The Poisoned Pawn (23 page)

The pathologist answered on the first ring.

“I’ve just received the Canadian documents, Ricardo. Thank you. There were traces of cyanide in Señora Ellis’s tissues. I think she may have died from cyanide poisoning, although the levels were very low. But there was no fluoroacetate in her system whatsoever.”

“Well, that may be, but I think Señor Ellis tried to kill her, and I think I know what killed Nicole Caron. You need to go to the Parque Ciudad Hotel as soon as you can and test the bottled water in the room’s mini-bar. I think Michael Ellis put fluoroacetate in it. His wife was cautious about drinking tap water. But she would have assumed that the bottled water was safe. Anyone would. If I’m right, the maids replaced the empty bottles when he moved out, removing the evidence. It’s brilliant, really. But he forgot that the maids wouldn’t take away full bottles. They would leave them for the next guest. I think Nicole Caron opened one of them, not realizing it had been tampered with.”

“Perhaps. But even if there was something wrong with the bottled water, Ricardo, that could have nothing to do with Rita Martinez’s death. She was never in that hotel room.”

“So far as we know. Once we’re sure of the source, I think we’ll find the connection.”

“I will go over there right away. We’ll treat it as a crime scene. I’ll seize the fridge as well as its contents,” said Apiro. “And I’ll check for prints on the bottles as well. But remember, Hillary Ellis wasn’t exposed to fluoroacetate. Even if you’re right, it doesn’t explain how she ended up with cyanide in her system.”

“Perhaps Señor Ellis tried to kill her twice,” said Ramirez, thinking of Charlie Pike’s
windagos
. “Or tried two different ways to do it, and only one of them worked.”

“I suppose the Canadian tests could be wrong. And he certainly had motive. His wife was scratching the paint with his best friend.”
Rayar la pintura
. Ramirez smiled at Apiro’s use of slang. It was no doubt a phrase Apiro had picked up from Maria Vasquez.

“But it may be impossible to prove,” Apiro continued. “Unless I find a contaminated bottle in that
frigo
, he may have committed the perfect crime. And Ricardo, it will take me at least eight hours
to complete gas chromatography on the contents of those bottles. Fluoroacetate has a long retention time. I can run some other tests, but they won’t be determinative of what’s in the bottles, only what isn’t.”

Ramirez looked at his watch. He had less than two hours before the travel advisory would issue. Apiro didn’t have enough time. Unless Ramirez could somehow prove the deaths were really murders. Then he remembered the black audiotape in his pocket.

“There may be a way, Hector. We can prove there was a link. We know Señor Ellis had opportunity. And as you say, he had motive.”

FORTY - TWO

Miles O’Malley, Celia Jones, and Inspector Ramirez sat in the police chief’s office. The tape recorder clicked off. O’Malley shook his head in disbelief.

“My God. I remember that night like it happened yesterday. I kept asking myself what we could have done differently, how we should have handled that call. I’ve questioned myself every time I’ve seen Michael’s disfigurement, every time I see that photograph of Steve Sloan in the lobby.”

“There was nothing you could do, Chief O’Malley,” said Ramirez. “Your officer’s death had nothing to do with you or your department.”

Ellis had admitted to Ramirez on the tape that he killed Steve Sloan after Ramirez produced what he said was an expert report from Hector Apiro to the effect that Ellis’s scars were self-inflicted.

It was a ruse. But it worked. Ellis admitted he hadn’t told his wife he was infertile. When she became pregnant, he knew she was having an affair.

“Steve and I were working the night shift,” Ellis said on the tape. “It was about two in the morning. Communications, that’s
our Dispatch, told us to be careful. A man on the third floor was schizophrenic, off his meds. That was all the information we had. No one mentioned he had a knife. We were pulling up in front when I told Steve that Hillary was pregnant. I saw the guilt in his face. I couldn’t believe it. That someone I loved so much had betrayed me.”

Sloan acknowledged the affair as he and Ellis took up their positions on either side of the suspect’s door. “She seduced
me
,” he said, “honest to God.”

The door opened and a man with a hunting knife lunged at them. Sloan shot the man once in the chest. And then Ellis shot Steve Sloan in the groin, just below his police vest.

“I knew I’d screwed up,” Ellis said on the tape. “I had one chance to save myself, whatever was left of my life, my marriage. And there was the baby to think of. That was all I had left.”

