The Arms of Death

by Maggie Foster

  The next visitor came in the form of a small boy. Not the regular sort of patron in this department, but tolerated because he was well behaved and the son of one of the librarians.

  Walter dumped his pile of loot on the desk in front of Ginny. “Look what I found!”

  Ginny looked at the boy in mild surprise.

  “I found it on the floor. Look at all this stuff. Can I keep it?”

  Ginny picked through the pile of junk with the tip of her finger, sorting it into categories. The first group consisted of lost buttons, single earrings, tie tacks and other bits of wearing apparel. The second group was made up of money and money substitutes; tokens for parking and game machines, and a genuine wooden nickel.

  The third category, and by far the largest, consisted of writing implements. She looked them over. There were three disposable felt-tipped pens, all dry; at least a dozen ballpoint pens, in black, blue, red, purple, and green ink; six pencils, of which one had a point and none an eraser; one paint brush; one lipstick (if that could be considered a writing implement); one thin and expensive looking gold-tone pen; one fat and expensive looking fountain pen; and one item which didn’t seem to be a pen at all.

  Ginny frowned to herself. It seemed familiar; a plastic cylinder with a button on one end like a ballpoint pen. It looked like the kind one could unscrew and refill. Ginny twisted the instrument at the join and pulled the two pieces apart.

  It wouldn’t have meant anything to most people, but Ginny was a nurse. She blanched at the sight of the needle. The device was spring-loaded, designed so that, when the trigger was activated, the needle was pushed out through a hole, into the skin, then withdrawn, back inside the plastic sheath for safe keeping until it could be properly disposed of. This was a medical device used by diabetics to prick their fingers so blood could be tested for sugar content. What was it doing here?

  Ginny stared at the lancet and thought hard. Diabetics, like other people, did not like to be stuck by needles. As a result, a lot of research had gone into making the procedure as painless as possible. The lancets themselves were smooth as silk and thin as a whisper. The speed with which the devices struck was legendary. A patient could be watching, expecting the stick and the whole thing be over before he noticed.

  “Can I keep them?” Walter demanded. Ginny jumped. She had forgotten he was there. “Yes, you may keep them,” she said. “All except these.” She set aside the two expensive looking pens, the jewelry, and the lancet, then dismissed the boy. He scooped up his treasure and started to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Ginny called. She hurried after him. “Where did you find all this stuff?” she asked.

  He pointed to the other end of the room. “It was just lying there,” he told her.

  “Will you show me where, please?” she asked.

  He led her over and pointed down at a spot on the floor. “Here.”

  “Did you get stuff from any other part of the room?”

  “No. It was all here, in the dirt. Can I go now?”

  “Yes, you may, and thank you very much.” The child ran off.

  Ginny went in search of his father.

  “Kevin, what’s going on over there?” she asked, pointing to the spot Walter had indicated.

  “That’s the new shelving going in. It’s amazing how long it took us to get metal shelves for that part of the stacks. We’ve had those old wooden ones since before the Flood.”

  “Walter says he found some stuff in the dirt over there. Do you think they might have been under the old bookcases?”

  He nodded. “No one has swept under those things since they went in. I’m always explaining to people, anything that rolls under those old shelves is gone for good.”

  “Well, here are a few that have been resurrected” She handed over everything except the lancet, then went back to her post and sat down, staring at the device. She pulled it apart and inspected it closely, noticing it had been ‘fired.’

  The cartridge holding the needle was intended to be discarded after each use and a new, sterile, one put in its place. The needle could be used again, but only if someone opened the pen and re-cocked the device first, and patients weren’t supposed to do that. Re-using needles introduced the chance of injecting yourself with something picked up from the skin, like bacteria. Or a virus.

  Ginny froze. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe this virus required blood-to-blood contact to be infectious. That might explain why there had been no other cases even among health care providers; no accidental needle sticks.

  There was no way to tell how long the lancet had been lying on the floor. It could have been there for years, or only a few days. But Professor Craig’s office was just across the way. He worked here, among the books. Could someone have poisoned (there was no other word for it) the tip of the needle, then injected that lethal virus into him?

  Ginny frowned, considering the possibility. The spaces between the shelves were narrow, dark, and quiet. Every now and then, she came across a patron who’d fallen asleep, snoozing, with their back against the shelves. It was not the sort of place where one expected an attack.

  Even if there had been some sort of outcry, and she suspected not, who would be close enough to hear? One need only choose a time of day when most of the library patrons were elsewhere, and the remaining ones were concentrating on their work, hearing aids turned off, glasses trained on the microfilm readers. There would be a good chance no one would see or hear a thing.

  The Murderer (Ginny had a habit of capitalizing in her thoughts) would have to lure his Victim to the site on some pretext, then attack him when his back was turned. No. That wouldn’t work. She wasn’t dealing with a body left bleeding all over the floor and telling no tales. The victim had been brought to the Emergency Room awake and talking. He never said a word about being attacked by anyone. If he had been injected with a lethal virus, he hadn’t noticed when or by whom.

