Poison (17 page)

Dhillon’s next deal was coming together. On Friday, September 6, 1996, he wrote a letter:

Five days later, on Wednesday, September 11, the propane-flame blue eyes peered through the car windshield. Hamilton homicide detective Warren Korol drove downtown to Central Station through a veil of fog. By noon it lifted and all was clear. Korol had been posted to the homicide branch less than a year and was still getting his feet wet. His supervisor, veteran investigator Steve Hrab, poked his head out the office door and saw the detective at his desk.

“Hey, Warren. You’re not doing anything. I’ve got a good one here for you.”

The smirk Korol often wore deepened, the eyes smiled. “
A good one.
” Translation: an impossible case, or nearly so. Two deaths in the city that were “historical,” as the cops put it: closed-book cases where detectives had not been called to the scene in the precious moments after the death. The bodies of the victims—if they had been murdered—were gone. Both had been cremated.

Korol looked over the files. Ranjit Khela and Parvesh Dhillon. Two young adults. Their deaths, 17 months apart, were considered to have been from natural but unknown causes at the time, but foul play was now suspected yet unproven in both cases. No smoking gun, no murder weapon. Ambulances had attended to the victims, but the tapes of the 911 calls had already been deleted. The deaths were witnessed by family members, but language would be a barrier in both cases.

Warren Korol was still fresh enough in homicide to relish the challenge. The idealist in a detective makes him believe he speaks for the victims. It is a noble calling. Experience would make Korol a realist. You do what it takes to investigate a case, but within the often frustrating confines of the legal system. If you don’t, you won’t win. And that was what the game was about. Veterans of homicide work know the job is tougher than it used to be. Yes, more forensic bells and whistles to assist, but then there are also more legal hoops to jump through than 20 or 30 years ago. It wasn’t enough to catch the bad guy and roll up evidence against him—evidence that, in the court of common sense, was plenty for a conviction. No, in a court of law you battled to get slivers of truth before a judge or jury. Korol had seen judges throw out evidence on minor procedural issues, leaving lawyers to present juries with a filtered version of the facts. It burned him. Most of the time, Korol had an inviting casualness about him and those who barely knew him gravitated to his easygoing manner. The new assignment? It didn’t faze him. Not yet. But ultimately the case would test him like nothing ever had, eat him up, rub his patience so raw it could have bled.

At the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, in a cramped lab with shiny black counters, a sample of Ranjit Khela’s blood rotated in a tube, combined with a chemical solvent. Turning, turning, methodically mixing in the spinning machine. Toxicology technicians liken the process to mixing oil and vinegar. Separate then break down the blood, isolate the foreign substance a killer might have
put there. Remove the natural material such as protein and fat. The techs call these “the dirt.” Examine what’s left: routine compounds, cholesterol, caffeine, nicotine, medication—and, perhaps, poison. Mix blood with a special solvent and its chemical balance is altered. The drugs no longer pack an electrical charge and they attach to the solvent. There were 130 to 140 drugs that could be detected in the blood screen.

Ranjit’s blood was subjected to this process and placed in a thumbnail-size glass vial. Then it went into a gas chromatography machine, the size of a large microwave oven. The sample began its journey through a copper tube, pushed along by gas pressure. The tube, if stretched out, is about 15 to 30 meters in length, maximizing travel distance. It is coated inside with a material similar to car wax. As the sample blows through, individual drugs stick to the wax at different intervals based on their chemical affinities. The time spent moving and sticking—the retention time—differs from drug to drug.

The lab had developed a catalogue of retention times that ranged from under a minute to 50 minutes for more than 100 drugs, poisons, and other compounds. As the components of Ranjit’s treated blood shot through the machine, each in turn hit the end of the copper tube and was burned off, creating a signal that registered on a computer screen. A technician monitored the signals, noting spikes in the line—sharp, high peaks, then flatter ones, then sharp again—a blueprint of components in his blood. The tech recognized the patterns of most of the peaks. Routine stuff. Caffeine. Cholesterol. The computer churned out a printed list naming each detected common chemical and compound.

Suddenly an unfamiliar peak appeared. Whatever it was, it represented a minute quantity in the blood. The computer assigned the unknown peak a number, representing its retention time. The technician had never seen that number before. No one in the lab ever had. She left the room, walked down the hall, pulled out a thick binder, and flipped to a chart. The peak was for an exotic poison. Strychnine. Just as Dr. Chitra Rao had predicted.

Strychnine is a crystalline powder, colorless, odorless but extremely bitter. CFS almost never came across it. They tested
blood samples for 2,500 deaths each year, and in the 12 years they had kept records, CFS had found strychnine in a blood sample just three times before. Strychnine was once sold off the shelf in Canada as rat poison, under brand names such as Kwik Kill. But that was back in the 60s. Nobody could buy it off the shelf anymore, at least not in Canada. Ranjit Khela’s blood sample showed a trace amount of strychnine, a concentration of 0.07 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood. Enough to kill.

The man behind the counter handed Warren Korol the paper cup filled with tea.

“Thanks,” he said, digging coins from his pocket then reaching for the door. “You take care.” Korol’s polished black shoes clicked down the steps at Val’s, the coffee shop across from the station that was frequented by police officers. Korol looked imposing in a charcoal suit wide enough to hang comfortably from his broad frame and conceal the .40-caliber Glock in the holster underneath.

