“I wasn’t thinking straight when we looked at Debrett’s body,” Gregor said. “All I could think about was poisons. Look.” He put his hand behind the senator’s head and lifted it off the pillows. “Look at the neck, right along the jaw at the carotid artery. What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“What I see is a little spot of blood.”
Berman blinked and leaned closer. “You’re right,” he said slowly, “there is a spot of blood.” He pulled back. “Are you trying to tell me he was injected with something after all?
Some kind of poison? And what about Debrett? I know there wasn’t anything like that on Debrett.”
“I know there wasn’t either. The trouble you’re having is with the categories you’re using. That was the trouble I was having. Stop thinking injection, and stop thinking poison.”
Gregor laid the senator’s head back on the pillow, carefully and as if it mattered. In death, the senator had become a blank, like one of the pod people in that movie about the body snatchers. It was almost as frightening to look at as the crowd at the gate. Gregor turned away and made himself look at something else. Again.
“Did you ask the M.E. to check for curare, the way I asked you to?”
“Curare,” Berman said solemnly, “is a poison.”
“I know it is.”
Berman sighed. “Yeah. Well. I asked. You know what he told me?”
“It’s almost impossible to get evidence of curare poisoning from a corpse, unless the dose has been massive, death has been instantaneous, and the body is autopsied right away.”
“My, my,” Berman said. “The things they teach you in the FBI.”
“You don’t need the FBI for that kind of information,” Gregor said blandly. “You could get it from Agatha Christie, did he find anything?”
“No.”
“Never mind. When you ask him this time, tell him to test for succinylcholine instead.”
Henry Berman rubbed his hands across his face, scratched the back of his neck, shook out his hair. The room was quiet except for the sound of leftover rain dripping from one part of the roof to another.
“What,” Berman asked slowly, “is—whatever that was that you said.”
“Succinylcholine.”
“Right.”
“Synthetic curare.”
“Mr. Demarkian, I don’t mean to be pesky here, but curare is a poison. Synthetic curare is, therefore—”
“Not a poison.”
“No?” Berman looked surprised.
“Curare isn’t just a poison,” Gregor explained patiently. “It’s got a number of perfectly legitimate medical uses. The problem with the organic variety is that it’s tricky. You’re never entirely sure of the strength of what you’ve got, so you’re never entirely sure of the dose you should be giving. You want to induce a short period of paralysis to aid in some surgical procedure, and instead—”
“Your patient is dead on the table.”
“Or not paralyzed at all. But you’re right. It was mostly dead on the table. That’s what bothered me about the senator’s attacks. They looked like curare poisoning. They behaved like curare poisoning. Every indication I could see screamed curare poisoning. But if they had been curare poisoning, the senator should have been dead a long time before now.”
“Well, it killed him this time,” Berman said.
“No, it didn’t. Suffocation killed him. Trust me. Succinylcholine is used for emergency procedures, surgical crises—”
“Surgical crises.” Henry Berman thought this over. “Didn’t Victoria Harte have surgery? Wasn’t it on the television news? Gallbladder or something like that.”
“And if Victoria Harte kept her head together, she could have stolen some from the hospital while she was there?” Gregor smiled. “Maybe. But any one of the people in this house, Victoria included, would have had easier ways of getting hold of succinylcholine.”
“How? Who?”
“Janet Harte Fox for one,” Gregor said. “She does volunteer work in a home for mentally retarded children.”
“So?”
“Succinylcholine is heavily used in pediatric emergency medicine. Children with Down syndrome frequently have severe medical problems. If that place Janet volunteers in is fully licensed—and with her husband in the news all the time, she’d have to be sure it was—they’d have to have a fully stocked infirmary.”
“I see.”
“Then there’s Clare Markey,” Gregor said. “She’s a lobbyist for a group of people who care for mentally retarded children. She wouldn’t have any trouble getting herself a tour of a facility, or a little supply on the side.”