Pretty Poison plgm-1

by Joyce Lavene

“They talked to Mrs. Stone’s husband and checked the people she worked with,” she answered. “They couldn’t find anything to connect her death to him or anyone else.”

  “But you think there might be some connection to whoever killed Warner.”

  “Anemonin poisoning is rare. These two incidents might have happened on the same day. I found Mark’s body that morning, and Dr. Samson consulted with me about the poisoning in Columbia that night. The woman was still alive when I talked to him.”

  “So where does this stuff come from?” he asked without taking his eyes off the road.

  “The chances are it was home-brewed. Whoever did it knows something about botanical poison and set up a little distillery. It wouldn’t take much.”

  “If that’s the case, could forensics tell if the poison was the same on the two cases?”

  Peggy shrugged. “Theoretically. I’m not a medical examiner, but I believe the poison would be traceable. I’ll have to do some research to verify that.”

  Al laughed. “Damn, Peggy. Why aren’t you working for us?”

  “There are thousands of cases of accidental poisoning every year, my friend. There are probably hundreds of intentional poisonings as well. But either medical examiners don’t catch them or the symptoms are mistaken for something else. I don’t think any police department has a botany professor on staff to look for plant poisonings.”

  “And here I only thought you had a green thumb! You’re full of surprises.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled at him.

  “Like it wouldn’t surprise me to find out you were somehow involved in the whole fiasco with the Warner case. It has all the earmarks, doesn’t it? It involved a college prank, or what looked like a prank, that led to us discover he’d been poisoned with some kind of plant. Couple that with the fact that you found the body and you’ve been poking your nose in on the investigation. Someone might think you set the whole thing up.”

  Peggy pulled down the sun visor and opened the mirror before she took out her lipstick. “That sounds like a real stretch of the imagination to me. First of all, if I’d known Mark was poisoned by anemonin, I would’ve simply told you, wouldn’t I?”

  “I hope so.” He laughed. “I think you’re right. I think that might be reaching, even for you.”

  She laughed with him, but her heart was fluttering in her chest. He was closer to the truth than she hoped he’d ever know. She certainly wouldn’t ever tell him.

  “You know this puts your little assistant in a bad light.” Al took out a pack of gum and offered her a stick. “The chances are the DA will do exactly what you’ve been wanting him to do and drop the charges on Mr. Cheever. But this new evidence gives us a more complete picture of the killer. Not only did she need opportunity at the shop to use the shovel, she needed prior knowledge about plants and how to use them. She needed to know something about Warner’s habits, too.”

  Peggy thought about his accusations. He was right. She helped prove Mr. Cheever was innocent. But her confession put Keeley in the spotlight. “Keeley doesn’t have the kind of information she’d need to poison Mark.”

  “And how hard would that be to get? She could probably go on the Internet and look it up. You said the killer wouldn’t need sophisticated equipment. Ms. Prinz told us she asked Warner to meet her at the shop that night. All she had to do was administer the poison. Forensics should be able to tell us how long it was between when that happened and when he died.”

  “Is that what Jonas is thinking?”

  Al wouldn’t commit. “I’m not sure. But it’s what I’m thinking. So what are the chances?”

  Peggy didn’t want to speculate on that yet. If the two poisoning cases were related, that could immediately change the picture for Keeley. What were the chances she knew Molly Stone? She changed the subject, and they talked about John and times past as they finished the trip to Columbia.

  HAL SAMSON WAS WAITING ANXIOUSLY. He jumped up from his chair when he saw them. “I’m so glad you could come. Maybe there’ll be an answer to this.”

  Al and Peggy sat down beside the doctor’s cluttered desk. The office was sparsely furnished with older office equipment. The green-and-white tile floor was clean but worn. The place smelled strongly of disinfectant.

  “Peggy told me what she knew about this case,” Al said. “How about you filling in the rest, Doctor?”

  Samson already had the file out. He passed Al and Peggy pictures of Molly Stone. “I’m sure Peggy told you that her husband brought her here presenting with unusual symptoms. Her skin was cold to the touch. She had almost no pulse. Her respiration was slow, almost failing.”

  “What made you think about poison?” Al asked as he took notes.

  “Blood work showed she had a high level of anemonin in her system. We immediately called poison control as well as the CDC since we weren’t sure how she came by the toxin. It wasn’t injected. I learned this morning that it was in a bottle of root beer she had at the bank. The police assume someone put it there. They just don’t know who.”

  “What time do they think it happened?” Peggy wondered.

  “Her husband brought her the root beer at work right before closing, about five p.M. Apparently, she didn’t drink it all. She sipped on it until she left the bank at six when he picked her up and they went out for dinner. It was their anniversary.”

  Peggy asked, “What bank did she work for?”

  Samson looked through his papers. “Bank of America in downtown Columbia.”