  Ginny let her eyes roam over the department. All available members of the local genealogy society had turned out to help. There were people everywhere, yet no one was paying her the slightest bit of attention. She could have approached any one of them, injected that virus, and been gone before they knew they were hit.

  Ginny reassembled the device, and stashed it in her bag, intending to take it to the hospital and dispose of it there.

  Murder. A deliberate attack upon a man with the intent to kill. Could such a thing be possible? And if it was, what was her responsibility? Did she have to come forward with her suspicions? To whom?

  Ginny’s eyes narrowed. Before she started making accusations, she needed to find out if it was feasible to kill someone that way. Also, she needed to see if there was any reason to rule her theory out, which meant getting a look at the autopsy report. She glanced at the clock. One more hour before she was free to leave and only twenty-four hours until she had to go back to work and put everything else on hold. She would have to move fast.

  * * *

  Ginny watched the clock for the next hour, waiting for a chance to speak to Elaine. If she didn’t show up soon, Ginny wouldn’t be able to retrieve Hal’s file before leaving. She fidgeted, then decided five minutes less on the desk would neither make nor break the usage statistics. She gathered up her belongings and crossed to Professor Craig’s office. The door was cracked and there was someone moving around inside.

  Ginny could not have said why she failed to knock. Perhaps it was the suspicion of murder that had her on edge. She acted on instinct, pulling the door all the way open and stepping inside.

  “Hello? Oh. It’s you.” She smiled at Elaine.

  The librarian had turned at Ginny’s entrance and stood with her mouth open, one hand on her chest, and one of the guiltiest expressions on her face Ginny had ever seen.

  “Ginny!” She recovered her composure. “You gave me a start.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Hal’s co
nfirmation papers. He asked me to pick them up for him so he can make sure to meet the deadline for filing.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Elaine turned to the desk and started flipping through a pile of folders stacked on the surface. “Here it is.” She turned and offered it to Ginny.

  “Thank you.” Ginny glanced around the office, noticing there were papers and piles on every surface and most of the floor. “This looks like quite a job.”

  Elaine made a wry face. “Yes, but it has to be done. I’ll manage.”

  “I know you will.” She smiled, then waved the folder in Elaine’s direction as she turned. “I’ll make sure Hal gets this.”

  Ginny hurried out of the building and into her car. Had she imagined it? No. The guilt had been plain to see. But why on earth should the interim Head Librarian feel guilty about sorting through the documents left by her predecessor? And the guilt had been there before Ginny asked her to hand over a file to someone other than the owner. Ginny frowned. Was there a connection? Could there be? Ginny frowned harder. It was conceivable, of course, but Elaine?

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  Sunday

  When she got to her car, Ginny pulled out her phone and accessed her brother’s home number. Alex answered on the second ring.

  “I’ve got another question for you. Were there any unaccounted for needle sticks on the victims, any of them?”

  “I’ll have to look. Why?”

  “I may have a theory about how Professor Craig was exposed to this virus.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Needle sticks. Look for needle sticks.”

  “Blood to blood transmission.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll send you those files tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be on the lookout for them. Love to everyone. Bye.”

  Her mother met her as she came in.

  “Hi, darling. How was the library?”

  “More interesting than usual. Some of the shelving in the stacks has been moved out to make way for new ones and you wouldn’t believe the mess they found underneath.”

  “I can imagine. You have a message, dear.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some nice young man called.”

  “Hal?”

  “No. This was someone else. Someone I haven’t spoken to before. He asked you to call, if it wasn’t too inconvenient.”

  Ginny pulled the message off the pad and looked at the name and number. Jim Mackenzie. She pursed her lips, wondering if she ought to be encouraging him, then decided he might want to talk about the virus.

  “Excuse me while I go make this phone call. I’ll be upstairs.” Ginny took the number and retreated to her library/office/computer room. She dialed the number on the note and heard a recorded voice directing her to leave a message or dial 9-1-1, if it was a medical emergency. She almost hung up without saying anything, but decided it would be better to let him know his message had gotten through.

  “This is Ginny Forbes returning your call at—” she glanced at the clock, “—six twenty-five p.m. Sunday. My number is—”

  “Ginny?” Jim’s voice interrupted the rest of her message.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry about that. I was hoping you’d call and I had to step out for a moment.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering whether you’d heard anything from your brother.”

  “Yes, I have.” She outlined what Alex had told her.

  “That’s very interesting. No other victims in each of the other two incidents?”

  “It looks like we may be off the hook.”

  “Well, that would be a relief.” There was a short pause. “So when may I see you again?”

  “Don’t you ever work?”

  “This is my weekend off. I’m free until Tuesday. May I take you to dinner?”

  “Tonight? Sorry, I already have plans.”

  “Tomorrow night, then?”

  “I have to be on the floor at six thirty.”

  “Lunch?”

