Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  His head began to throb in pace with the pulse of blood in his arteries. “I don’t remember.”

  The orange glow around her intensified. “You were seen heading toward the lifts. Were you visiting someone?”

  The machine to his right began a jangling alarm signal.

  “I don’t know.”

  She glanced to the array of screens. “That heart monitor says different.”

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing until the monitor returned to a regular blipblipblip.

  “Who did you meet at the hotel?”

  He looked at her and tried to mirror the quiet curiosity in her eyes.

  “Was it an informant?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You need to understand something,” Ruth said. “Jansen’s only going through the motions, investigating a Thorn Killer connection. He doesn’t believe it any more than I do. This is all to keep Superintendent Wilshire off his back—Wilshire’s being bugged by the press, and he wants our guy ruled out. What Jansen is really interested in is you, Greg.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “He doesn’t like you. I know, he’s a dickhead—but he’s good at the job. So, is there anything I should know?”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to ask, now, would I?” she said, and her eyes showed a rare flash of anger.

  What does she know? Carver listened to the steady blip of the monitor and willed it to stay that way.

  She took out her notebook. “Jansen’s team found an untraceable number on your mobile,” she said.

  The monitor picked up pace and he covered by saying, “Why have they got my phone?”

  “You were found concussed and shot, Greg.”

  She held the notebook up for him to read. “This number appears on your phone log over two dozen times.”

  He just kept breathing.

  “You called it the night you were shot. Then you went to the hotel, after parking your car a good fifteen-minute walk away. Who is it, Greg? Who did you meet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She wasn’t playing fair, reading him while he was so messed up.

  “I’m tired.” That was a lie: he was nauseated and weak, but his mind was jangling like a dozen alarm bells.

  Ruth wrote something on a fresh page of her notebook and tore it out. “Okay, it’s not my case—DCI Jansen is investigating the shooting, not me. He will want answers, and he won’t be as sympathetic.” She slapped the slip of paper onto the bedspread. “The number—in case you forget.” This was as angry as he’d ever seen her.

  He closed his eyes against the fierce glow around her.

  I’m losing my mind, he thought.

  He sensed her hovering for a moment or two longer.

  “Greg,” she murmured. “I’m trying to help you.”

  When he was sure she’d gone, he picked the paper up and clenched it in his fist.

  Chapter 15

  Day 7

  Five books lay open on Ruth Lake’s office desk; another pile was stacked next to it. Kara’s marginal notes were cryptic; Ruth needed help to understand what all this background reading was for, so she rang the student’s academic tutor.

  “At least ten books on psychics, mediums, premonitions, cold reading . . .” she explained. “Was she preparing for a presentation?”

  “All of her cohort should be, of course, with showcases coming up in February and March,” he said. “But Kara was planning to use a scene from Antony and Cleopatra and something from Educating Rita as a contrast piece.”

  “So this psychic stuff can’t be about her coursework?”

  “I doubt it—you see, she would have to’ve run it past me to get it approved, and this is all news to me.” He paused. “Of course, she could’ve been preparing for an audition.”

  “Paid work? Wouldn’t she have mentioned that to you?”

  “It gets insane around here—especially as the final semester rolls round,” he said. “Students can get paranoid about losing an opportunity—they’ll use all kinds of tactics to improve their chances at an audition.”

  Ruth finished the call and dialed Crime Scene Manager John Hughes.

  “How’s it going, Ruth?” he asked. “You get anything from those books I sent you?”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “The psychic texts Kara squirreled away behind the biographies—I think she might’ve been reading up for a role. It’s possible she had an acting job in the offing.”

  “Okay—so we’ll need to look for e-mails from theaters, TV, and film—”

  “And theatrical agents,” Ruth said. “Oh, and can you run a search for anything with ‘audition’ in the subject line?”

  “I’ll get someone on it.”

  “Thanks.” She was about to hang up when he spoke again.

  “How’s Greg?” he asked.

  She’d been dreading the question. “Emma says he’s doing well.”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not in a couple of days,” she said.

  “Oh.” He sounded shocked. “Well, I suppose he’s in good hands . . .”

  “Yeah,” Ruth said, refusing to feel guilty for the neglect. In fact she’d stayed away from the hospital since she’d confronted him about the hotel and the burner phone number on his mobile phone log. Until Carver decided to be honest with her, he could stew. Her mobile rang, and she said, “I’ve got to go, John. Thanks for this.”

  She hung up the landline and checked her mobile. It was Darshan Singh, the toxicologist who was working on skin samples from Kara. They had worked together on a few cases when Ruth was still a CSI, and he had done a rush job on Kara’s tox analysis as a favor.

  “Ruth,” Singh said, “I have those results for you, and your theory was correct—the poison was mixed with the tattoo ink.”

  “You’ve identified the poison?”

  He cleared his throat and in her mind’s eye she saw his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

  “It was tricky,” he said. “It had been significantly diluted before it was mixed with the pigment to make the ink. Added to that, we had only a small patch of freshly inked skin to work with—the older tattoos did not retain the toxin.”

  “Darshan.”

  “Yes, Ruth?”

