Fountain of Death(67)

“It is cheese, isn’t it?” he asked. “You can have the strawberry one if you want instead.”

Gregor couldn’t imagine eating a strawberry Danish. He took the cheese one and began to follow Philip Brye back to his office.

“I take it you put some kind of rush on the lab reports for Stella Mortimer,” he said. “Either that, or you’ve been doing them personally.”

“I can’t do lab reports.” Philip Brye kicked open his office door and gestured Gregor inside. “I get the vapors every time I see a test tube. I did the autopsy myself.”

“And?”

“And what did you expect? Death consistent with poisoning by arsenic, which, by the way, is what the lab people found when they analyzed the contents of her stomach. That and traces of what was probably an English muffin, with butter. Also coffee. Stella Mortimer wasn’t much of a health food nut.”

The lab reports were lying in the middle of Philip Brye’s desk, enclosed in a file clearly marked AUTOP: SM in red felt-tipped pen. Gregor picked them up and took them over to a chair where he could sit down and examine them. He took a large bite of Danish and flipped the file open.

“She didn’t have to be,” he said in answer to Philip Brye’s comment about the health food. “She wasn’t hired to be a role model, like the instructors. She was hired to take the pictures. Are all these numbers down this side supposed to mean something to me?”

“Not really. They’re for administration. Take the next page.”

Gregor turned to the next page. This was the stomach analysis, and he understood all of it. He couldn’t count the number of stomach analyses he read while he was heading up the Behavioral Sciences Department. Eventually, he had gotten an agent trainee to read them for him. They always made him a little ill. Gregor ran through the technical language that added up to an English muffin with butter and a cup of coffee—gluten simplex, sucrose, dextrose, paraphalymides—and looked up.

“She took a lot of sugar in her coffee.”

“She did this time, yes.”

“Do you think somebody made the coffee for her? The sugar would do something to hide the taste of arsenic.” Gregor sighed. “You know, I’ve investigated maybe half a dozen arsenic poisonings in my life, and you know what always bothers me?”

“No,” Philip Brye said. “What?”

“Arsenic tastes awful,” Gregor told him. “Arsenic tastes really, really awful. I know. I’ve tasted it. In the interests of research, if you get me. And yet people eat the stuff all the time. They eat massive quantities of it. That’s why they die.”

“Be reasonable, Gregor. Stella Mortimer didn’t eat massive quantities of arsenic. She ate, or more probably drank, just enough to kill her. And the taste was disguised in the food she ate with it.”

“Arsenic isn’t cyanide,” Gregor pointed out. “You need more than a drop or two.”

“True. But arsenic is a hell of a lot easier to come by and it does the job. You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff we have sitting around here in the evidence room. You’re not supposed to be able to buy straight arsenic without signing for it, but people do. They most certainly do. Then they go out and poison other people’s dogs with it.”

“Is that what most of the arsenic you collect has been used for?”

“Oh, yeah. Dogs and cats. People are incredibly nasty about other people’s pets. Dogs are as fussy as humans are about the tastes of the foods they eat. At least some dogs are. If you can disguise the taste for dogs, why couldn’t you disguise the taste for people?”

“Maybe it’s the politeness factor. Maybe if somebody gives you something to eat, or makes it for you, maybe you feel obligated to eat it even if it tastes awful.”

“Remind me never to do that again,” Philip Brye muttered.

Gregor flipped through to the next page in the file. This file was much thicker than the file at Fountain of Youth, but Gregor didn’t think it was much more revealing. Height. Weight. Eye color. Hair color. He couldn’t find anything unusual. At the tune she died, Stella Mortimer hadn’t been on any of the common recreational drugs. She hadn’t been on the pill. She had gone through menopause. She had had her gallbladder removed. Gregor could have said the same things about a Park Avenue Chihuahua. He flipped another page in the file and came to the detailed physical descriptions of internal body parts. He flipped the file closed and handed it back to Philip Brye.

“She hadn’t been dead very long when we found her,” he said. “None of the vomit was dry.”