  His voice held a note of pleading that pricked Ginny’s conscience. She considered it and decided he hadn’t given her any reason to deny him.

  “Yes, thank you, I’d like that.”

  His voice was warm with approval. “Good. I’ll pick you up at twelve and you can introduce me to your mother.”

  She hung up the phone. It was just lunch with a medical colleague, she told herself. About the virus. No need to mention it to Hal. Not yet, anyway.

  * * *

  Ginny spent the next hour getting organized.

  Ginny was a list maker. Her mother was a list maker. As a matter of fact, she came from a long line of list makers. Any time she had a problem to work out or a task to do, it seemed natural to her to sit down and start making lists.

  If there were three deaths from the same, or a similar virus, it was at least possible they were connected. And if her theory about the lancet pen was right, then all three victims had been injected with the lethal virus. Deliberately injected. That made it murder.

  She opened her spreadsheet program and set up a file. Across the top she listed the three victims, labeling the columns Donald Craig, Victim # 1, and Victim # 2. Down the left hand side she started listing everything she could think of that might link the three together; age, sex, race, residence, occupation, and so forth.

  The next set of rows had to do with the victims themselves: date, place, and cause of death; heirs, length of time from first symptoms to death, unexplained puncture wound(s), and more. By the end of the hour, she had a formidable list.

  “The trouble is,” she said to herself, “that I don’t have the slightest idea what to put in those fields.”

  She sat back and stared at the machine. A murder implied a murderer or murderess. Why did people kill one another? She started a new table, this one with an arbitrarily chosen three rows, labeled Suspect # 1, Suspect # 2, and Suspect # 3, one for each victim. In the first column she listed Means. The second was labeled Motive, the third Opportunity.

  “Well,” she said to herself, “the means is the same in each case, unless the murderer delivered the virus in some way other than a lancet pen.” She typed virus/lancet pen in the slot for the means for Suspect # 1 and virus/? for the other two suspects.

  “Okay. What else have I got?”

  Motive. She scrolled down the sheet and started a list of every reason she could think of for wanting another person dead.

  Passion headed the list, with lust, jealousy, hatred, revenge, and other strong emotions under it.

  Then came avarice. Follow the money.

  The third entry, power and altruism, seemed two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, the suspect would get his or her jollies from controlling another life. On the other, you might find mercy killings.

  The fourth entry, deception, implied the suspect had something so awful in his past that he would be willing to kill to cover it up. This included eliminating witnesses and Ginny wondered if any of the three victims could have seen or heard something they weren’t supposed to.

  The fifth entry covered making a political statement. Sometimes the killer wanted to kill a specific person or a representative member of a targeted group; sometimes anyone would do.

  The last entry was psychopathology. Ginny didn’t even want to think about this type of killer. The idea of someone who heard voices instructing him to kill, or someone who killed for the thrill of it, was so frightening it made her shiver.

  That left opportunity. She knew, or at least suspected, where Donald Craig had been attacked. She typed in library stacks? Was it true most victims knew their attackers?

  Whoever it was would have to get close enough to inject the virus, but that didn’t mean he knew the assailant. Pickpockets made a living bumping into strangers on the street and, if they were good enough, no one noticed until they went looking for their wallet.

  There must still be a connection of some sort, or the death
served no purpose. Ginny refused to believe a murder committed by stealth, using a poison, was anything other than premeditated.

  She shook her head over the enormity of the problem. She couldn’t even begin to answer the questions until she got those files from Alex. She would have to wait. She shut down the computer and went to get ready for her dinner date.

  * * *

  Ginny watched as Hal placed the file she had gotten from Elaine in his briefcase, then climbed behind the wheel. He accelerated away from the curb, swinging wide around the corner, the centrifugal force throwing her against the door of the car.

  “Ow! Please, Hal, I don’t need any more bruises.” Ginny rubbed her sore knee.

  Hal glanced over, his mind clearly on other things, then slowed down. “Sorry.”

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

  He glanced over at her, frowning.

  “I guess I’m a little tired after all that’s happened this week; the conference, Craig dying, and this virus scare on top of everything else.”

  Ginny nodded. “We’re all on edge. It would be hard not to be.”

  He reached over and took her hand. “I’m sorry. What do you say we put the whole thing out of our heads for tonight and concentrate on having a good time?”

  She smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “Then it’s a deal.” He gave her hand a squeeze then let go. “So, what did you think of Jim?” he asked.

  Ginny started, then realized Hal was referring to Friday night. “He seems nice enough. What do you know about him?”

  “Not much. He’s a doctor. There’s family in the neighborhood, though I always thought they were Virginia natives. He’s just moved here and has an apartment off of Northwest Highway somewhere.” Hal looked over at her and smiled. “I know that because he was teasing me about having to look after the grounds around the house. So I told him it was better than having to share a laundry room.”

  Ginny laughed. “I always hated that. What else?”

  “No wife, if that’s what you mean.” Hal grinned at her.