  “Did you identify it?”

  “Of course,” he said, more in apology for digressing than out of pride. “It’s an alkaloid.”

  “Alkaloid,” she said. “Like you’d get in potatoes, or deadly nightshade?”

  “And the opium poppy, and tobacco—and about four thousand other plant species.”

  “Well, that doesn’t exactly narrow it down, does it?” Ruth felt her shoulders slump. “Okay, thanks, Darshan—it was worth a try.”

  “Wait,” he said. “You haven’t heard the good part. It is alkaloid, but we found three distinct peaks on HPLC analysis.”

  That sounded more promising—high pressure liquid chromatography was a biochemist’s go-to kit for anything from pharmaceuticals, to organic chemicals, to TNT. Three distinct peaks meant Darshan had identified three specific types of alkaloid, and that brought them three steps nearer to knowing the name of the poison.

  “Go ahead,” Ruth said, picking up a pen, ready to jot down the list.

  “Mesaconitine, hypaconitine, and aconitine,” the toxicologist said.

  “It’s aconite?”

  “Yes,” he said, like a man bitterly disappointed to have been beaten to his punch line. “I’ve e-mailed my full report; if you have any questions, you know where to find me.” He sounded hurt, and Ruth felt the need to make it up to him.

  “No, wait,” she said. “I’ll take a look now, if you can spare ten minutes to talk me through it?”

  “All right . . .”

  Of all the lab specialisms, toxicology was the least glamorous and rarely got its share of the credit. Tox results usually came through long after t
he first flush of excitement in an investigation had faded. Added to this, toxicologists rarely got out into the field—they were very much laboratory creatures, often isolated even in that setting as cerebral and a bit standoffish.

  “Okay, I’m opening the file now,” she said, adding, “Aconite is a garden plant, isn’t it?” although she already knew the answer.

  “Common names: wolfbane, monkshood, or mousebane. There are many subspecies, and it’s unlikely we will identify the exact source—too many variables—but alkaloids of aconite are both neuro- and cardiotoxic.”

  “Nerves and heart . . .” she murmured. “And is skin contact enough to poison you?”

  “Even picking the plant leaves with bare hands can be dangerous,” he said, warming to his theme. “I found a paper in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology. Let me quote you: ‘Tingling starts at the point of absorption and extends up the arm to the shoulder, after which the heart will start to be affected.’ Imagine how much worse it might be if the skin has been broken—or punctured.” He was sounding pleased with himself and she was pleased for him.

  She read from the report, “Symptoms of aconite poisoning involving skin contact alone include numbness of the skin, weakness of muscles, tachycardia, atrial fibrillation . . . bradycardia.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it can speed the heart rate or slow it down.”

  “And if it slows down—”

  “It could cause asphyxia,” he finished, and she could almost see him nodding enthusiastically at the other end of the line. “There is one small dipteran in the emollient, however—I mean—”

  “Fly in the ointment. Yeah, I got it.” Ruth didn’t mind smoothing ruffled feathers, but she refused to be patronized. “And the dipteran is . . . ?”

  “The relatively low concentration of aconitine—Kara really wasn’t exposed to very much of it.”

  “So how much would it take to kill a person?”

  “About two milligrams of the pure stuff is enough to kill a healthy man. But take a look at the chromatograph.”

  There were two smaller peaks, like minor pulses in a cardiograph.

  “The stuff wasn’t pure,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “Added to that, the effects of aconitine are unpredictable—some people seem to have a natural tolerance.”

  “And others succumb more easily.” She was thinking about Tali Tredwin, their first victim, killed within ten days of disappearing, her tattoos incomplete. “It would take no more than a pinch to finish off the average person, though?” she asked.

  “There, or thereabouts.”

  “How much was Kara given?”

  “It’s impossible to even estimate the original concentration—but it would be very low, and the dye itself is likely to have affected the way the toxin worked. We haven’t identified the black dye he used on Kara, but he used woad, a natural indigo dye, on all the others. It’s slightly alkaline, and high pH weakens the effect of the aconitine.”

  “Could the effect be cumulative?” she asked. “We know the killer subjected the victims to this stuff over a period of weeks. Could it have—I don’t know—weakened their hearts over time?”

  “That’s more a pathologist-type question,” he said with regret.

  Her next question wasn’t really one for Darshan, either, so she thanked him and hung up, ran off a copy of his report, and went in search of DCI Parsons.

  Parsons skimmed the details and set the report aside.

  “Where are you with reinterviewing witnesses?” he asked.

  “Almost done,” she said, not ready to share the details with him yet.

  “Well, it’s useful to know the poison, I suppose,” he said, with a glance at the printout in front of him. “For future reference, I mean.”

  She got the feeling that he’d ticked this box and was ready to move on.

  “I think we can use it now, sir,” she said, keeping her voice light and nonconfrontational.

  Parsons blinked. “How, exactly?”

  “The killer chooses his victims carefully and he keeps them for an extended period. He used a natural plant tool—the firethorn—to create elaborate tattoos on their bodies. In the first four victims he used an herbal dye, and today we discover that Kara was injected with a neurotoxin that could explain cause of death, and it’s also an herbal extract—taken from a plant so dangerous that just handling it could kill you.”

