Scent of Evil (42 page)

Wilson sighed and addressed the board. “Madam Chairman, I wish I could accommodate you and your colleagues here, and I’ll certainly do the best I can, with Chief Brandt’s cooperation, of course. Despite the setbacks, the confusion, and all the press, the police department is doing its job. Progress is being made, and the instances you mentioned of what looked like random police activity all have clear and reasonable explanations—”

“Of which we can give you only the barest outline,” Brandt added.

“I’ll start with that,” Jackson said. “God knows I don’t have a damned thing now.”

I sensed from the tone that things were settling down slightly and entering a purely informational phase. Wilson and Brandt were to become, for the next several minutes, the feeders at the lion cage, doling out morsels to a beast with an appetite for their arms. I turned my attention to the wad of papers that Maxine Paroddy had handed me earlier.

It turned out Jackson hadn’t been the only one to get calls from reporters in California. I gave up on the phone messages about halfway through and turned to the daily report to see if anything new had surfaced during the night shift. Apart from the usual array of domestic disputes, a barroom brawl, and a foot chase after a teenager who’d been trying to pry open a bank’s night-deposit box with a crowbar, the report told me nothing I wanted to know. I wished to hell I’d been able to get to my office before I’d been dragged in here, so I could have had a peek at our own interoffice report.

Disappointed, I returned to my mail, dimly aware of the back and forth goings-on at the front of the room. Wilson, with little help from Brandt, was trying to explain the necessity of checking into everything and everybody in a case like this, even at the risk of stepping on toes.

My mail was also unenlightening: equipment brochures, official junk mail from the state capital, notifications of various classes being offered to police officers, from first-aid to SWAT tactics. I went back to the phone messages, this time starting from the bottom of the pile.

The fifth one up froze me in my seat: Isador Gramm, Beverly Hillstrom’s forensic toxicologist, had called with “interesting news.” The message indicated he’d called just five minutes before I’d been dragged into this kangaroo proceeding.

I snapped out of my reverie at the mention of my name “—been up to, nosing around like some damn tabloid reporter?”

Brandt answered. “His job, Mr. Vice-Chairman, which he can’t do sitting here.”

“He is the one heading this investigation, is he not?”

“He is, but he will not be allowed to speak on that matter.”

Jackson bristled. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Please,” Mrs. Morse warned, looking at Jackson.

“It means I won’t let him. I am head of the department, and everything Lieutenant Gunther does is cleared through me. I will be his spokesman at this meeting, and I think you’ll find that doing otherwise will only get all of us into more hot water if and when the press finds out about this little get-together.”

“I do not intend that they find out.”

Brandt didn’t argue the point. “May Lieutenant Gunther be excused from these proceedings?”

It wasn’t, from his tone of voice, a debatable question.

As Mrs. Morse said, “Of course,” Jackson barked out, “No.” They stared at each other for a long moment, the lady’s knuckles white where she was gripping her weapon of office. Jackson, either cowed or mollified that Brandt himself had no intention of leaving, finally nodded. “Oh, all right.”

I gathered up my wad of papers, smiled back at Gail’s quick and tiny thumbs-up gesture, and left.

Outside, on the landing, I met Stan Katz coming up the stairs. He looked as exhausted as I felt. We eyed one another warily. “Hey, there, Stanley.”

“Hey, yourself. See the paper this morning?” The question was asked neutrally, even tentatively.

“Nope. You take John to the cleaners?”

He sighed and his shoulders sagged slightly. It made me wonder for the first time about the toll this kind of story took on the man reporting it. It was a jarring thought and not one I enjoyed; things were tough enough without wondering if Stanley Katz had feelings.

“I wrote about the accident and put it in context,” he said tiredly. “How’re they doin’ in there?” He motioned toward the room I’d just left.

I feigned ignorance, Jackson’s claim that the press would never hear of the meeting still echoing in my ears. “They?”

“The selectmen. The executive session.”

I played with the idea of giving him the standard “no comment” but thought better of it suddenly, realizing I had nothing to lose here. “How’d you hear about it? Jackson thinks the meeting’s top secret.”

