Seven ways to die

35

Like Handley and Uncle Tony, she’d been stripped naked, and was seated. On a card-table chair. Her legs and arms bound with surgical tape. One hand was clutching an open bottle of Excedrin. They could see that at least a third of the pills were missing.

The other hand was positioned on her lap, its thumb taped beneath the four fingers.

Kate stopped screaming. She was staring at her lover as though a huge practical joke was being perpetrated on her and, if she just waited, Song would wink and say, “Gotcha!”

Rizzo studied the rigid corpse. Song’s body was perfect, not an ounce of fat anywhere, he noticed. Her breasts were perfectly formed, the nipples hard with the caress of rigor mortis. No visible signs of trauma-only the look of surprise on the good doctor’s face seemed out of kilter with what otherwise could have been mistaken for a model posing nude for a painter.

The sonofabitch who had done this to her was painting with human lives.

Kate hadn’t moved, not backwards, not forwards. Rizzo could see she was in shock. “Let me handle this,” he said, taking her by the elbow and backing her toward the door.

With a wrenching effort, Kate snapped out of it and turned her head toward him. “Take your hand off me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re fine,” he said. “You’re superhuman.”

“Why her? Who would do this to Song?” Kate sobbed. “She never hurt a fly in her life.”

“My guess is that it had nothing to do with her at all,” Rizzo said, reaching for his cell phone. His nose wrinkled at a familiar scent.

Kate detected it too.

“Burnt almonds,” Rizzo said.

“Cyanide?” Kate guessed.

Rizzo nodded as he speed-dialed.

Then Kate pointed to something else, the shelf to the right of Song’s body.

It was filled with boxes and boxes of blue and green surgical booties.?

For the rest of the day, the entire squad was turned on its ear. Kate’s devastation ignited a slow burn that would not cool until Androg was brought to justice. Cody had tried to send her home, to get her a prescription for valium. She’d refused both.

“Don’t you realize I’d go crazy if I went home?” she said. “Don’t do that to me. I’m staying here. I’m working the case.”

“You know you can’t work the case, Kate. It’s not in your job description. It’d be counterproductive, to say the least. You observe cases, remember?”

“I’m staying here and doing my job,” Kate insisted.

While they awaited Wolfsheim’s autopsy results, no one doubted for an instant Larry Simon’s preliminary analysis that they were dealing with the same psychotic killer who had offed Raymond Handley and Uncle Tony: all three victims ended their lives in a sitting position, all were in their death seats between twelve and one o’clock a.m., none of them seemed to have any connection to the others. “And I’m betting that the cause of death will not be the obvious one,” Larry added. “It won’t be ‘Excedrin laced with cyanide.’”

Simon’s head was focused on the photo showing Song’s thumb taped under her four fingers. “It’s a message from the perp,” he concluded firmly. “He’s warning us that Number Four is about to happen. Maybe even giving us a hint about how it will happen or who it will happen to. If anyone can figure it out, you can,” Simon said. “What are your thoughts?”

“What I think is that it may be something else,” Cody said. “Maybe it’s already happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe she was Number Four.”