He told Ramirez he took Sloan’s gun and put it in his own holster, then pressed his gun into the suspect’s hand. “The suspect was dead: I took his knife and pulled it down my face. It was almost a relief that it hurt so much.”

Ellis had carved up his own face to cover his crime. Or so he’d said.

Ramirez believed that the real reason Ellis mutilated himself was his anguish at what he’d done. A split second of rage—a moment when he let his emotions get away from him—had forever altered his life. And ended Sloan’s.

“The lad confessed to you, Inspector. I can’t believe it.” O’Malley shook his head.

“If Señor Ellis was angry enough to kill his partner over that affair, he may have been angry enough to kill his wife, too.”

“But in God’s name how? Where did he get the poison, if you can’t bring it into Cuba or buy it there?”

“I think he
did
bring it into Cuba,” said Ramirez. “Or rather, his wife did.”

It had bothered him all afternoon. Something Señora Olefson said that kept circling around his brain. An exhibit in the National Gallery. A resin sculpture of a baby’s head so real it could almost cry.

A smart killer would put poison in something a woman would never share, Olefson suggested. Ramirez had walked through the hotel room in his mind again and again until he saw it.

“There was a package of birth control pills in the bathroom in his hotel room. I don’t think the pills were in
his
baggage: the sniffing dogs at the airport picked up nothing. But I never checked the surveillance tapes to see if Señora Ellis’s bags had been searched. Even if a dog had found the pills in her luggage, the guards would assume that it had reacted to the medication. Prescription drugs are allowed into our country.”

“You think she brought in the very poison that killed her, without knowing?”

“If I’m right, it could explain what happened to Rita Martinez as well. May I make a long-distance call? I think I can find out quickly.”

O’Malley nodded and handed Ramirez the phone.

Ramirez called the Havana switchboard, but Sophia said Apiro had asked not to be disturbed.

Ramirez left Apiro a message. He asked Sophia to place a second call, to Conchita Alvarez, the new clerk for the exhibit room.

“Please check the Michael Ellis evidence box for me, will you? I think you’ll find that the birth control pills listed in the log are no longer there.” He held the phone to his ear, waiting.

Celia Jones raised her eyebrows. “What do you think happened to them?”

“I would prefer not to say anything yet, in case I’m wrong. But this will only take a moment. Conchita is looking.”

A minute or two later there was the distant metallic buzzing of a voice on the end of the line.

Ramirez nodded. “
Gracias.
” He hung up the phone. “Rita Martinez was a single woman. She was on her way out for a drink with an attractive young police detective. It is almost impossible to get proper contraceptives in Havana. Our condoms are made in China. Like much of what we import from that country, they are made poorly. They are full of holes.”

Rita was a girl who liked to go out. She had stolen the pills from the exhibit room, where she probably also stole the money for her new breasts. The same way Sanchez got fresh batteries and Apiro and Ramirez supplied themselves with rum.

“Rita took the pills,” he continued. “She died because she wanted to protect herself from becoming pregnant, not knowing that they had been replaced with a poison meant for someone else.”

“Good God. This is incredible,” said O’Malley. “Unbelievable. I’ve known Michael for years.”

“There may have been another reason for the murder, Miles,” said Jones. “Not just revenge. Mike changed his departmental life insurance policy a couple of weeks ago, just before they left on holidays: He increased the coverage to two million dollars if Hillary died accidentally. It’s circumstantial, but with everything else on that tape, it’s got to be enough to arrest him.”

“That confession of yours wasn’t beaten out of the man, was it, Inspector Ramirez?”

“No,” Ramirez shook his head. “He spoke freely. He wanted to get it off his chest.”

“Yes, I can imagine that. Steve Sloan and Michael were best friends. As thick as thieves, those two. I can almost understand
him being angry enough to kill Steve, once he found out his wife was screwing around with him, and particularly if she was careless enough to get pregnant. It’s the way Michael covered it up for so long that shocks me. He completely took me in.”

O’Malley walked back to his large desk and sat behind it, vigorously rubbing his bald head with his thick fingers. “I never would have thought he had it in him. But that wife of his. A woman like that attracts men the way flowers attract bees.”