  Al nodded when she looked at him. “It’s too big a coincidence that both victims worked for Bank of America.”

  Samson was astonished. “Do you think there’s a plot against Bank of America employees?”

  “I guess I may be here in my official capacity after all,” Al said. “I’m going to have to speak to the Columbia police. Maybe together we can find out what’s going on.”

  Al used his cell phone to call the detective in charge of Molly Stone’s case. Peggy and Dr. Samson accompanied him to the downtown precinct, against his better judgment.

  “You’ll need us,” Peggy argued. “Besides, I didn’t come all this way to sit in a cafeteria and wait for you.”

  “And you wouldn’t know there was a link between these two cases without us,” Samson agreed with her while he looked through the information she brought about Mark Warner.

  Detective Bather Ramsey was less than welcoming when they arrived at the precinct. “I think we can probably figure out who killed Ms. Stone without help from Charlotte, Detective McDonald.” His pug face was angry and hostile.

  “Look here, Ramsey,” Al started, “I don’t want to solve your homicide for you. I was hoping to get your help solving our case of poisoning. We had one the same day as yours. It also involved a Bank of America employee.”

  Ramsey’s expression changed to astonishment. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He glanced at Peggy. “Pardon my French, ma’am.”

  “So you see, we have something in common,” Al continued. “But we didn’t know our vic was poisoned until yesterday. You have a head start on us. Anything you could tell me about your poisoning could help with ours.”

  “What did you think happened to your vic if you didn’t think he was poisoned?” Ramsey asked, looking at the information Peggy brought about Warner.

  Al explained the circumstances of the bank exec’s death. “A CSI finally brought the information to light for us. Now I find out you had a poisoning on the same day, same kind of poison.”

  Ramsey nodded and picked up the phone. “I think I should call in my captain on this. If anyone is going to contact the bank, it should be him.”

  While Ramsey was on the phone with the captain, Al called Lieutenant Rimer to let him know what was going on.

  Peggy and Dr. Samson sat together and compared notes. Peggy wished she had both sets of police files to look at. What she had wasn’t complete. She couldn’t get the whole picture from partial facts.

  “Do you think the poi
son could be traced?” Samson asked her.

  “If there was a random sample to go with,” she replied. “We’d need that to compare to the others.”

  “A conspiracy to kill bank employees in two states is a big deal,” Samson considered. “They’ll probably call in the FBI.”

  “I don’t think it’s that kind of conspiracy. I hope they don’t jump to conclusions that way.”

  But the captain decided to call in a bank liaison who would work with them on the poisonings. The liaison asked them not to call in the FBI until they had more information. He didn’t want to start a panic among the bank’s employees.

  They all got in a large black police van and went to look at the bank branch where Molly worked. They walked through the procedure she would’ve used for closing the day she worked. They looked through the surveillance video footage between the time when her husband brought the root beer and when she left the bank with him. Only a handful of customers came into the bank during that time. Molly handled three of them at her window. Two women and one man.

  “Unless the husband brought the root beer with the poison in it,” the captain said, “the drink had to be poisoned here by one of these people.”

  “What about the people she worked with?” Al asked him.

  “We questioned them in depth several times. None of them seem to have any motive to kill her,” Ramsey answered.

  “And their psychological profiles don’t add up that way,” the BofA liaison added. “We carefully screen all our employees.”

  “Which brought us back to the husband.” Ramsey stuck his hands in his pockets. “But no matter how we looked at this boy, he didn’t fit the pattern for someone who murders his wife. His prints were all over the root beer bottle. There wasn’t a life insurance policy. We all felt he just didn’t have it in him.”

  “What about the bottling plant?” Al glanced up from his notes.

  “We checked that out. They dumped hundreds of gallons of root beer for us. Not a tainted bottle in them. Except for this one.” The captain answered his cell phone as he finished speaking.

  “That leaves us with these three people,” Ramsey finished. “We identified two of them. These two.” He pointed to the man and one woman on the tape. “Neither one of them had any connection to the victim.”

  “What about this one?” Al asked the tape operator to stop. “What’s she doing over there anyway? Nobody needs to lean in that close.”

  “We think she could be our suspect. Unfortunately, we can’t ID her. She came in and asked for change for a twenty. Notice she’s wearing gloves, so we can’t even get fingerprints from the twenty. Not that it would matter with that much money and that many prints without a comparison. If this is what she really looks like, she’s tall, long dark hair, slender build.”

  Al looked at Peggy. “Could be Ms. Prinz.”

  “What was your system of delivery on the poison in Charlotte?” The captain finished his phone call and questioned Al.

  “We’re not sure yet. CSI is still working on it. Could be root beer for all we know. We do have a suspect who matches this woman on the tape.”

  “Does she have some beef with Bank of America?” Ramsey asked.

