31


It is midnight, and we are picking at a dinner that Benton has managed to overcook and wilt, but no one is particular at the moment or preoccupied with food, at least not in a good way. Right now I can easily imagine not wanting to eat ever again, as everything I look at turns into a potential source of disease and death.

Bolognese sauce, lettuce, salad dressing, even the wine, and I’m reminded that a peaceful, healthy coexistence on this planet is shockingly fragile. It takes so little to cause disaster. Shifting tectonic plates in the earth that create a tsunami, clashing temperatures and humidity unleashing hurricanes and tornadoes, and worst of all is what humans can do.

Colin Dengate e-mailed me about an hour ago with information he probably shouldn’t be releasing to me, but that’s who he is, a redneck, as he describes himself. Armed and dangerous, he likes to say, roaring around in that ancient Land Rover of his in the blistering heat and afraid of nothing, including bureaucrats, or bureausaurs, as he calls people who let policies, politics, and phobias get in the way of doing what is right. He’s not going to shut me out of any investigation, certainly not when efforts to frame me are blatant enough to bury any reasonable doubt that I’m the one running around poisoning people.

Colin let me know that Jaime died in good health, just as Kathleen Lawler did. There was nothing on gross examination to show what caused Jaime’s death, but her gastric contents were undigested, including pinkish, reddish, and white tablets or pills that he and I suspect are ranitidine, Sudafed, and Benadryl. He explained that Sammy Chang passed along lab results that probably don’t mean anything unless it’s possible Kathleen died of heavy metal poisoning, and Colin certainly doesn’t think so, and he’s right, she didn’t. Specifically, he wanted to know if trace elements of magnesium, iron, and sodium might hold any special meaning for me.

“I understand that.” Benton paces back and forth past windows overlooking the Savannah River, lights scattered along the opposite shore, where shipyard cranes are etched faintly against the distant dark sky. “But what you need to understand is the following. They could be deadly poisonous,” he is saying to Special Agent Douglas Burke from the FBI’s Boston field office.

I can tell from what I’m overhearing that Douglas Burke, a member of the task force that has been working the Mensa Murders, is resistant to answering Benton’s questions beyond confirming the statement that Massachusetts General Hospital has released to the media. Dawn Kincaid has botulism. She remains on life support, and her brain is no longer viable. Benton has asked point-blank if fifteen-cent postage stamps featuring a beach umbrella might have turned up inside her cell at Butler.

“She got hold of the toxin somehow,” he pushes. “Poisoned, in other words, unless she got it from Butler’s food, which I seriously doubt. Anybody else at Butler with botulism? … Exactly. The glue on the stamps could be the source of the exposure.”

“That was pretty good, but no offense to Benton, he should stay out of the kitchen.” Marino pushes away his bowl of unfinished Bolognese sauce without pasta, which turned out gummy. “The Botox Diet. All you got to do is think about botulism. That will make you lose weight. Doris used to do her own canning,” he adds, talking about his ex-wife. “Creeps me out to think about it now. You can get it from honey, you know.”

“Mostly that’s a risk for infants,” I reply distractedly, as I listen to Benton’s conversation. “They don’t have the robust immune systems adults do. I think you’re fine to eat honey.”

“Nope. I stay away from sugar, fake sugar, and I sure as hell don’t want honey or home canning or maybe salad bars, either.”

“You can get the stuff for like twenty bucks a vial from China.” Lucy has her MacBook on the dining-room table, typing with one hand as she eats a piece of bread with the other. “Fake name, fake e-mail account, and you don’t have to be a doctor or work in a lab. Order what you want from the privacy of your own home. I could do it as I sit here. I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened before now.”

“Thank God it hasn’t.” I begin to clear the dishes while I continue to debate whether I should call General Briggs.

“The most potent poison on the planet, and it shouldn’t be this easy to get,” Lucy says.

“It didn’t used to be,” I reply. “But botulinum toxin type A has become ubiquitous since its introduction into the treatment of numerous medical conditions. Not just cosmetic procedures but migraine headaches, facial tics and other types of spasms, hypersalivation — drooling, in other words — crossed eyes, involuntary muscle contractions, sweaty palms.”

“How much of it would you have to use, saying you could order vials of it off the Internet?” Glass clanks as Marino drops empty bottles in the recycle bag inside the kitchenette, where he’s followed me.