It seemed to Ramirez that O’Malley had missed the point. The police chief clearly had no idea that Señor Ellis was homosexual, even though Apiro had recognized it immediately.

“It seems obvious,” Apiro had commented after listening to Ellis’s taped confession. “Most men whose wives have been unfaithful get divorced rather than shooting their wife’s lover in the
cojones
. And to show such concern for his friend’s baby? Describe it as all he had left? All he had left of Señor Sloan is what I think he meant. I think it was not the fact that Hillary Ellis slept with another man that enraged Señor Ellis but
who
she slept with. His own lover. Steve Sloan.”

“No point in beating yourself up, Miles,” said Jones. “Mike was in counselling for months after the shooting. Dr. Mann didn’t see anything to suggest he was capable of this. There’s no way you could have known this was going to happen. SIU investigated; they cleared Mike completely.”

“I suppose you’re right. I feel wretchedly sorry for the Carons. And for your clerk’s family, too, Inspector. They were the truly innocent victims in all of this. Not to mention Steve Sloan. He was a good man, even if he did make a mistake. There’s a fine line between love and hate. I’m sure it’s the same in your work. Most of the homicides we deal with are domestics.”

“Yes, we see it all the time,” Ramirez acknowledged. “Most murders occur within families. But they are usually impulsive
acts, following petty arguments, disagreements. And they often involve excessive drinking. A poisoning, on the other hand, is deliberate.”

That was the one thing that bothered Ramirez about all of this. Michael Ellis’s emotional reaction to the affair, the split second of rage that resulted in Steve Sloan’s death; these were things he could understand. But the use of poison required coldblooded premeditation.

Like O’Malley, Ramirez hadn’t thought of Detective Ellis that way. Ellis struck Ramirez as someone who, even if he thought about killing someone, would change his mind if given time to reconsider.

Once Michael Ellis had killed Sloan, he had done what he could to salvage the lives of those around him. His concern was for Sloan’s unborn child. And when Ellis confessed, Ramirez was convinced it was to ease his conscience. Why had he not confessed to poisoning his wife at the same time? Could it have been because he didn’t know if she had taken the bait?

The murder Ellis had admitted to had nothing to do with Cuba; that was the reason Ramirez let him go. But the one involving his wife
was
within Ramirez’s jurisdiction. Perhaps O’Malley was right. Perhaps Señor Ellis had taken Ramirez in, too.

“Once you’ve killed one person, I don’t think it takes as much soul-searching to kill another,” said O’Malley. “Or a dozen, for that matter. Particularly in Canada. The penalty under our Criminal Code is exactly the same for killing twelve people as it is for one: life in prison. Well, we’ll let the Crown figure out the details. Celia, you get on the phone with Andrew Britton and make sure we have whatever we need from the inspector before he heads back to Cuba. Your government will cooperate with us, won’t it?”

“They will if the travel advisory isn’t issued.” Ramirez looked at his watch. Less than five minutes left.

“Sweet Jesus, I forgot all about that. I’ll take care of it right away. Clare,” O’Malley called out. “Can you get Ralph Hollands on the line for me? Or someone at PHAC? Inspector, I’m not sure I should thank you for bringing that little tape with you. I honestly wish I hadn’t heard it. But the only thing that’s really changed is that now I know something that I didn’t before. Andrew Britton’s a good Crown, and a good man. He’ll make sure Michael gets a fair trial before he’s convicted.”

FORTY - THREE

Maria Vasquez and Hector Apiro sat together in his office. Apiro was happy to see Maria but also apprehensive. He took her slender hands in his. “I can spare perhaps a half-hour, no more. But there is something I need to talk to you about. I confess, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“You’re not breaking up with me, are you, Hector? Because of the rice?”

“Of course not. No, nothing like that,” Apiro smiled. “Never, Maria. You returned to my life like a gift. I will never stop being grateful for that.”

Maria’s smile lit up the room.

Apiro had thought long and hard about Ramirez’s investigation and whether to tell Maria about the photographs of Arturo Montenegro taken by his attackers. If the photographs were on Rey Callendes’s laptop, then they had most likely been circulated to others. It seemed to Apiro that in the relationship he and Maria were trying to build, it was best to have no secrets. He wanted to break it to her gently, but there was no kind way to tell her such terrible news. He launched right in, sickened by
the expression on her face as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying.