Moonlight Falls (17 page)

I said, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Miner smiled as best he could under the circumstances.

“It’s the damned gout again, Richard,” he said. “Getting so I cannot eat or drink a thing without my feet swelling up like balloons.”

I was well aware of the good toxicologist’s penchant for rich foods and fine wines. A fondness that at this stage of the life-game was pretty much killing him.

I sat down in the wood chair set in front of his desk.

“You should retire to Florida,” I said. “Take it easy like normal people your age.”

He exhaled a breath, looked me in the eye.

“Now let me ask you, Richard,” he said. “Just what the hell would I do with myself in Florida?”

I pretended to think about it for a minute, actually raising my eyes to the ceiling, scratching at the tip of my chin with index finger and thumb.

“You could chase women, for instance.”

“Not with these feet,” he said. “Besides, all the women in Miami are either too old, too married or too rich.”

I said, “Rich is good. And you’re mature in years yourself.”

“Never married,” he said. “Never had any kids, and despite appearances, I do not consider myself an old man.”

“What is it you’re trying to tell me, Doc?”

“I’m in full possession of my faculties—feet be damned. And, I’ve still got my first paycheck.”

He pulled out the top desk drawer, retrieved a manila folder, which he laid flat on his desk before flipping it open. From where I sat, I could see that his hands were shaking. Not a lot, but enough for me to notice.

Scarlet Montana’s tox report,” he said. “Per your and Dr. Robb’s request.”

He ran an index finger across a sheet of eleven-by-fourteen-inch computer-generated graph paper, pausing every second or two to whisper something indiscernible under his breath.

Looking back up, he said, “These are the facts of the matter: not only was the alcohol level in her blood high enough to put most men twice her size into a coma, but she also had a good amount of Curare floating around her veins and brain.”

“Curare,” I questioned.

He said, “That, Richard, is your smoking gun.”

I shook my head.

Miner’s blue eyes were still glued to mine when he let loose with a painful grunt as he shifted and repositioned sore feet beneath his desk.

“Stuff has been around for years and years,” he said. “Hospitals still keep it lying around in their closets for the occasional psychopathic patient that can’t be controlled.”

“Never heard of it before.”

He said, “It’s very rare. Or rarely
used
anyway. Forty-five years in the business and never once have I come across it until now.”

He explained that Curare was only lethal when injected directly into the bloodstream, but not when ingested orally, in which case it only caused a temporary total paralysis.

“Edgar Allen Poe suggested the use of Curare in his story, ‘The Premature Burial,’” he pointed out with a quick, over-the-shoulder glance to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on his left. “The story is about being buried alive. Poe was petrified of it. With Curare you are unable to talk, blink your eyes or move your lips. You can hardly breathe. Yet the mind remains razor sharp, fully cognizant. That was Poe’s real fear: being fully conscious of your hopeless, suffocating situation underground.”

Miner also revealed that the Nazis had a nasty habit of administering a combination of Curare and mescaline on select Jews and Poles in Dachau during their horrible wartime mind-control experiments.

“The drug works quick,” he went on. “But then the paralyzing effects can disappear just as fast, depending upon the dosage. So too will all traces of the drug.” He shifted his gaze from the tox report to me. “Ten years ago, I never would have found it.”

“The miracle of technology,” I said. But what I was really thinking was this: it didn’t take a brain surgeon or even a toxicologist with forty-five years’ experience under his lab coat to make a clear determination on how Scarlet had been murdered.

“Somebody fed her the stuff,” I said. “Then proceeded to cut her up in a way that would make it look like a psychotic suicide.”

“As in self-mutilation. Which is, of course, more believable than if the cuts had been nice and neatly executed.”

“A last desperate act. That’s the theme the killer was after.”

Considering this new development, what I had to ask myself was this: how possible was it that I would have access, much less the means, to acquire a poison like Curare? The answer, of course, was impossible. But then what about Jake? Could he find a way to get the stuff? As the top Stormville cop, I knew it was very possible. Standing inside that musty old office, I was beginning to feel my sternum loosen up. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, I was beginning to believe that I had absolutely nothing to do with Scarlet’s death. Sure there were the scratches on my hands. But that’s all they were.

Scratches.

“At this point,” Miner continued, “I’m beginning to think her heart may have given out even before her throat was cut. But then, here’s where things get even more interesting, Richard, my boy.” Once more, he stared down at the graph. “She also had ingested enough opiate and speed to jump start a Jake truck.”

I said, “Speed, as in amphetamines. Opiate, as in heroin, smack, shit.”

He sat back heavily in his chair.

“Precisely,” he said.

“What do you make of all this?” I asked. A question for which I was only just beginning to formulate an answer.

“My take is that the sadistic bastard who did this wanted her completely messed up on one hand—”

“Drunk and paralyzed,” I interjected.

“—but on quite another hand, he wanted her fully awake, fully cognizant.” He paused for a quick breath and a painful wince. “You see what I’m getting at here, Richard?”

I shook my head.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that the killer wanted to keep her fully immobile, but also fully conscious while he cut her up.”

The silence in the dark room suddenly seemed thicker than the dust that coated the furniture.

Until I raised the billion dollar question:

“Am I to conclude, Dr. Miner, that in your professional opinion, Scarlet Montana could not possibly have killed herself by slicing her own neck?”

He said, “The only thing she could have managed in her state, Detective Divine, was to die.” I sat up straight.

My heart was pounding. Or was it the arteries in my head?

“You be willing to act as an expert witness in a court of law, old friend?” I asked.

Miner made a cross over his heart with his right hand.

“So help me die,” he said.

A beat later, Miner had to excuse himself before hobbling to the bathroom down the hall outside his office. I used the break as an excuse to pull the thick volume of Poe off his bookshelf. Sitting back down I thumbed through the collected works until I came to the story I was looking for:

“The Premature Burial.”

