“Would that require medical expertise?” the chief asked.
Dad shook his head.
“Just about anyone could have managed to do it subcutaneously,” he said. “Especially if she was unconscious and unresisting. Of course, that does leave us with two interesting questions.”
“I’m all ears,” the chief said.
“First, who knew that she was an insulin-dependent diabetic?” Dad asked. “She didn’t exactly advertise it—we didn’t find a medic alert bracelet or tag of any kind.”
“And it’s definitely her prescription?” the chief asked. “Her name on the label?”
Horace nodded.
“So the killer had to be someone who knew her well,” Horace said.
“Not necessarily,” the chief said. “All someone had to do was see her injecting insulin at any time in the past and they could be reasonably certain she’d have it with her.”
“True,” I said. “But unless she did her injecting very publicly—like in the middle of a class—and a whole lot of people knew about it, I bet you’re going to have a hard time finding anyone who’ll admit to knowing it, since knowing it makes someone even more suspicious.”
“Of course, right now, only the killer knows that insulin was what killed her,” the chief said. He turned back to Dad. “You said two questions. What was the other?”
“Just how many attempted killers do we have here?” Dad asked. He sounded rather more gleeful than I would have been if I were asking that question. “It’s almost like Murder on the Orient Express.”
“Only they don’t play well with others, these killers,” I said. “Since we have three or four separate attempts to kill her instead of one coordinated effort.”
“Can we reconstruct a sequence of events from this?” the chief asked.
“A hypothetical one,” Dad said. “Either Ramon or Bronwyn or both doctored her tea with what they claim was sleeping medicine—probably Ramon’s Valium. The order in which they did it doesn’t matter, since she’d have ingested both at the same time. Sometime later, after she had ingested some tea and presumably fallen asleep due to the Valium, she was injected with insulin. And sometime after that, she was hit over the head with the statue—an attack that would have been fatal if she hadn’t been already dead when it occurred.”
“You’re forgetting one possibility,” the chief said. “We know these people claim to have put Valium in her tea, and we know there was Valium around for them to use, but what if one or both of them drugged her tea with something other than Valium? Señor Mendoza’s heart medicine, for example. Maybe the insulin was unnecessary too. Maybe she was already dead or dying when they gave her the insulin. We won’t be able to tell until the tox screen comes back.”
“Not for sure,” Dad said. “But I’ll tell you what I bet we’ll find. May I show you something?”
He had pulled out his iPhone and was waving it about.
I cringed. Dad’s iPhone was a relatively new acquisition and he was still consumed with the zeal of the recent convert, always trying to find new ways to make use of his expensive little toy. But now was not the time to show it off to the chief.
“If it’s relevant,” the chief said. “I mean, if there’s a reason I should not arrest Señor Mendoza for the murder of Professor Wright, I’d like to hear it.”
“Are you serious?” Dad asked anxiously.
“Of course not,” the chief said. “If I thought the old guy really had bludgeoned her with the statue, I’d have already arrested him, no matter how distinguished he is in Spain. Just because she wasn’t alive when someone hit her doesn’t mean it wasn’t attempted murder. Or if I really believed he was the one who poisoned her, I’d bring him back and question him some more.”
“Poison doesn’t seem like his style,” I said. “A sword, maybe, or pistols at dawn, but nothing subtle like poison.”
“And he’s probably the least likely of anyone here to have the inside knowledge that a potentially deadly vial of insulin was in her bag.”
“He’s the least likely suspect for any of what went on,” the chief said.
“He was hanging around the kitchen during the time someone drugged Dr. Wright’s tea,” I said. “He could have done that. Or seen it done, or just suspected someone used his pills. Or maybe he confessed so implausibly to the bludgeoning because he put his heart pills in her tea and wanted to make himself look implausible as a suspect.”