“Good. Real good.”
“Anything exciting or new happen?”
There was a pause longer than I expected before he said, “No, not really. Just that lady on the tour.” He hesitated. “And a lot of studying to do. I’ve got a big physics test tomorrow. First midterm.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “I won’t keep you. Just want to say I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Damon said. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever—”
“Alex!” Bree called to me. “They’ve found a few things.”
“Sorry, son,” I said. “Got to go. We’ll talk later, okay?”
I hung up before Damon could answer.
Chapter
40
As I headed toward my wife where she stood on the stoop of the Lancasters’ town house, my cell phone rang again. It was the medical examiner’s office. Exasperated, I held up a finger to Bree and answered, “Cross.”
It was Cynthia Wu from the ME’s office. She said, “Alex, that coffee from the Jackson crime scene you asked to have analyzed?”
“Yes?”
“Someone dumped nearly pure liquid nicotine into it, enough to give a horse a heart attack.”
“Liquid nicotine?” I said, puzzled. “Wait, wouldn’t you taste something like that? Wet cigarettes aren’t exactly appetizing. Smell gross, too.”
“Because they’re made from tobacco,” Wu replied. “This is extracted nicotine, the kind that people use in those electronic cigarettes, though that stuff is a hundred times more diluted than this was.”
“Any idea where you’d get something that pure?” I asked.
“Gotta be brokers somewhere,” Wu said.
“Anything else?”
“Preliminary report on that smear on the attorney’s suit pants,” she said. “Vaginal secretions. Some semen, too.”
I thought about that, came up with the most likely conclusion. “Order tests on the female DNA against the samples we got from Mandy Bell Lee and confirm the semen is Jackson’s.”
“Might take a while.”
“A while I’ve got,” I said. “And thanks, Cynthia, I owe you one.”
“Anytime, Alex,” she said, and hung up.
As soon as I entered the Lancasters’ foyer again, Bree pointed at the stairs. “They found synthetic hair on that second step. Cheap wig, I figure, which means Kelli’s changing her look, which means that sketch we put out of her had to have been close.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s just part of a disguise. What else?”
“She took a diaper bag and a stack of diapers with her,” Bree replied.
“So she’s caring for Evan.”