Even so, he knew a few things that mattered and one thing that was absolutely crucial. It was truly remarkable how often “solving” a case came down to a few small details, mechanical and precise. Those detective novels wanted the reader to believe that knowledge of personality and closeness to people made all the difference. Gregor supposed it could, but often it didn’t matter at all, except in the end, when you needed to hand something to the prosecutor that he could go into court with. Juries like personality and people. They were never comfortable with bare facts. They wanted it all to be clothed in “motive.”
Gregor didn’t have a clue as to motive, although he could imagine a few, given what he’d been told about Windsor, and Mark, and Michael Feyre. From what he’d heard so far though, there were more people with motives to kill Michael than to kill Mark; and as far as he knew, nobody had killed Michael.
Brian came in just after six, bustling happily, followed by a tall, thin, angular woman with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, wearing no makeup, and dressed for all the world as if she were about to go gardening.
“Frank is delighted to have you aboard,” Brian said. “You could practically hear him gloat. I’ve got one of the girls to stay late—”
The angular woman cleared her throat, glaring.
“Okay, okay,” Brian said, “one of the women. Excuse me, one of the secretaries. June Morland, to be exact. She’s going to stay late and file all your paperwork just so that you’re completely legal, no problems from the litigious ones up the street. This is Kay Hanrahan. She’s one of our pathologists.”
“A town like this has need for more than one?” Gregor said.
“Drugs,” Kay Hanrahan said. Then she held out her hand to him. “How do you do?”
“How do you do?” Gregor responded automatically, shaking what felt like a skeleton in a skin bag.
Kay Hanrahan sat down and threw a pile of papers on the conference table. “I’ve been looking over these since the hospital sent them,” she said, “and they’ve given me several hair samples to analyze on my own. On our own, I should say. And I’m coming in late here. But I must say, from a cursory look, this is truly extraordinary.”
“The arsenic makes it truly extraordinary?” Gregor asked.
“It’s not the arsenic per se,” Kay said, “it’s the apparent trail of dosages.” She fanned the papers out in front of her. “I have to caution you that I’m interpreting somebody else’s test results. I’m not going to be completely sure I know what’s happened here until I’ve got results of tests we’ve done ourselves. But I do know the lab at the hospital, and it’sgenerally very reliable. I don’t know them ever to have had a problem with raw results. For the moment let’s assume that these numbers are reliable.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
“The note here says that Mark received a ‘massive’ dose of arsenic last night,” Kay says, “but that’s not entirely accurate. People can develop a tolerance to arsenic, and Mark must have had one, if the analysis of the hair samples is to be believed at all. The amount of arsenic found in his stomach contents and in the vomit on his clothes indicates a dose that would have killed him without that tolerance but not necessarily a dose that would have killed him with it. The interesting thing to me is that he was given enough to throw up, but not enough to be sure he’d die. You’d think that anyone who had gone to all the trouble of habituating him to arsenic over a period of two months minimum would know better. Either that or have had a reason for getting him to vomit.”
“It could have been a miscalculation,” Brian said. “Whoever it was could have been intending to murder him, or just to keep him sick, and misjudged the dose.”
“I agree,” Kay said. “In fact it’s most likely to be a miscalculation. I just want to point out that the circumstances are curious. The other problem is that even with a tolerance in theory, the tolerance in fact will depend on a number of factors peculiar to the immediate circumstances. For instance, if he’d eaten more or less than usual that day, or if he’d had more or less sleep. Or if he’d had more or less caffeine, for that matter. This,” she flicked her hands at the pages, “seems to indicate quite a bit of caffeine, enough to kill him on its own. Does he have anything to say about why he was ingesting all this caffeine?”
“His mother says he claims not to have taken the tablets at all,” Gregor said, “and I want to stress something here. For the last several months, people have assumed he’s been using drugs, and he’s been insisting he wasn’t; and from what we know, he was telling the truth. It makes sense to me to believe what he has to tell us.”