  “No. Her thing was the man.” Al’s face suddenly lit up. “We need to check out a few facts about this. If our suspect was responsible for Ms. Stone’s death as well, maybe they had something else in common.”

  “Such as . . . the man?” Ramsey followed his thinking.

  “Exactly.”

  “Let’s take a look at Ms. Stone’s phone calls. See if she had any personal or professional contact with your victim.” Ramsey took out his cell phone. “What was his name again?”

  “Mark Warner. He was a senior executive vice president in Charlotte.”

  Peggy didn’t like the way the conversation had changed. She thought it was a mistake to consider the two poisonings as a conspiracy against the bank. But she knew it was a mistake to try to pin both of them on Keeley.

  She had to admit the woman in the video looked like her assistant, at least from the back. She could only hope they couldn’t find any record of Keeley being in Columbia that day. Not that it would take much to make the police feel they had a case against her. Keeley’s confession had seen to that.

  14

  Carnation

  Botanical: Dianthus caryophyllus

  Family: Caryophyllaceae

  The name comes from the Greek word di, meaning of Zeus, and anthos, meaning a flower. It was called dianthus by the Greek botanist Theopharastus, meaning divine flower. It is believed that carnations can tell fortunes. In Korea, three carnations are placed in a girl’s hair. If the bottom flower dies first, she will be miserable her entire life. If the top one dies first, her later years will be hard. Her younger years will be hard if the middle flower dies first.

  THE NEWS HEADLINE in the Charlotte Observer on Monday morning told the city a judge had dismissed the charges against Joseph Cheever. He was released into his daughter’s custody. Local television news showed the father and daughter leaving the Mecklenburg County Jail hospital facility. Joe Cheever was in a wheelchair, said to be recovering from a stroke. His daughter was tearful and thanked the police for releasing her father.

  Peggy watched on a small television set in the faculty lounge at Queens. She was glad for Mr. Cheever but apprehensive about Keeley. She knew the police from Columbia and Charlotte had worked through the weekend to prove her assistant murdered two people.

  Obviously, the evidence wasn’t forthcoming. Or the police were taking their time, making sure they had the right person. It looked bad when they arrested someone only to find out it was the wrong person. They probably wouldn’t let it happen again in this case.

  And that was why it was imperative she find out who really killed Mark and Molly. If she waited too long, the police would have a case difficult to dispute. She knew Al would do the best he could to find the truth. But the Charlotte police were desperate. Everyone from the mayor down was leaning on them. With the added involvement from South Carolina, they needed the right suspect fast.

  By now, the police knew if there was a connection between the dead woman in Columbia and the dead man in Charlotte. Since they were still pursuing Keeley, she guessed they’d found one that involved her.

  It wasn’t a large stretch of the imagination to link the two deaths. Once the method was discovered, just the fact that the dead woman worked for Bank of America made Peggy suspicious. Mark managed several affairs at once in his home office. It was possible he’d managed to conduct a few with women in other offices. The question for her seemed to be, why Molly? If Keeley or anyone else wanted to kill one of Mark’s women, why would it be Molly? The others were closer, simpler to kill.

  Keeley called her early Sunday morning to tell her the police were searching the apartment she shared with another girl on campus. They confiscated every piece of glassware and two houseplants they found. Peggy advised her assistant to call Hunter Ollsen.

  What needed to be done to create anemonin took equipment and specialized knowledge. Keeley didn’t have either. But who did? Besides herself, of course. She finished her blackberry tea and left the lounge to go to her classroom. She gave her freshman class a complex quiz requiring line drawings of plant parts. It took the entire hour and gave her plenty of time to think.

  If she couldn’t find some clue that would lead to a search for a workplace or utensils to tie to the making of the poison, she was afraid the circumstantial evidence against Keeley could prove insurmountable.

  The class bell rang, startling her from her thoughts. Unhappy faces piled papers on her desk as students grumbled while they left her class.

  “That wasn’t fair, Dr. Lee,” one student protested. “I wasn’t ready.”

  “We’ve been going over this material for six weeks,” Peggy responded. “If you don’t know it now, maybe you should do a little more studying.”

  Gathering up the papers, she put everyt
hing into her backpack. The ride over made her knee a little sore but not too bad. It was good to be on the bike again. Taxis were fine for late nights or important meetings. If anything could spur her into getting the work done on the old Rolls, this was it. She hated being dependent on other people to take her places, though she was grateful so many were willing to help her.

  She hadn’t heard from Steve since the night they’d stolen the body from the crematorium. She wasn’t surprised. Something like that would be hard enough to take with a person you knew well. She and Steve would probably never have that opportunity. Still, it was a pleasant experience being with him. In some ways, it gave her hope for the future.

  “Hey, Peggy.”

  She was surprised to see Al standing beside her desk. “Good morning. What brings you by?”