuaged curiosity.
Once we were seated in the neutral territory of a duct tape-patched booth, with a plate of maple bars on the table and steaming cups all around, Drake picked up the story.
“You asked why Ed had to kill Jenifer.” He gazed somberly from me to Suzanne. “At this point we’re just conjecturing, because he hasn’t given us a coherent statement.”
I shuddered a little, thinking of Ed’s panic-filled gaze, wondering if he’d become completely unhinged.
“But this is what we think, putting together what you’ve told us”—he nodded at Suzanne—“with what we’ve dug up. Ed wanted to take SoftWrite public after bringing out the new product. He wanted the money, he wanted the prestige. He wanted to be the Bill Gates of Palo Alto.”
Suzanne snorted. “He got greedy. I kept telling him we weren’t ready to go public till we had a bigger range of products, but he didn’t want to listen. It took us so long to get profitable, and a couple of extra rounds of venture capital eroded our stock position. The VC wanted us to go public too, but I was totally against it.”
“That’s what we heard,” Drake murmured, exchanging glances with Bruno. “Several people told us you were against both the venture financing and the public offering.”
“Call me a stickin-the-mud.” Suzanne smiled tiredly. “Ed did. And then he wanted to bring out our new product right away. I was only doing the user interface. He had Jenifer working on the real guts. And I couldn’t believe she could get it done so fast. I wondered about it—after all, she’d worked for MicroMax, although he tried to keep that quiet. She was his new software queen.” Her face twisted with pain. “Last weekend I went in and checked through the code. I found places where the two of them had unplugged chunks of proprietary stuff from somewhere else and stitched them into our product.”
“Why didn’t he just ask you to write original code?” Drake leaned forward, the last bite of a maple bar waiting in his hand.
“Too slow.” Suzanne shrugged. “When Ed and I started out, we were a scrappy team, making it up as we went along. Our first product, the screen saver with the thunderstorm that rained cats and dogs, was a kind of thumb-your-nose thing that we tossed off for fun. It made us a lot of money. Suddenly we had offices and staff and cash flow— and a high overhead. Ed changed. Our next product was complicated and took more time to develop. He was impatient. He wanted more money, fast. He wanted to release things before they were ready and bring out endless variations of what we’d already done.”
She stirred her coffee, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “He said I was holding him back by insisting on testing and quality; our private relationship died, but I wouldn’t let him get rid of me in the company.” She glanced up. “I actually own more of the stock than he does—he made some bad investments—and I bailed him out in return for some of his options. He started doing little power plays—dating women we hired, making under-the-table deals with investors. I knew he’d find some way to force me out sooner or later—I’m not good with that kind of scheming political management. I was just hoping to keep the standards up a little longer.”
“Why didn’t you want him to go public? Then you could have recouped your investment and gotten out.” Drake poured more coffee from the tall plastic pot. I fished the tea bag out of my little metal pot of lukewarm water and refilled my cup.
Suzanne put one hand over her eyes. “I just didn’t trust him. And there’s so much more scrutiny when you go public. Once I found he was pirating other people’s software for our product, I was really frightened of lawsuits. I was trying to think of a way to postpone the new release, some way to let our investors know that Ed should be removed without causing everything to collapse. Like I say, I’m not good at these things, and I didn’t know where to go for help. I just—withdrew, I guess.”
“So Jenifer was helping Ed doctor the new release.” I still didn’t really understand. “Why? She didn’t seem like that kind of person. Because they were in love, talking marriage?”
“She was,” Suzanne corrected. “Ed never talked marriage. But he probably did use his personal—charisma—to overwhelm her into helping him. He probably let her think he would marry her. He might even have meant to, just to keep her quiet.”
“And then she joined Clarice’s religion,” Drake said. He pushed his coffee cup away and folded his arms on the table. “Clarice was jealous of Jenifer for getting Ed after he’d ditched her. But her new religion didn’t allow jealousy, so she decided that if her beliefs had driven Ed away from her, the same thing would happen if she converted Jenifer. And Jenifer was easy meat for Clarice. She’d already been influenced by a group in Seattle, several of whom blamed all their problems on child abuse they remembered. Jenifer’s new ‘memory’ broke up her brother’s romance, and she wasn’t sorry.”
“Yes,” Bruno Morales put in. “Jason told us that she said she felt cleaner after she’d ‘confessed’ to his fiancée, and she’d feel cleaner yet once she was done. Obviously she had something more on her mind.”
“Ed must have known she was getting ready to denounce him,” Drake said. “The big scene at the office that morning wasn’t really about their romance, but about her plans to confess to doctoring the software. The blackmailing note in the lunch bag just made Jenifer more determined. Ed couldn’t allow it. He took her home, gave her a sedative, told her to rest up. He was probably already thinking how much better it would be if she were dead. After you came by, Liz, he gave her cocoa with a lethal dose of the sleeping pills—she would be groggy by then, unquestioning. When she passed out, he left her to die.”
“And Bill Aronson photographed his car there.” Bruno Morales took over the story. “He had a habit of keeping track of things, and he’d found out from one of Clarice’s spiteful remarks about Ed and Jenifer. After she died, he got his pictures printed and tried to cash in on his knowledge. Ed agreed to meet him on Skyline to hand over the blackmail, but instead he just knocked Aronson out, put a hole in his exhaust pipe, and left him to die. Ed didn’t really kill them, he says. They died when he wasn’t there.” We were all silent for a moment.
“But I don’
t understand why he planned to pin it on me,” I said, standing a maple bar up on one end, like an office building. “I had no motive for any of it.”
Drake gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “I don’t think he really did. He felt you should be included in his scheme when he found out you’d been at Jenifer’s that afternoon. But right up to the end you were just going to be insurance, an outsider to confirm that Suzanne was threatening him. And if something went wrong, you could be the backup suspect, in case we didn’t buy the suicides or Suzanne didn’t look guilty enough. That’s why he made sure you came back to answer the phones after Clarice’s big fit. He wanted you available.”
“Why did he kill Larry?” Suzanne had a pile of crumbs in front of her from shredding her maple bar. “Did Larry know that Ed had—killed Jenifer?”
“He figured out that Jenifer and Ed were using MicroMax’s proprietary code.” Drake pushed his hair back and looked wearily at Suzanne. “Ed saw Larry as the last obstacle, and also an opportunity to divert suspicion from himself.”
“What’s going to happen to Ed?” Suzanne was trembling enough to shake the whole booth, but her voice was even. “Will he—be executed?” She smoothed the bandage that covered the hole in her hand.
Drake shrugged. “Not for me to say. He’ll be remanded for trial. Your testimony will be important, and so will Liz’s, that he attempted to intimidate and murder. As far as Jenifer and Bill and Larry, we’ll find more evidence now that we know what to look for. Certainly he’ll be brought up on capital charges.”
Suzanne rubbed her thin arms. “I don’t know what to do about SoftWrite,” she said helplessly. “The new release is compromised, the investors will be frantic, and that public offering is looming over me.”
“Call up Emery and ask him for some names,” I suggested, feeling sorry for her. “You need a good lawyer. Maybe there are some consultants who can sort things out for you.”