He plunged through the outer door into inner darkness, paused to catch his breath, caught the light and stopped breathing. The light was coming through an open door in the opposite wall, streaming into the corridor in a sharp-edged shaft. That didn’t surprise him. The door was where Neila had said the utility room door would be. The light could have been the one she said she’d turned on. She hadn’t said anything about turning it off.
The surprising thing was the person, standing at the edge of the door with her arms folded across her chest and a look of incredulity on her face.
Sister Mary Scholastica.
[2]
“His name was Don Bollander and he was Miriam Bailey’s assistant at the bank,” Sister Scholastica said later, when Gregor had her sitting down on the floor outside the utility room. It was less than five minutes since he had found her, but it felt as if it had been forever. He had made her sit down just in case. She had been in mild shock when he first saw her. He didn’t want to take any chances. Still, she was no Neila Connelly. She was older, better trained, and more experienced. She had seen a man die in front of her eyes last year in Colchester, New York. Even without all that she would have held up better. She simply had more backbone than Neila Connelly ever would.
Gregor was leaning over the sink, trying to find out everything he could without touching anything. The sink was not really a sink at all but a laundry tub, which explained how a body had gotten into it. Listening to Neila Connelly out in the courtyard, Gregor had imagined a stuffing and folding operation it would have taken a trash compactor to complete. He didn’t have to worry that their blithering conversation in the cold had cost this man his life, either. Gregor had thought at the time that Neila’s description sounded like rigor mortis. It would take a doctor and a good forensic laboratory to be sure, but Gregor’s guess was that Don Bollander had been dead for at least half a day.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance it isn’t murder,” Scholastica said. “Not with him stuffed into the laundry sink that way.”
“It’s hard to tell much of anything with him this way,” Gregor said. “Would there have been any reason for him to have been in this room?”
“Good heavens no. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but you’re in a restricted area of the Motherhouse. There aren’t supposed to be any seculars in this part.”
“Is that religious?” Gregor asked. “Have I just done something on the order of desecrating an altar—”
“No, no. Of course not. It would have been a more serious transgression before Vatican Two, but sometimes I think everything was a more serious transgression before Vatican Two. No, my point is, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near here unless he’d had a good reason, and I can’t think of a reason he might have had.”
“He could have been meeting somebody.”
“He would have met her in one of the reception rooms. If you mean he could have been having a clandestine meeting, it would have been safer to hold it off Motherhouse grounds. He had the perfect setup. I did tell you he was Don Bollander from the bank.”
“You did. You just didn’t tell me what that meant.”
Gregor was leaning far over the laundry sink now, the only position from which he could stare Don Bollander straight in the face. He had told Scholastica that it was hard to tell anything about this death under these circumstances, but that wasn’t quite true. Coniine killed by paralyzing the lungs. There was a blue tinge to the face, faint but unmistakable. Of course, it might have been one of a number of other vegetable alkaloids. Their effects were often quite similar. Because there was already one person dead from coniine, though, Gregor thought he was justified in guessing death by coniine here. In his experience, amateur murderers picked a method they found comfortable and stuck to it.
He backed away from the body and looked around the room. There was a shelf about the sink filled with laundry detergents and white plastic bottles of cleaning materials. There were more white plastic bottles on the floor, lined up against the window. Gregor didn’t think Don Bollander could have been brought in through the window. He’d examined every inch of visible skin and he hadn’t come up with a single bruise. It was possible that all the bruising had occurred under Bollander’s clothes, but it wasn’t likely. It was also possible that Bollander had been alive and ambulatory when he arrived at the utility room, but that wasn’t likely, either. Alive wasn’t impossible. Coniine was a tricky poison. Symptoms almost always started within half an hour. Death was more erratic. Depending on a number of factors—how much coniine the victim had eaten; how much other food the victim had eaten immediately before that; state of health; state of mind; height, weight, and age—death could arrive anywhere from half an hour to five hours later. What made coniine particularly nasty was that death was inevitable a long time before that. Coniine was one of those poisons whose antidote had to be delivered next to immediately after the poison was ingested. It was the kind of poison that grew roots.