Loitering With Intent (Stone Barrington 16)

Eggers asked. “You seem to have an in.”

“I’ll ask questions of somebody who can ask questions, that’s all I can do.”

“Keep me posted,” Eggers said, then he hung up. Stone strolled over to where Dino was sitting. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but can you call your guy in Connecticut and fi nd out what’s happening?”

“I guess,” Dino said. “Excuse me a minute, ladies.”

The girls tittered and wandered away.

Dino dialed the number and put his phone on speaker.

“Robbery Homicide.”

“Lieutenant Dan Hotchkiss, please.”

“This is Lieutenant Hotchkiss.”

“Hey, Dan, it’s Dino.”

“I could have predicted that.”

“What did you find out about the Warren Keating thing?”

“I found out that it’s hard to analyze the ashes of a corpse for traces of poison.”

“You ever heard that tale about there being three common household substances—or maybe it’s two—that, when combined, make an unanalyzable poison?”

“Dino, how am I going to look for an unanalyzable poison?”

“You can get a search warrant for Keating’s house and look for the ingredients.”

“What are the ingredients?”

“I told you, two or three common household substances.”

“You’re a big fucking help, Dino.”

“Well, the people who know about these things don’t like to mention the names of the substances, for fear of setting off a nationwide epidemic of dead husbands, but Warren Keating has a chemistry degree, and you know what college kids are like: Something of that sort would be talked about in lab classes.”

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L o i t e r i n g w i t h I n t e n t

“So what do I do, ask a college chemistry major?”

“Why don’t you ask the FBI lab? If anybody know

s about this poison, they would.”

“Okay, say I call the FBI lab, or get somebody at our lab to do it, and they tell me that the three secret ingredients are toilet cleaner, bug spray and a decent Scotch. Half the people in the state have those things in their houses, so they’d be just as good for the crime as Warren Keating, wouldn’t they?”

“Dan …”

“You think a judge, a sober one anyway, would give me a warrant to search for those three items? I’ll bet the judge has them at home, too.”

“I take your point, Dan. Now, can you tell me what, if anything, is being done in this investigation?”

“Right now, it’s in the hands of the lab, and they won’t give me an ETA for their results.”