Katz grinned, the carnivore in him resurfacing. “Really? Maybe I ought to call Ted and the others to fill up the hallway. That would startle him.”

I shrugged, resigned to his not revealing his source. “Be my guest.”

He chuckled, the idea growing on him. “I think I will. Why’re you out here, by the way?”

“Brandt cut me loose. Told ’em he wouldn’t let me talk to them—that they’d have to go through him.”

This time he laughed outright. “Damn, your boss has balls.”

“Dunn walked out at the start; said he’d talk when he was good and ready.”

“Christ, how’s Jackson taking it?”

“Hasn’t blown a fuse yet, but Mrs. Morse is about ready to kill him. Might be worth sticking around.”

He shook his head, still grinning. “I gotta get to a phone.” He stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing to their familiar suspicious squint. “Why’d you just tell me all that?”

I laughed, heading for the stairs. “’Cause I don’t give a damn and I’m in a good mood.”

· · ·

I didn’t even pause to turn on Buddy’s stolen fan before dialing Isador Gramm’s number.

He answered on the fourth ring. “Dr. Gramm.”

“This is Joe Gunther, down in Brattleboro. Sorry I wasn’t in earlier.”

“Oh, nice of you to call back. I think I may have found something in your case. It was one of those brain-teasers, you know? I kept coming up with reasonable possibilities and getting nowhere. Had it not been for the tissue sample Dr. Hillstrom let me have, I’d probably still be barking up the wrong tree.”

“So what was it that killed him?”

There was a deadening pause. “Killed him? Cerebral ischemia; I thought you knew that. Dr. Hillstrom didn’t tell me I was to determine cause of death.”

I swore softly under my breath at the literalness of the scientific mind. “Sorry, I meant what was injected into him?”

“Tubocurarine chloride.”

“What the hell is that?”

I shut my eyes at my own outburst, but Gramm merely laughed. He was obviously so pleased with his own detective work, nothing was going to dampen his spirits. “In layman’s terms, curare.”

My mouth fell open. “Curare? As in South American Indians and blowguns?”

He was still chuckling. “Pretty weird, huh? It’s a quaternary amine, the bane of toxicology, a real pain in the butt to analyze, unless you know what you’re looking for, or you just get lucky. I guess I benefited from both.”

I was still having a tough time mentally transplanting tribal tranquilizers into a Brattleboro setting. “Why curare?”

“Well, that’s it exactly. Actually, you helped in this discovery. It was your comment to Dr. Hillstrom about the dichotomy of the presenting evidence that started me thinking along the proper lines. The hypothesis ran that the victim was positioned so that he could witness his own death, both visually and, since the method chosen was so specifically painful, sensorially. And yet, while his limbs had been taped to inhibit movement, there were no signs of his having struggled against those bonds, despite the pain he experienced during the terminating process.”

I winced at the phrase “terminating process,” but Gramm went happily on. “That turns out to have been the watershed deduction, steering me away from the narcotics which, while subduing the patient, would have also subdued his sensitivity to pain. It was in thinking about that seemingly contradictory requirement—to numb the muscles but not the neurological sensitivity—that I suddenly remembered an extraordinary experiment I’d read about that took place in the late 1800s.

“There was this doctor who had his colleagues overdose him with curare to test the drug’s properties. Back in those days, it wasn’t as exotic as it seems today, but it also wasn’t very well understood. They were standing by, of course, ready to give him artificial respirations if he needed them, and it was a lucky thing, too. He had the most horrible experience. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do the slightest thing. He felt like he was gagging to death, feeling his saliva running down his throat without being able to swallow. That was the first experiment to clearly identify the full range of effects of curare on a human being. Crazy thing to do, of course, but scientists tended to be that way back then—real adventurers.”

I was running his words through my mind, translating them to fit my notion of how Jardine died. “You said he couldn’t breathe.”

“Ah, right, but he’d been given a series of escalating doses, to determine the various stages of the drug’s effects. The respiratory muscles are the last to go, as it turns out, and the first to recover. So, if the injection came to just below that effect, the victim would never suffer from respiratory arrest. He would just be rendered totally motionless. In retrospect, it fits your case like a glove.”