Every so often Korol was reminded that you never stop being a regular cop. The other day, he’d seen a kid trying to break into a car, right there, a couple of blocks from Val’s and the station. Not only that, the car was a cop’s private vehicle. So Korol, in his suit, chased down the teenager, his dress shoes slapping the pavement, grabbed him by the collar, and, gasping for breath, radioed for assistance. “For chrissakes,” he thought. “I’m not supposed to be doing this kind of thing anymore.”

He claimed to have no nicknames. Korol’s surname, of Ukrainian origin, sounded clean and angular. His first name was formal, with no phonetic option to add a “y” to the end—no Jimmy or Johnny or Danny. It was just: Warren. Married, three young kids. Square-shouldered handsome, with light brown hair that grayed nearly imperceptibly, cropped tight on the sides. When it grew longer he moussed it on top, creating a look that suggested he had just come out of a swimming pool. His approach to the job was measured, businesslike. Korol sat at his desk in Central Station, took a sip of the tea, a stray curl of hair falling onto his forehead. His eyes scanned documents on his desk provided by forensic pathologist Dr. Chitra Rao.

“Strychnine is an alkaloid found in the seeds of the
Strychnos nux-vomica
, the botanical name given to a tree indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.” Strychnine. That was a new one in an era of sniper and drive-by shootings, machete attacks, mail-bomb murders. In his career Korol would see lacerated bodies, bullet holes in skulls. But poisoning from a tropical plant? He needed to learn more.

“It is a potent central nervous system stimulant and convulsant, acting by the selective blockade of postsynaptic neuronal inhibition. Death may occur ... due to paralysis of muscles of respiration.” Strychnine was closely restricted in Canada. Two companies were licensed to sell it for agricultural use. What about in India, Korol wondered? How easy would it be for someone to smuggle it out of India? At some point he should give it the test. He continued studying the background papers. There is no acceptable therapeutic use for strychnine, at any dosage, in conventional medicine. It is technically a stimulant but if used in the wrong amount, muscles spasm so violently and repeatedly they rip apart, sucking oxygen from the brain, plunging the victim toward certain death.

In Canada a highly diluted byproduct of strychnine, called
nux vomica
, is available as a homeopathic remedy. Drinking even a full bottle would do little harm. But in India and Southeast Asia, strychnine tonics are available in much higher, riskier concentrations. As little as five milligrams of pure strychnine kills. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram. An ordinary headache pill contains 325 milligrams of active ingredient. Divide that into 65 pieces, and if one of them is pure strychnine, swallowing it could be fatal. Strychnine comes in clear crystals or white powder form and is absorbed rapidly in the bloodstream. Reactions to ingestion vary, but seizures commonly occur in five minutes, heart attacks in 20 minutes, and brain damage can cause more drawn-out death. Most deaths occur in three to six hours, from asphyxia.

It is one of the most bitter substances in the world. Dissolve one cup of salt in 50 cups of water, and a hint of salt would be tasted. Dissolve one cup of salt in 1,000 cups of water, and the salt would be undetectable. But if one cup of strychnine was dissolved in 100,000 cups of water, you would still taste it. A poisoner would need extremely sour or bitter food to mask the taste of strychnine. Much better to pack it into something the victim swallows whole. Like a capsule.

The death of Ranjit Khela was recent; the tox screen would give Korol a good starting point. But what about Parvesh Dhillon more than a year earlier? She had collapsed and died in early 1995. There had been no detailed toxicology performed. The oldest motives for murder are love and money. Korol knew there was one man who benefited from both deaths—Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, husband of the former and friend and mentor of the latter. He was also the sole beneficiary of both their life insurance policies, worth a total of $400,000.

But Korol worked methodically. He did not jump to conclusions, or if he did, he didn’t announce his thoughts. He was trained to keep an open mind. Hunches and common sense don’t land first-degree murder convictions. Hard evidence wins in the courtroom. Gather evidence, forensics, and interview, interview, interview. Still, from the start his gut instinct said this was a double homicide. Korol logged on to criminal records and punched in the name. Dhillon, Sukhwinder Singh. Information raced across the screen:

REM: Korol

ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE IDENTIFICATION SERVICES

RESTRICTED—INFORMATION SUPPORTED BY FINGERPRINTS SUBMITTED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES—DISTRIBUTION TO AUTHORIZED AGENCIES ONLY.

FPS: 15923OD

Dhillon. Sukhwinder Singh

CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS CONDITIONAL AND ABSOLUTE DISCHARGES AND RELATED INFORMATION. 1992-11-13 Assault Sec 266 CC $300 Hamilton Wentworth REG PF. 92-2518

END OF CONVICTIONS AND DISCHARGES

Korol logged off the system and turned to a folder containing a Hamilton police report on the same charge. Dhillon’s first name was misspelled. It read:

92-08-14 8:30 DHILLON SUKHBINDER

Assault Level One

The report covered an incident of wife abuse. For four years it had sat in darkness in a police filing cabinet. Now it was a brief, ugly glimpse into Parvesh Dhillon’s life, two sheets of paper with a few words and dates. Korol kept his mind focused. It is quite a step—a huge step, from a man striking his wife to murdering her. An ugly fact of life, but some men hit their wives. They aren’t all killers. But then, while men who beat their wives don’t necessarily kill, men who kill their wives frequently have a history of domestic abuse. The assault was a clue, although Korol knew that it would probably never be aired in court. A judge would almost certainly refuse to let the jury in a murder trial hear about a domestic assault. It would be prejudicial to the accused. That was the language the lawyers used. Korol stuck to the rules, respected them. That didn’t mean he had to like them.