Split Second (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 1)

“But Mildred Martin said she didn’t call.”

“Somebody impersonated her, Michelle.”

“And if Bruno hadn’t come?” She answered her own question. “Then they would have just left. And if I’d gone in with him, they wouldn’t have tried it, and Neal Richards…” Her voice trailed off. “What else do you have?”

“Our thinking is that this had been planned for some time. I mean, they had to coordinate a lot of different things, and they executed it to perfection.”

“They must have had inside sources on Bruno’s campaign. How else would they know his schedule?”

“Well, one way was his campaign’s official Web site. The event he was going to when he took a detour to the funeral home had been scheduled for quite some time.”

“Damn it, I told them not to post his schedule on the Web. Do you know that a waitress at one of the hotels where we stayed knew more about Bruno’s itinerary than we did, because she’d overheard Bruno and his staff talking about it? They don’t bother to tell us until the last minute.”

“Frankly, with all that, I don’t know how you do your job.”

Michelle looked at her sharply. “And having Bruno’s mentor conveniently die? I mean, that started the whole chain of events.”

The woman was already nodding. “Bill Martin was elderly, had terminal cancer in its late stages and died in bed during the night. Under those circumstances no report was filed with the medical examiner, and no autopsy was conducted. The attending physician signed the death certificate. However, after what happened, his body was posted, and toxicology tests were run on the postmortem samples.”

“And they found what?”

“Large amounts of Roxanol, liquid morphine, which he was taking for pain, and over a liter of embalming fluid, among other things. No gastric contents because those had been drained during the embalming. No smoking gun really.”

Michelle eyed her friend closely. “And yet you don’t look convinced.”

Her friend finally shrugged. “Embalming fluid gets into all major vessels, cavities, solid organs, so it’s tough to be accurate. But under the circumstances the medical examiner took a sampling of the middle brain, where typically the embalming fluid doesn’t penetrate, and she found a spike of methanol.”

“Methanol! But that’s a compound of embalming fluid, isn’t it? What if the embalming fluid did get in there?”

“That’s a concern. And in case you didn’t know, there are differences in embalming fluids. High-budget embalming fluids have less methanol but more formaldehyde. Low-budget ones, like Martin’s, have higher levels of pure methanol. A

dded to that is that methanol is found in lots of things, like wine and liquor. Martin was reportedly a heavy drinker. That might account for the spike, the M.E. couldn’t be sure. Bottom line, though, for a man as terminally ill as Bill Martin it wouldn’t have taken a large dose of methanol to kill him.”

She took out a file and flipped through it. “The autopsy also found organ damage, shrunken mucous membranes, stomach lining torn, all markers for methanol poisoning. And yet he had cancer throughout his body and had undergone radiation and chemotherapy. All in all the M.E. had a mess on her hands. The probable cause of death was circulatory failure, but there are lots of reasons a very elderly man with a terminal illness would have died from circulatory failure.”

“Yet killing someone with methanol, knowing he’d probably be embalmed without an autopsy, that’s pretty ingenious,” said Michelle.

“Actually that’s pretty damn scary.”

“But he must have been murdered,” said Michelle. “They couldn’t just wait around hoping Martin would die on his own and then have his body at the funeral home precisely when Bruno was passing through.” She paused. “List of suspects?”

“I really can’t say. It’s an ongoing investigation, and I’ve already told you more than I should have. I might have to pass a polygraph on this, you know.”

When the check came, Michelle was quick to grab it. As they walked out together, her friend said, “So what are you going to do? Lie low? Look for another position?”

“The ‘lying low’ part, yes; the ‘looking for another job,’ not yet.”

“So what, then?”

“I’m not ready to give up my career at the Service without a fight.”

Her friend eyed her warily. “I know that look. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you’re FBI, and it’s better that you don’t know. Like you said, you might have to pass a polygraph.”

CHAPTER

10