“But what would be the point?” Kay asked in exasperation. “Why bother to do all that?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “Mark was rooming with a boy who was known to be having a sexual relationship with the headmaster’s wife and to be selling drugs. Maybe there were things going on that Mark couldn’t help seeing that somebody didn’t want him to be able to report to anyone else. Maybe the idea was to make sure that if Mark saw what he wasn’t supposed to see, and told somebody about it, nobody would believe him.”
“Did he see something?” Brian asked.
“My guess is that he doesn’t think he did,” Gregor said, “but then that would be handy, too. If you get him addled and distracted enough, maybe he won’t even notice the thing you don’t want him to notice.”
“I think this is a really dodgy device to do that sort of thing,” Kay said. “And why bother with it, really? Why not just use straightforward illegal drugs? If this other boy was selling them, couldn’t whoever it was have gotten hold of some hallucinogen? Or some speed, some crystal meth, something with a kick to it. It would have done pretty much the same sort of thing, especially the hallucinogen, but it wouldn’t have had the danger that you’d end up killing him. And if they found out he had LSD or something in his system, so what? They thought he had a drug problem anyway.
They’d just kick him out of school, and that would be the end of the trouble whoever was having with Mark.”
“Very good,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to assume, then, that whoever it was had access to arsenic and caffeine tablets but didn’t have access to illegal street drugs. That’s interesting in and of itself.”
“Everybody has access to caffeine tablets,” Brian said.
“But not everybody has access to arsenic,” Gregor said. “Would you do me a favor?”
“If I can,” Brian said.
“First, check with the pharmacies in the area and find out if anybody bought anything with arsenic in it recently that can be traced. Pesticides. That kind of thing. The lab should do an analysis to look for some of the other things in those formulae. Second, I’ve talked to Michael Feyre’s mother. Michael still isn’t buried, and I’ve prevailed on her to forgo embalming for another day or two. She can’t wait much longer, even with the boy in the freezer. Run some more tests. Check for arsenic. Check for tranquilizers and other prescription relaxants. Check for sleeping pills, both prescription and over-the-counter.”
“There really isn’t any way for Michael Feyre to have been murdered,” Kay said. “I worked on that one myself. He definitely died from hanging, and I defy you to find a way that anybody could get a large, strong, very young man into that position and then kick the chair out from under him. He wouldn’t go quietly. And if he was unconscious, he’d be one hell of a deadweight.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “there is one other way.”
“What way is that?” Brian asked.
“Sex.”
2
Gregor didn’t want to go charging over to Windsor Academy in his new official capacity, brandishing his credentials and demanding that faculty and students both cooperate in a formal investigation. It was just going on eight o’clock, dark and cold, and what he wanted was to look at that place in the library that Mark had told him about. Then he wanted to go back to the hospital and make the end of evening visiting hours. He wondered if Mark still thought it was “cool” that somebody had tried to poison him. Mark being Mark, he probably did.
Gregor went down Main Street without marveling at the stores. If they ever made a Hip Urban Liberal with a Social Conscience Barbie, her main street would look like this. If they made a Rural Conservative Barbie, she’d probably come with a miniature Wal-Mart. He pulled the collar of his coat high on his neck. It was snowing, steadily and heavily, and the snow was sticking on the clean sidewalks under his feet. He went down to East Gate and crossed the street in the middle of traffic. Main Street was so crowded most of the time that the cars weren’t moving fast enough to hurt him when he jaywalked. He went through East Gate and onto the quad. Then he turned to the left and headed for the library.
The library building was impressive, he had to admit that. It reminded him of a church, and there was a lot of it. It was easily the largest building on campus that he could see. He went up the front steps and into the foyer and was impressed again. The ceiling was far above his head and arched. The floors and the base of the checkout desk were made of dark, polished hardwood and the surface of the checkout desk was marble. Through the arched doorway into the main reading room, he could see an enormous stained-glass window. The building had been designed to awe. It succeeded.