3rd Degree

Chapter 27

BY THE TIME most people were turning on the morning news, we had descriptions of a “cute brunette in a suit” (the night doorman) who “looked like she was totally into him” (their waiter at Masa's) and had accompanied Bengosian back to his room last night.

She was either the killer or an accomplice who had let the killer in. A different girl from the one we were seeking as the au pair.

I looked up from the papers on my desk and saw Claire. “Got a second, Lindsay?”

Claire always maintained an upbeat side, even in the grimmest of cases, but it was clear from her expression that she didn't like what she had found. “I owe you a couple of hours sleep,” I said.

Her worried eyes said, No, you don't.

“I've been doing this work ten years.” Claire sank into the chair across my desk and shook her head. “I've never seen the inside of a body that looked like that.”

“I'm listening,” I said, leaning forward.

“I don't even know what to call it,” she said. “It was like jelly in there. Total vascular and pulmonary collapse. Hemor-rhaging all through the gastrointestinal tract. Massive sple-netic and renal necrosis... Degradation, Lindsay,” she said, seeing my eyes glaze.

I shrugged. “We talking some kind of poison, Claire?”

“Yeah, but with a toxicity that's way beyond anything I've seen before. I skimmed through a few journals. I once worked on this child who had a similar vascular collapse and edema; we tied it to a rare adverse reaction to, of all things, castor oil. So I'm thinking castor beans. Not the case. It's ricin, Lindsay! Relatively easy to make in large quantities. Protein derived from the castor plant.”

“Obviously, it's poisonous, right?”

“Highly toxic. A couple of thousand times more powerful than cyanide,” Claire said, nodding. “Easily secreted. A pin-prick would stop your heart. It can also be released into the air, Lindsay. But I was thinking ricin alone wouldn't leave someone looking like that, unless it was delivered...”

“Unless it was delivered how?”

“Unless it was delivered in such massive amounts that it accelerated the destructive cycle by a factor of ten... fifty, Lindsay. This Bengosian, he was dead before the champagne glass fell. Ricin kills over a period of hours, even a day. You get severe, flu like warnings, gastrointestinal pains; your lungs fill up with fluid. This guy came back at eleven-thirty and they were calling it in by three o'clock. Three o'clock.”

“We found a champagne glass shattered on the floor. We sent it to the lab. They can test for this stuff, right?”

“Testing for the stuff isn't what concerns me, Lindsay. Why kill him like this, when a tenth of this dosage would've done the trick?”

I saw where Claire was going. Whoever killed them had studied both victims. Both murders had been planned, set up. And the killer possessed weapons of widespread terror.

We are inside your homes, your workplaces... They were telling us, We have this stuff. We can deliver ricin in massive quantities if we want to. “Jesus, they're warning us, Claire. They're declaring war.”