Gramm sounded positively delighted, for which I couldn’t really fault him. The closest he’d come to Charlie Jardine had been a tiny chunk of meat in a test tube.

“But the victim would feel pain?”

“Oh, absolutely. Remember I said that doctor felt the saliva running down the back of his throat; that indicates that his neurological antennae, if you will, were still perfectly functional. It’s the muscles that are affected. The patient can still hear, see, and feel normally.”

I was still half stunned by the oddness of this discovery, and becoming hopeful that its uniqueness might eventually be the killer’s undoing. A knife, after all, could be gotten almost anywhere. But curare?

“So where can you get this stuff—South America?”

Gramm laughed again. “Good lord, no. I mean, you can, of course, but it’s a lot easier to locate than that. It’s not as rare as it sounds, and it’s not a regulated drug, so no DEA license is needed. It’s not in everyday use, but it’s still handy in surgery where the patient’s neurological receptors need to be intact. Hospitals carry it, and so do most decent-sized veterinary clinics.”

“As in animal vets?”

“Yup. Of course, the doses they carry are smaller, as befits the size of their average customer.”

I was wracking my brain, trying to come up with the right questions, the answers to which might point me in the proper direction. “How do you administer the stuff? Is injection the only way?”

“Yes, that’s why the Indians can eat the birds they kill with their famous curare-tipped arrows or darts. It has no effect when ingested.”

“You mentioned the doctor took it in progressive doses, until he couldn’t breathe. Doesn’t that make it tricky to administer?”

Gramm sounded pleased. “Ah, very good. Yes, the recommendation accompanying tubocurarine chloride is that it be administered only by a trained anesthesiologist. Of course, that’s only true when you’re out to benefit the patient; clearly, that doesn’t apply here.”

“It may not apply, but presumably the killer didn’t want Jardine to die on him before he was ready.”

Gramm’s voice was suddenly doubtful. “Jardine?”

Again, I was reminded of the man’s distance from the case. “That was the dead man’s name.”

“Oh, sorry, I wasn’t told. Well, anyway, I suppose you’re right. Still, the injection could have been administered gradually, so that its effects could be monitored. That would account for the victim being bound. On the other hand, the drug only lasts ten minutes or so, then it has to be boostered with another dose, half the strength of the first. That part’s important, since curare is additive.”

“But there was only one injection site.”

Gramm mulled that over for a while. “True. Well, there’s always the element of dumb luck, especially if the dose was secured from a vet.”

“Because it’s smaller, you mean?”

“Right. The killer could inject the entire dose at once and get away lucky. Chances are a full-sized, healthy man could survive that, if just barely. And I guess the killer wouldn’t be too concerned either way. I mean, the worst thing that could happen is that the victim would die. It wouldn’t be painful, but it would still be a terrible experience, tantamount to suffocating in the midst of fresh air.”

Terrible maybe, but the victim hadn’t died of curare. The dosage had been perfect. I wrapped up the conversation with my thanks and a few pleasantries and hung up.

I stuck my head out the door and yelled for Ron Klesczewski. He appeared from around the cluster of cubicles in the middle of the room and followed me back into my office. I scribbled “tubocurarine chloride” on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “That’s the fancy name for curare. That’s what was injected into Charlie Jardine to keep him still while he was being strangled.”

Ron stared at the name. “Holy shit.”

“Apparently, this stuff’s available in hospitals and vet clinics, and maybe by prescription. I want you to check out every source around here and find out if any of it’s either gone missing, say within the last year or two, or if anyone has bought any legally.”

As he started to leave, I grabbed his elbow. “Ron, if we can nail this down, we might find out who was behind this mess. I don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to, okay? When you’re doing your inquiry, make up a story of some kind—an animal poisoning, anything to throw people off.”

Ron nodded. “Gotcha.”

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking hard. A rare drug requiring careful administration. Which of my suspects had that kind of training in his or her background? And why be so eccentric when any number of more mundane drugs could have been used? I was dealing with an ego here, someone consciously leaving a signature.