Tricky Twenty-Two(80)
“So Pooka shot him.”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to move the fireworks operation?”
“Pooka started moving some of it. From what we can tell from the incinerated van, he had some firecrackers and blasting powder in the back. The thing is, I think Pooka was finding it easy to shoot people. Bang! Problem solved. He wasn’t all that logical by the time he shot Linken. His mental health wasn’t helped by the fact that he was injecting himself with a concoction that hasn’t been completely analyzed. It contained blood and a hallucinogen and God knows what else. It was supposed to make him immune to the plague.”
“Oh boy.”
“He said he shot Mintner because Mintner was nosy. He caught Mintner trying to break into the cellar, chased him outside, and shot him.”
“No one noticed?”
Morelli gave a small head shake. “We’ve interviewed a lot of people and no one noticed. It was like that sort of thing happens all the time at Zeta parties. There was a band playing and everyone was drinking and no one noticed.”
“The band was pretty good,” I said.
“Yeah, I know the band, but the drummer is no Brian Dunne.”
“That’s what Lula said!”
“Anyway, we found Pooka’s gun, and it all checks out.”
“That’s great. You’ve solved your murders.”
“The best part is coming up. Pooka had been obsessed with Unit 731 for a long time. Especially the use of plague as a military weapon. If you search back through his papers and computer history, it’s all there. He also had a history with a third-rate biotech lab in Maryland. He’d worked there off and on while he was in grad school, and he knew they kept some unsavory and illegal things in their freezers. Things like a couple rats that were supposedly infected with plague.”
“Why would they keep those rats in their freezer?”
“I guess initially the rats were sent to them for testing, but through sloppy housekeeping the rats were misplaced or something. Anyway, time passed, the rats were never tested, and they stayed in the freezer. Pooka knew about them, and one day he went in and dropped them into his raincoat pocket and walked off with them. If he’d looked into it a little more he would have found that the reason the rats weren’t tested was because no plague had been found in the area where they were trapped.”
“There’s no plague?”
“Looks that way. At least not in Trenton.”
I choked back the rush of emotion. I had my hands clasped tight in my lap, and my teeth sunk into my lower lip. I didn’t want to burst into tears in the restaurant. I was half-afraid that once I got started crying I wouldn’t be able to stop. It didn’t matter that I was crying because I was so happy. I wasn’t an attractive crier. My nose would run and my face would get blotchy and people would stare.
“Jeez,” I said, pausing a beat to get my voice under control. “I’m really relieved.”
Morelli nodded. His eyes were dark and serious, and his voice was soft. “Me, too,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I thought the hospital called you.”
We clinked our glasses in a silent toast, and we both chugged our wine. The waiter rushed over and refilled our glasses.
“Okay, so there’s no plague,” I said. “How could Pooka make a mistake like that? Didn’t he do any of his own testing?”
“By the time Pooka went to get the rats he was not in a good place.”
“He seemed odd, but he didn’t seem insane when I first met him.”
“People said that about Jeffrey Dahmer. Remember him? He was the guy who worked in a candy factory and kept decapitated heads in his freezer.”
“Like Blatzo.”
“Blatzo didn’t work in a candy factory,” Morelli said. “Even if there had been plague in the rats or in the fleas Pooka was breeding, the blood cocktail he was feeding the fleas probably would have killed the bacilli. He thought he was breeding super fleas but the lab tests suggest he was doing the opposite. None of the fleas that were found and tested were infected.”
“I’m not going to suffer the agony of the plague.”
I said it with a smile. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“So what about you?” I asked Morelli.
“Xanthan gum.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t digest xanthan gum. I thought I had cancer. My doctor thought I had Crohn’s disease. My Sicilian grandmother said I was cursed. I’ve been through a month of testing. I’ve been on a restrictive diet. And it turns out the restrictive diet was the worst thing. I was eating tons of gluten-free bread, and it all contains xanthan gum. So I was getting worse instead of better.”