Hothouse Orchid

11

Holly had just hung up after talking with Hurd Wallace when her phone rang. “Hello?”

“Good morning, it’s Josh,” he said.

“Good morning.”

“I’m coming back for more; would you like to go out to dinner tonight?”

“Yes, I would,” she replied without hesitation.

“Where would you like to go?”

“You choose; I’m easy.”

“I hope so,” he said, laughing. “I’ll come and get you at seven.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“See you then.” He hung up.

He appeared at her door on time, and she let him in. “Would you like a drink before we go?” she asked.

“I’m hungry; let’s have a drink at the restaurant.”

“Okay by me.” She patted Daisy on the head. “Guard the place with your life, and you can sleep on the bed while we’re gone.”

Daisy turned and trotted upstairs. Holly secured the house and left with Josh, who was driving a newish Mercedes convertible, top down.

“Nice car,” she said, when they had cleared the gates. “How do you afford it on a public hospital salary?”

“The money isn’t all that bad, really,” Josh said, “especially if you don’t have to buy a wife a car, too. It isn’t as good as my general-surgery practice, but then I don’t have to support an office and a staff. How does the CIA pay?”

“It’s civil service pay, but I’ve been operating at a fairly high grade, and now that I’ve been promoted to the executive level, I’ll do even better. To tell the truth, I was afraid to ask how much better. I’ll find out when I get back to work. Where are we dining?”

“At the Ocean Grill in Vero Beach,” he replied. “Do you know it?”

“One of my favorites,” she said, “and I’m in the mood for seafood.”

They were halfway through their first drink when he changed the subject.

“I got your tox screen back,” he said.

“I thought that could take weeks,” Holly said.

“Not if you have a friend in the lab and not if you ask for a specific test.”

“And?”

“It was a benzodiazepine, trade name Rohypnol.”

“I know about that,” she said. “It’s a date-rape drug. But doesn’t it take fifteen or twenty minutes to take effect?”

“If you’re ingesting it in a drink, yes. But the perpetrator probably dissolved it in alcohol and injected it, so it would work much faster. I’m very pleased with myself for taking your blood as soon as you were admitted. The body metabolizes the drug quickly, and if we had waited, we might have gotten a negative result on the test. As it was, only a very small amount was detected.”

“Rohypnol is illegal, right?”

“Right. It would have to be obtained through a street dealer, like crack or pot, but it is available.”

“Or,” Holly said, “in a drug bust.”

“Pardon?”

“If the perp is a cop he might well have found the drug in a search of a suspect or a car. He could learn how to use it effectively from the Internet.”

“I guess you can learn almost anything from the Internet these days,” Josh replied.

“How much Rohypnol would it take to kill someone?” she asked.

“I’d have to look that up on the Internet,” he replied, “but I suppose it would depend on how it was administered: a lot, if ingested-it has the same effect as alcohol, only more powerful. It would take less if injected-even less, if it were injected into a vein or an artery.”

“Now there’s a thought,” Holly said.

“Come again?”

“This morning Daisy and I discovered the body of a young woman washed up on the beach not far from my house. I have a gut feeling she’s a victim of the same perp who’s doing the raping. Suppose he’s injecting Rohypnol and he accidentally finds the jugular vein or the carotid artery?”

“I get your point,” Josh said. “That could result in death instead of just unconsciousness.”

“Probably surprised the perp,” Holly said. “He was aiming for a neck muscle, but he hit the vein or artery instead, and she dies. He had to get rid of the body in a hurry, so he takes it out in a small boat, ties a weight to an ankle and throws her overboard. Only his outboard severs the rope, and she ends up a floater. Did I mention that she had a rope tied to a leg and that the rope had been severed?”

“No, but that makes sense. I suppose you must have a very rattled perp.”

“Maybe,” Holly said. “Or maybe he ended up enjoying the experience.”

“The experience of killing someone?”

“Maybe. Or maybe the experience of sex with a dead body.”

Josh gave a little shiver. “Creepy.”

“When you think about it, it’s not a very big step from sex with an unconscious body. Either way, she’s not going to fight back, and maybe he feels safer with his victim dead.”

“This is all outside my experience,” Josh said. “I mean, if somebody walks into my ER who appears to be psychotic, I just patch him up, then call for a psych consult and hand him off. Chances are, I never see him again.”

“Lucky you,” Holly said. “Eventually, the cops have to deal with him, and, like our serial rapist, they don’t even know who he is.”

“From what you said before about his finding the Rohypnol in a search, I take it you’re considering the possibility that your perpetrator is a cop?”

“He had a flashing light on his dashboard, and in the dark, a driver seeing the light wouldn’t see much of the car in her rearview mirror. The cop who’s investigating the crimes-you met him, Jimmy Weathers-brought up that possibility right away. He said he had already eliminated the men on the Orchid force as suspects, so he’s thinking of somebody in a neighboring jurisdiction.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Josh cocked his head and looked at her. “You enjoy this process, don’t you?”

Holly laughed. “It’s the cop in me, I suppose. Until a few years ago, I had never done anything but be a cop. My new work is very, very interesting, but it doesn’t involve much in the way of criminal investigation, and I guess I miss that.”

“My guess is, you’re not going to stop thinking about this until you’ve caught the guy,” Josh said.

“Until somebody catches the guy,” she replied, “and I guess it would be satisfying if it were me.”