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Act of Darkness(75)

By:Jane Haddam


“Of course not.” Berman was morose. “This is incredible.”

“Well,” Gregor told him, “don’t forget the person with the best access. Don’t forget Kevin Debrett.”

Henry Berman’s eyes seemed to grow to twice their size, threatening to pop out of his head. “Kevin Debrett?” he said. “Kevin Debrett? Mr. Demarkian, for God’s sake, Kevin Debrett is dead.”

“I know—”

“You—”

Gregor almost hated to do it to him. He really did. “Kevin Debrett had his medical bag here for the weekend, didn’t he?”

“How should I know?”

“I know. He said he did, yesterday at lunch, before he was killed. Go find it. There has to be a vial of succinylcholine in that bag, or there’s a vial of it wandering around loose in this house, because he would have had to have it with him. And remember that none of the guest room doors can be locked from the outside, and every guest here got a brochure with a floor plan clipped to the back cover of it. The floor plan makes it perfectly clear which guest was in which room for the weekend. And Debrett was worried about someone stealing that bag, because someone had stolen it, three months or so ago, right before the attacks on Stephen Whistler Fox began to happen.”

“That can’t have had anything to do with it,” Berman said wildly. “That happened right here in Oyster Bay. I was called in on it, for God’s sake. It happened at Heston Lodge during one of those Bacchanalia Night parties they throw. Adolescent bull manure—”

“None of the people here this weekend was there then?”

“No. Not a one.”

“What about publicity?”

“Don’t be a damn fool. This is Oyster Bay. The fastest way out of a job, a house, or a life in this place is to annoy the kind of people who belong to the lodge.”

Gregor shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He was known to take that bag everywhere. All someone had to do was lift the succinylcholine out of it, and they all had plenty of chances to do that.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Henry Berman said. His eyes darted around the room, going from one piece of crumpled underwear to another, stopping for a moment at the window, through which he could see the tip of a flag high on a flagpole, waving in the wind.

The sight of the flag seemed to calm him down. “Wait a minute,” he said, “you keep telling me Stephen Whistler Fox wasn’t poisoned. And Kevin Debrett wasn’t poisoned.”

“They weren’t.”

“Then what was the point of this succinylcholine stuff?”

“Paralysis.”

“What?”

“I’ll repeat, Mr. Berman. Succinylcholine isn’t a poison. It’s been used to kill children—a nurse down in Texas killed a lot of them with it—but to kill an adult with the stuff, you’d have to use a massive dose. You’d certainly have to give it by injection.”

“That mark on the neck—”

“It’s a puncture mark,” Gregor said, “made by a tack or a pin. It’s much too small to have been made by any hypodermic known to Western science. It hit the carotid artery, but I think that was just luck. It didn’t have to, anyway.”

“But why bother with it?” Henry insisted. “Why go to the trouble?”

“Paralyze the victim, for one thing. Make it easy to suffocate him.”

“You could do that by conking him on the head.”

“You could,” Gregor admitted, “but it wouldn’t be the same. In the first place, it would have been obvious. If you’re going to conk them on the head, why not just conk them a little harder and kill them that way?”

“What’s the second place?”

“If you conk them on the head, they’re unconscious,” Gregor said. “It’s considered one of the virtues of succinylcholine, for medical purposes, that it doesn’t paralyze the brain. While our victims were being suffocated—probably with nylon stockings like the one we found in Bennis’s wastebasket—they were fully and gloriously awake.”

Henry Berman looked so sick, Gregor almost wanted to spare him the rest of it. Almost, but not quite.

“There is one more thing,” he said.

“What’s that?” Henry Berman was croaking.

“Do you remember what I said yesterday, about crib death?”

“I remember you using the words.”

“Yes, well. I think we’d better go get ahold of one Mr. Carl Bettinger. I think we’re going to find that Dr. Kevin Debrett knew a good deal more about crib death than anyone ever suspected.”