Alone, inside that dimly lit room, I began to read.

What I learned is that Curare could indeed be a very helpful tool for the person who wanted to fake their own death. It could also prove instrumental for the creep who required his victim to become completely incapacitated while remaining fully awake, fully aware. Even if said victim was about to be murdered in the most brutal of ways.

In the story, Poe recounts the real-life story of the wife of a prominent Baltimore Congressman who one day in the mid 1850s, without warning, was stricken with a “sudden and unaccountable illness.” Her doctors, not having the skills necessary to resuscitate, pronounced her dead.

According to Poe, “her face assumed the usual pinch and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation ceased.”

The supposedly dead woman was placed inside the family vault where she remained for three years until it was opened once again. It was then that the widowed husband got the shock of his life. Instead of discovering the decayed body of his wife inside her casket, he found her still clothed bones set beside the tomb’s door. Having become fully awake, the woman had somehow managed to escape her casket. At some point during her ordeal, she even managed to light an oil lamp. What she could not manage, however, was to gather anyone’s attention before she must have surely starved to death inside that lonely black tomb.

While Poe made no mention of murder or a murderer, it became obvious to me that the woman had been drugged with a substance that, while giving away nothing about how or who might have been responsible for administering the mechanism of death, made her appear very dead. Maybe the guilty party had been the woman’s politician husband, or maybe it was the woman herself. In any case, the point here was not
whodunit
, but
whatdunnit
.

Miner came back in.

I got up, replaced the volume back onto the shelf where it belonged.

“Pretty scary stuff,” he commented.

I said, “If you’re still hanging around when I go, promise me you’ll make certain there’s no gas left in the tank.”

“Don’t talk like that, son.”

“It’s one thing to be buried alive,” I said. “It’s another to be rendered paralyzed and then butchered like an animal.”

“Which do you think is worse?” Miner asked as he painfully slid himself back down into his chair, as if the question had an answer. He sat as far back as the swivel spring would allow without him dropping onto his back.

I asked, “Would you be willing to go public with your findings even before a trial begins?”

He twirled his thumbs. I knew the action helped him to think.

“How far in advance?”

“Today,” I said. “Scarlet Montana’s body of evidence is scheduled for a four o’clock cremation today. I might be able to legitimately stop it if you go public now.”

He nodded for a few seconds while staring down at those twirling thumbs. But then he perked up.

“I have no real reason to hold back my information, if that’s what you want. But I warn you, my coming forward now may render my evidence inadmissible in court. There’s no order for discovery that I’m aware of.”

I said, “I’m not concerned with the future. All I want to do is invite an immediate public inquiry. I do that, I’ve not only won some kind of justice for Scarlet, but I also start smoking out the real killer or killers.”

Sitting up in his chair, Miner once more pulled the center drawer open. He pulled out a second manila folder. A duplicate for sure. He slammed the drawer closed, handed the package to me from across the desk.

“You might find yourself talking to a crime reporter as early as this afternoon,” I said. “That is, I can arrange it. This package doesn’t mean a whole lot unless you put yourself out there, offer up testimony.”

“I’ll do it,” he said, tired face showing hints of yet another wave of pain shooting through his body. “I’ll let the public in on the truth.”

I felt the slight weight of the package resting against my right quadricep.

“You do this,” I said, “you act of your own volition. I.A. suspects you were coerced, they’ll crucify us both.”

“Look, Richard,” he said, “in my professional opinion, somebody messed that woman up real bad. For whatever reason, I don’t know. That should be for the police to determine. But if the cops don’t want to get to the bottom of it, then I think it’s only right that we do it for them.”

I said, “No one should be allowed to get away with murder.”

“Especially an honest-to-goodness decorated officer of the law.”

40

WITH AN OPEN CAN of propellant in hand, Jake stood in the center of the kitchen floor and poured. The fuel spattered when it hit the linoleum. It spread like blood from a severed artery. The fumes the toxic liquid raised burned his already exhausted eyes. But the pain—the semi-watery blindness—was worth it. The fuel—this perfect propellant—would burn the house to the ground and at the same time, secure a very free future for the captain of the S.P.D.

The single can was all it took to cover the entire kitchen floor.

It was the same story for the living room where Scarlet kept her creepy dolls, and the dining room that as a married couple, they almost never used.

It was the same story for Jake’s lonely bedroom and for the bedroom where Scarlet breathed her last.

All it took was ten minutes to turn the house that Jake built into a kind of new-fangled, suburban Improvised Explosive Device.

Knowing the time for crying was long passed, the big Captain could only deduce that the time for covering his ass had arrived. Scarlet was dead. There was no changing that. Someone had to have done it. That someone would have to pay and it was not going to be him. Not if he could help it.

Stepping out onto the wood deck off the kitchen, Jake reached into his pant’s pocket, pulled out a pack of matches.

“I’m sorry for what I did, Scar,” he said aloud while striking a flame. “I’m sorry for what I did to our family.”

Reaching into the open kitchen door, he tossed the lit match.

The fire started as an almost quiet, woof-like explosion of orange flame. Feeling the wave of immediate heat, Stormville’s top cop was about to take a step back onto the deck. He would have accomplished it too had he not felt the quick shove against his back, then a stunning slam against the back of his head.

When he lost his balance and fell into the flame, he barely heard the kitchen door slam closed behind him as the burning propellant began to ravage his body.

41

TOX REPORT IN HAND, I made my swift retreat from Dr. Miner’s office.

Outside the building I jogged past the physical plant, past the massive concrete platform that supported the tall, ice-coated liquid oxygen tanks that misted in the gray sky and light rain.

Once inside the funeral coach, I dialed the now memorized number for Brendan Lyons.