  She waited for her boss to join the dots.

  Parsons frowned. “Safely extracting poison from a plant like that must take specialist knowledge,” he said.

  “I’m thinking, who would have that kind of knowledge?” Ruth said. “An herbalist? A toxicologist—an anthropologist, even?”

  “You’re asking me to bring in an independent forensic adviser?”

  She shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

  Chapter 16

  “I have the results of your CT scan.” The neurosurgeon stood by the side of Greg Carver’s bed in the rehabilitation unit, an e-tablet in his hand.

  “Okay . . .”

  “You look uncertain. Do you remember having the scan?”

  A huge creamy-white machine, the constant exhalation of cooling fans. Then the whooshing drone of a jet engine. Red laser crosshairs had lit his body as he rolled into the vast drum, and he couldn’t get the thought of gunsights out of his head.

  “I remember the scan,” Carver said. Since he’d woken up in this hospital, people were always asking questions like this. Sometimes he lied that he remembered, and sometimes he lied that he didn’t. This time, searching the face of the gray-haired, besuited man by his bed, he answered truthfully, “I just don’t remember you.”

  “I wasn’t there for the scan, of course,” the doctor said. “But we have spoken several times . . .” He seemed to be waiting for a eureka moment from Carver, which never came.

  The consultant smiled. “Well, you do have a rather large team managing your treatment.” He introduced himself again. Carver immediately forgot his name. “Your brain swelling has normalized,” the doctor went on. “But we will need to monitor you.”

  Carver nodded, trying to commit the facts to memory.

  “So have you had any unusual feelings or sensations?”

  “Like what?”

  “Smells that seem out of place—the smell of burning, or a strong perfume, for instance? Seeing things that aren’t there?”

  He means hallucinations.

  Carver said, “No,” thinking of the shadows that haunted his waking moments, the flash of light, the presence that he knew wished him evil, but he could not visualize.

  The doctor kept his faded blue eyes on Carver for a long five seconds, but seemed to decide it wasn’t worth forcing the issue. He turned the tablet to show Carver a biological diagram of a human spine outlined in black, the heart and its blood vessels colored red.

  “The bullet is still lodged behind the descending aorta.” He pointed to a thick blood vessel that looped over the heart and backward to the spinal column. “It’s trapped between the aorta and these two vertebrae—T4 and T5—in the thoracic region of your spinal column.” He turned, indicating with his thumb a position on his own back between his shoulder blades.

  “Can you get it out?”

  “We could, but we won’t—not if we can avoid it,” the doctor said.

  Is he telling me I’m going to be an invalid? That would invite a yes or no answer, and Carver could not deal with a yes, right now, so he said, instead: “Doctor, I need to work.”

  “You need to focus on getting well, Mr. Carver.”

  “How can I do that with a bullet inside me?”

  “Nine times out of ten, surgery to remove bullets usually does more harm than good,” the doctor explained. “Infection, damage to surrounding tissues as we seek out the foreign object—to say nothing of the risks involved in opening your chest. Because we would have to do that to get at this little bugger.”

  He swiped the screen of the tablet and a new im
age appeared. “This is the actual scan.”

  It looked like a slightly fuzzy grayscale photograph, and Carver could see the bullet as a bright slug, nestled between the artery and the bone. The thought of this alien object lodged near his heart made his chest constrict and his stomach turn to liquid.

  “The bullet’s position means there’s a risk of damaging the aorta itself—the major blood vessel supplying blood to the chest and the lower part of your body,” the doctor went on. “Nerves pass out from the spinal column in this region that control the upper chest, midback, and abdomen, as well as the lower limbs. Damage could result in anything from breathing problems to paraplegia.”

  “But if it’s left in there, surely it could cause the same damage?” Carver resisted the compulsion to press a hand to his chest.

  “Your tests so far have been very positive,” the doctor said. “No muscle weakness, tingling, or numbness in the lower limbs. And the physio team say they had you up and walking earlier today—only a week after you were brought here in a coma. The signs are good.”

  But Carver couldn’t shake the panicky feeling that one sudden movement could cripple him, that he would end up in a wheelchair for life. “What if it shifts?” he said. “Injures my spine anyway?”

  “We will monitor you closely as you rebuild your strength,” the doctor said. “If we see any worrying changes, we can reevaluate the risks of surgery against the benefits. For the moment, my biggest concern is the head trauma. You have no idea how it happened, or when?”

  “No.”

  “The reason I ask is because, if treatment of concussion is delayed, it can cause long-term problems,” the consultant said. “And you do seem to be having difficulty remembering things.”

  “I’m fine,” Carver said.

  “Can you tell me my name?”

  Carver didn’t answer; he couldn’t.

  The doctor didn’t comment, but after a moment he went on: “The nurses and physiotherapists have also noticed that you have problems with concentration. Which you would expect in someone who has just woken from a coma.” He paused. “But there are complicating factors in your case.”

  Carver glanced up: complicating factors were always a bad thing.