Fountain of Death(71)

“Are you having the contents of her stomach analyzed?” Philip Brye asked.

“We always do.”

“We’d like you to check for a few things you don’t usually check for,” Gregor said. “Starting with arsenic.”

Pete Lindner’s mouth quirked into a smile. “I already did. As soon as Phil here told me that you were coming, Mr. Demarkian. I do read the papers.”

“You wouldn’t have had to bother,” Philip Brye said. “The way the press has been on this case, the only way you could have missed any of it was to have been blind, deaf, and dumb.”

“True,” Pete Lindner said. “If I’d realized at the start that all this was connected with that, I would have handled the case myself. Fortunately, as I said, Kadhi is a very good man. Did the officers tell you how she was found?”

“They said something about a neighbor calling,” Gregor said. “A neighbor heard her vomiting and called the police.”

“She wasn’t just vomiting, she was pounding,” Pete Lindner said. “After I talked to Phil here, I went down and talked to the ambulance men. They said she was lying in her bathtub, absolutely dry and fully clothed, vomiting all over the floor and hitting the heel of her hand against the bathroom wall. That’s the wall that connects with the bathroom wall in her neighbor’s apartment. The heel of her hand was bruised black.”

“She was still vomiting when the ambulance men got there?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She slipped into unconsciousness just a few minutes after they arrived. You can talk to them a little later, if you want. I’ve got them filling out forms to waste time. She didn’t say anything to anybody. She wasn’t capable.”

“Do you know if she said anything to the police officers?” Gregor asked. “Weren’t they there first?”

“They were definitely there first,” Pete Lindner said, “and, again, you can ask them yourself. But I don’t think she did. Once I knew that Phil was bringing you in here, Mr. Demarkian, I called in everyone I could find who was even remotely connected with this thing and told them we had a probable attempted murder on our hands. We did all try to work out what we knew so we’d be able to present it to you when you got here. Not that I told anybody it was you who was coming. The way news spreads around a hospital, information like that would have been damned near lethal.”

Gregor agreed. He got out of his chair and walked around Pete Lindner’s office. Through the barred E-glass windows, he could see the first signs of a light snow in the lights from the line of streetlamps that marched down the sidewalk outside. This was another terrible neighborhood. The sidewalks were deserted. The paint on the streetlamps was blistered and peeling. Only the streets themselves were in good repair. Probably because they didn’t want the ambulances getting flat tires in potholes.

“She left work early,” Gregor said, stopping near Pete Lindner’s empty desk. “I needed something over there today that she usually would have been the one to get me, and Magda Hale told me that. Traci left work at four o’clock to go to a dentist’s appointment.”

“That can be checked out,” Philip Brye said.

“We can check her teeth to see if anything’s been done to them,” Lindner said. “Of course, the dentist’s appointment may just have been for x-rays.”

“I don’t think we have to go so far as to check her teeth,” Gregor said. “Is she still unconscious?”

“Yes,” Pete Lindner said. “She’ll probably be unconscious for most of the rest of tonight. She’d had a very bad time.”

“But you do expect her to survive?”

“Oh, yes. Unless something very unusual happens, she should survive quite nicely.”

“And she’ll be whole?” Gregor persisted. “She won’t have brain damage or affected speech or anything like that?”

“There’s no reason why she should have. This isn’t lye we’re talking about here, or even strychnine. Being poisoned with arsenic shouldn’t have any long-term consequences much different from being poisoned with sleeping pills.”

“People are in comas for years after taking overdoses of sleeping pills,” Gregor said.

“I know, Mr. Demarkian. But Traci Cardinale isn’t in a coma now, and there’s no reason to think she’s going to be in one. Would you like to go down and see her? I was having her kept on the ward until the two of you arrived.”

“It would probably be a good idea to keep her on the ward until Tony Bandero arrives.” Gregor sighed.