Hothouse Orchid (Holly Barker 6)

“That’s good,” she said.

“See you then.” He hung up.

He appeared at her door on time, and she let him in. “Would you like a drink before we go?” she asked.

“I’m hungry; let’s have a drink at the restaurant.”

“Okay by me.” She patted Daisy on the head. “Guard the place with your life, and you can sleep on the bed while we’re gone.”

Daisy turned and trotted upstairs. Holly secured the house and left with Josh, who was driving a newish Mercedes convertible, top down.

“Nice car,” she said, when they had cleared the gates. “How do you afford it on a public hospital salary?”

“The money isn’t all that bad, really,” Josh said, “especially if you don’t have to buy a wife a car, too. It isn’t as good as my general-surgery practice, but then I don’t have to support an office and a staff. How does the CIA pay?”

“It’s civil service pay, but I’ve been operating at a fairly high grade, and now that I’ve been promoted to the executive level, I’ll do even better. To tell the truth, I was afraid to ask how much better. I’ll find out when I get back to work. Where are we dining?”

“At the Ocean Grill in Vero Beach,” he replied. “Do you know it?”

“One of my favorites,” she said, “and I’m in the mood for seafood.”

They were halfway through their first drink when he changed the subject.

“I got your tox screen back,” he said.

“I thought that could take weeks,” Holly said.

“Not if you have a friend in the lab and not if you ask for a specific test.”

“And?”

“It was a benzodiazepine, trade name Rohypnol.”

“I know about that,” she said. “It’s a date-rape drug. But doesn’t it take fifteen or twenty minutes to take effect?”

“If you’re ingesting it in a drink, yes. But the perpetrator probably dissolved it in alcohol and injected it, so it would work much faster. I’m very pleased with myself for taking your blood as soon as you were admitted. The body metabolizes the drug quickly, and if we had waited, we might have gotten a negative result on the test. As it was, only a very small amount was detected.”

“Rohypnol is illegal, right?”

“Right. It would have to be obtained through a street dealer, like crack or pot, but it is available.”

“Or,” Holly said, “in a drug bust.”

“Pardon?”

“If the perp is a cop he might well have found the drug in a search of a suspect or a car. He could learn how to use it effectively from the Internet.”

“I guess you can learn almost anything from the Internet these days,” Josh replied.

“How much Rohypnol would it take to kill someone?” she asked.

“I’d have to look that up on the Internet,” he replied, “but I suppose it would depend on how it was administered: a lot, if ingested-it has the same effect as alcohol, only more powerful. It would take less if injected-even less, if it were injected into a vein or an artery.”

“Now there’s a thought,” Holly said.

“Come again?”

“This morning Daisy and I discovered the body of a young woman washed up on the beach not far from my house. I have a gut feeling she’s a victim of the same perp who’s doing the raping. Suppose he’s injecting Rohypnol and he accidentally finds the jugular vein or the carotid artery?”