3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)

I shrugged. “We talking some kind of poison, Claire?”

“Yeah, but with a toxicity that’s way beyond anything I’ve seen before. I skimmed through a few journals. I once worked on this child who had a similar vascular collapse and edema; we tied it to a rare adverse reaction to, of all things, castor oil. So I’m thinking castor beans. Not the case. It’s ricin, Lindsay! Relatively easy to make in large quantities. Protein derived from the castor plant.”

“Obviously, it’s poisonous, right?”

“Highly toxic. A couple of thousand times more powerful than cyanide,” Claire said, nodding. “Easily secreted. A pinprick would stop your heart. It can also be released into the air, Lindsay. But I was thinking ricin alone wouldn’t leave someone looking like that, unless it was delivered…”

“Unless it was delivered how?”

“Unless it was delivered in such massive amounts that it accelerated the destructive cycle by a factor of ten… fifty, Lindsay. This Bengosian, he was dead before the champagne glass fell. Ricin kills over a period of hours, even a day. You get severe, flulike warnings, gastrointestinal pains; your lungs fill up with fluid. This guy came back at eleven-thirty and they were calling it in by three o’clock. Three o’clock.”

“We found a champagne glass shattered on the floor. We sent it to the lab. They can test for this stuff, right?”

“Testing for the stuff isn’t what concerns me, Lindsay. Why kill him like this, when a tenth of this dosage would’ve done the trick?”

I saw where Claire was going. Whoever killed them had studied both victims. Both murders had been planned, set up. And the killer possessed weapons of widespread terror.

We are inside your homes, your workplaces… They were telling us, We have this stuff. We can deliver ricin in massive quantities if we want to. “Jesus, they’re warning us, Claire. They’re declaring war.”

Chapter 28

WE CALLED IN EVERYONE now. The Metropolitan Medical Task Force. The Bureau of Public Safety. The local office of the FBI. We weren’t talking murder any longer. This was terrorism.

The trail for the missing au pair had gone cold. Jacobi and Cappy had come back empty after passing her photo around the campus bars across the bay. One thing did pan out, though: the article Cindy put in the Chronicle on X/L. With news crews plastered all over their offices and the threat of a subpoena, I got a message from Chuck Zinn that he wanted to deal. An hour later, he was in my office.

“You can have your access, Lieutenant. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Mort did receive a series of e-mails in the past few weeks. The entire board did. None of us took them very seriously, but we put our internal security team on it.”

Zinn unbuckled his fancy leather case and placed an orange file on the table and pushed it across. “This is all of them, Lieutenant. By date received.”

I opened the file and a shock resonated through my system.

To the Board of Directors, X/L Systems:

On February 15, Morton Lightower, your CEO, sold 762,000 shares of his company stock totaling $3,175,000.

On that same day, some 256,000 of your own shareholders lost money, making their net return –87% in the past year.

35,341 children of the world died from starvation.

11,174 people in this country died from diseases that were deemed “preventable” with proper medical care.

That same Wednesday, 4,233,768 mothers brought babies into conditions of poverty and hopelessness across the world.

In the past 24 months, you have sold off almost $600,000,000 of your own company stock and purchased homes in Aspen and France, returning nothing to the world. We are demanding contributions to hunger and world health organizations equal to any further sell-offs. We are demanding that the board of X/L, and the boards of all companies, see beyond the narrow scope of its expansionist strategies to the world beyond, which is being crushed by economic apartheid.

This is not a plea. This is a demand.

Enjoy your wealth, Mr. Lightower. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.

The message was signed, August Spies.

I skimmed through the rest of the e-mails. Each was more belligerent. The menu of the world’s ills more grievous.

You’re ignoring us, Mr. Lightower. The board has not complied. We intend to act. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.

“How could you not turn these over to us?” I stared at Zinn. “This whole thing might have been prevented.”

“In retrospect, I