Golden in Death (In Death 50)

“God of the dead.” Pleased to help out, Peabody beamed at him. “Where do you want it?”

“Oh, just on the counter there.”

When she spotted the jars, blanched, Morris actually chuckled. “I’ll take it, and I can’t thank you both enough. I’ll be checking with the lab. I very much want to know what we’re dealing with.”

“We’re heading there now. I’ll make sure they send you a report.”

Nodding, he took a stool at the counter, laid the tray down. “Find this one quickly, my treasures. He may not be one and done.”

As they walked out, Eve saw him spread the napkin Peabody had provided on his lap, and prepare to have some breakfast with the dead.

Home away from home, she thought.

5

After Eve filled in Peabody on Morris’s opinion, her partner remained silent for several moments.

“I did okay in chemistry,” Peabody began. “I wasn’t like a whiz or anything, but I know what sarin is, and Jesus, Dallas.”

“He didn’t think straight sarin, which doesn’t make sense. If you have it, why wouldn’t you use it straight? Look up the other one he said. The sulfur trioxide.”

“Sarin’s banned—I know that, too. It can’t be a snap to … Okay, sulfur trioxide’s pretty damn bad, too. It can be colorless, can be liquid or solid—like crystalline. The fumes are toxic—he said fumes for Abner.”

“Fumes, vapor—airborne.”

“It’s bad stuff, too. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand a lot of the technical stuff, the chemistry stuff, but without medical intervention asap—and even with, if it’s direct exposure—you’re going to die pretty quick. You’ve maybe got a little more time than with sarin.”

“It’s not terrorism,” Eve said as they started into the lab. “Not in the traditional sense. At least not yet. If Abner was a test case … And that doesn’t make sense. If you’re testing it out, why go for a single person, someone alone in a house? Why not go for an office, a store, a public place? Get some impact. This was about Abner.”

She spotted Berenski at his counter, his egg-shaped head bobbing as he used those spider fingers to stuff a doughnut in his mouth.

Son of a bitch!

She stalked over, resisted knocking him off his stool. “Sorry to interrupt all your hard work.”

He swiveled around. “Kiss my ass. I’ve been here all night, got a couple hours down in my office. And I’m not the only one pulling all night on this.”

She saw it clearly now that he faced her. The bloodshot eyes, the dark circles under them. And the strain.

Dickhead, he might be, but at the moment, he was all in on the job.

“Peabody, how about getting Berenski some coffee to go with the doughnut?”

“Yours?” He perked up. “The real? Make it two large. We think we’ve got it. I want to call Siler out. He’s catching a couple z’s, but he should talk this through. He’s the expert on this around here.”

Eve held up two fingers, then turned back to Berenski. “You start.”

“We’ll start with the egg.”

“What egg?”

He swiveled again, brought up an image on-screen. Split-screened it. “You see there’s the container—t

he egg. We put it together from the pieces on the floor of the crime scene. The other’s what we’ve determined it looked like before it broke. You got a golden egg. Looks like cheap plastic, right? A piece of crap.”

“Okay.”

“And it is, except the inside of the piece of crap’s been coated with a sealant, lead based.”