The Sigma Protocol (16 page)

Ben felt his stomach turn over. He’d been in a haze, a deadened stupor, and suddenly the reality of it, the horror, was sinking in. The guest shouted something at her. Ben ran toward the hall that he guessed led to the rear of the house.

The woman was screaming at his back, but Ben kept running. The high caterwauling of a police siren joined the innkeeper’s shrill hysteria, then grew louder as the police car came closer. It sounded like a single siren, a single car. But that was enough.

Stay or go?

They own half the cops
, Peter had said.

He ran down the hall, turned sharply to the right, then saw a small painted wooden door. He flung it open: wooden shelves piled with linens.

The siren grew louder, now accompanied by the crunch of a car’s wheels on gravel. The police were arriving at the front of the building.

Ben ran toward another wooden doorway at the end of the hall. A small louvered window next to it told him
the door led to the outside. He turned the knob and pulled at the door. It stuck; he pulled again, harder, and this time it yielded and the door came open.

The area outside had to be safe by now: the police sirens would have scared the gunmen away. No one would be lurking in the dense woods back here for fear of getting caught. He leaped forward into the underbrush, his foot snagging on a vine, knocking him painfully to the ground.

Christ!
he thought.
Must hurry
. The police had to be avoided at all costs.
They own half the cops
. He scrambled to his feet, lunged forward into the pitch-black.

The siren had gone silent, but now there were shouts, both female and male, the crunch of feet on the gravel. Running forward, he pushed branches away from his face, but still one scraped him, just missing an eye. He kept going, not slowing for a second, turning this way, juking that, through the close vegetation, the narrow tunnels, under canopies formed by interlaced branches. Something tore at his pants. His hands were scraped and bloodied. But he kept plowing through the trees, machinelike, unthinking, until he came to the hidden clearing where Peter’s truck was still parked.

He opened the driver’s side door—unlocked, thank God—and of course there was no key in the ignition. He felt under the floor mat. Nothing. Under the seat. Nothing.

Panic overcame him. He inhaled sharply several times to try to calm himself. Of course, he thought. I’ve forgotten what I know.

He reached into the mess of wires beneath the dash, pulled them out to inspect the tangle by the weak overhead light.
Hot-wiring
, their beloved family groundskeeper, Arnie, had told him and Peter one
summer morning.
This is a skill you may never have a use for. But if you do, you’ll sure be glad you got it
.

In a few moments he’d paired the two wires, and the ignition turned over, roared to life. Slamming the gearshift into reverse, he backed out of the clearing onto the dark road. No headlights in either direction. He shifted into drive; the old truck balked, but then lurched ahead, surging down the deserted highway.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

The next morning was cold and dreary. Fog had settled gloomily over the port, visibility no more than ten feet ahead.

Robert Mailhot lay on a steel examination table, clothed in a blue suit, his face and hands rosy with the funeral home’s garish makeup. The face was bronzetinted but heavily lined, angry, the thin mouth sunken, the nose a prominent beak. He looked to be five foot ten or eleven, which meant he’d probably been six feet tall as a young man.

The medical examiner was a corpulent, ruddy-faced man in his late fifties named Higgins: a thatch of white hair, small suspicious gray eyes. He was perfectly cordial, while at the same time guarded, neutral. He wore a green surgical gown. “So you’ve got reason to believe this was a homicide?” he said jovially, his eyes watchful. He was dubious and made no attempt to mask it.

Anna nodded.

Sergeant Arsenault, in a bright red sweater and jeans, was subdued. Both of them were rattled by their long and difficult interview with the widow. In the end, of course, she had given permission for the autopsy, saving them the headache of having to ask for a court order.

The hospital morgue reeked of formalin, which
always made Anna uneasy. Classical music played tinnily from a portable radio on the stainless-steel counter.

“You’re not expecting to find any trace evidence on the body, I hope,” Higgins said.

“I assume the body was pretty thoroughly washed at the funeral home,” she said. Did he think she was an idiot?

“What are we looking for, then?”

“I don’t know. Puncture marks, bruises, wounds, cuts, scratches.”

“Poison?”

“Could be.”

She and Higgins and Arsenault together removed Mailhot’s clothing, and then Higgins swabbed the body’s hands and face clean of makeup, which could hide marks. The eyes had been sutured shut at the funeral home; Higgins cut the stitches and inspected for petechial hemorrhages—tiny pinpoints of blood under the skin—that might indicate strangulation.

“Any bruising inside the lips?” Anna asked.

The mouth, too, had been sutured closed. The medical examiner quickly sliced through the twine with a scalpel, then poked around inside the mouth with a latex-gloved finger. When someone is smothered with a pillow with enough pressure to stop the flow of air, Anna knew, you usually find bruises where the lips were forced against the teeth.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “None that I can see.”

All three began inspecting the shriveled body with magnifying glasses, inch by inch. With an old person this is difficult work: the skin is covered with dings and bruises, moles and broken capillaries, the marks and accretions of age.

They looked for needle marks in all the usual places: the back of the neck, between fingers and toes, the backs of the hands, the ankles, behind the ears.
Around the nose and cheeks. Injection marks could be disguised with a scratch, but nothing turned up. Higgins even checked the scrotum, which was large and loose, the penis a tiny stub nestled on top. Pathologists rarely checked the scrotum. The guy was thorough.

They spent over an hour at it, then turned Mailhot over and did the same. Higgins took photographs of the body. For a long time no one spoke; there was just the staticky crackle of a clarinet, the lush swell of strings, the hum of refrigerators and other machinery. The formalin smell was unpleasant, but at least there was no smell of decay, for which Anna was thankful. Higgins checked the fingernails for tears or rips—did the deceased fight an assailant?—and scraped under the nails, putting the scrapings into small white envelopes.

“Nothing on the epidermis out of the ordinary, far as I can see,” Higgins declared at last.

She was disappointed but not surprised. “Poison could have been ingested,” she suggested.

“Well, it’ll turn up in the tox,” Higgins said.

“Maybe not,” she said. “There’s no blood.”

“May be some,” Higgins said. If they were lucky. Usually, when the funeral home prepared the body, the blood was completely removed except for small residual pockets, and replaced with embalming fluid. Methanol, ethanol, formaldehyde, dyes. It broke down certain compounds, poisons, rendering them untraceable. Maybe there’d be some urine remaining in the bladder.

He cut the usual Y-shaped incision from the shoulder down to the pelvis, then reached inside the thoracic cavity to remove the organs and weigh them. This was one of the aspects of an autopsy Anna found particularly repellent. She worked with death regularly, but there was a reason she hadn’t become a pathologist.

Arsenault, looking pale, excused himself to get a cup of coffee.

“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.”