“It comes in a crystalline form, a white powder, vacuum-dried Clostridium botulinum type A, that you reconstitute.” I turn on the water in the sink and wait for it to get hot.

“Then you just inject it in a package of food, for example,” Marino says. “Or a take-out container.”

“Very simple. Frighteningly so.”

“So if you got hold of enough of it, you could wipe out thousands of people.” Marino finds a dish towel and begins to dry as I wash.

“If you tampered with some product, like a prepackaged food or beverages that aren’t heated sufficiently to destroy the toxin, yes,” I reply, and that is what scares me.

“Well, I think you should call Briggs.” He takes a plate from me.

“I know you do,” I reply. “But it’s not that simple.”

“Sure it is. You just friggin’ call him and give him a heads-up.”

“It sets things in motion before we have lab results.” I hand him a wineglass to dry.

“Dawn Kincaid’s got botulism. That’s one lab result.” He opens cabinets and starts putting away dishes. “You ask me, that’s the only confirmation you need when you think of everything else we’re finding out and start putting the pieces together. Like the shit in Kathleen Lawler’s sink that fits with the burns on her foot.”

“It might fit with that. I’m speculating.”

“The person you should be speculating with is him.”

He means General Briggs, the chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my commander and an old friend from my earliest days when I began my career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Marino wants me to tell Briggs that Kathleen Lawler’s gastric contents appear to be undigested chicken and pasta and cheese that possibly were poisoned with botulinum toxin, and that scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis of the odd-smelling residue recovered from her sink revealed magnesium, iron, and sodium. The answer to Colin Dengate’s question about whether the finding of these elements in the chalky residue means something to me is yes. Unfortunately, it does.

When water is added to food-grade iron, magnesium, and sodium or salt, the result is an exothermic reaction that rapidly produces heat. Temperatures can reach up to one hundred degrees centigrade, and it is this technology that is the basis for the flameless ration heaters used to cook or warm up food eaten by soldiers in the field. MREs, meals ready to eat, offer dozens of different menus, including chicken with pasta, and many of the tough tan plastic bags they’re packaged in offer additional rations, such as cheese spread. Each of these self-contained meals includes a water-activated flameless ration heater packaged in a sturdy polybag, an ingenious device that requires a soldier in the field to do nothing more than cut off the top, add water, and then place the bag under the MRE, propping both against “a rock or something,” according to the operating instructions.

I realize it’s possible there might be other explanations for why swabs of the residue in Kathleen’s sink show trace elements of iron, magnesium, and sodium, but it is the combination of evidence that offers a possible nightmarish answer that can’t easily be explained away. The unpleasant odor that reminded me of a shorted-out blow-dryer or overheated insulation strikes me as consistent with a chemical reaction producing heat, and Kathleen had burns on her left foot that prison officials claimed she could not have sustained while incarcerated in Bravo Pod. I believe she accidentally dripped a hot liquid on her bare skin, and it may very well have been the boiling water from a flameless ration heater.

The first-degree burns were recent, and I can’t dismiss from my thoughts her obsession with food and certain comments she made to me, and I wonder if a missing diary or more than one might have contained what Kathleen was doing and thinking and possibly eating since she’d been moved to Bravo Pod. Tara Grimm was taking care of her, was good to her, and Kathleen was more than happy to be a test kitchen.She had sweet buns and packages of noodles in her cell and knew how to turn Pop-Tarts into strawberry cake, fancying herself the Julia Child of the slammer. Maybe Tara Grimm was seeing to it that Kathleen got an occasional treat in exchange for cooperation or other favors, and early this morning the treat was a ready-to-eat feast that had been injected with poison.

“Plus, there’s the shit about the camera,” Marino continues to lecture me about what I should do. “Defeating infrared with infrared, a strip of tiny IR LEDs on her bike helmet, assuming Lucy’s right about that. Whatever this person did, the camera got defeated with something, and that’s a fact, completely whiting out her head the instant she got close enough for her face to be recognizable on the camera, and Lucy says the recording can’t be fixed or restored. Like the damn Chinese blinding our spy satellites with lasers. You should call him.”

“It will be sounding an alarm that could end up in the Oval Office,” I say what I’ve said before. “General Briggs will have to pass the information up the chain, straight to the Pentagon, the White House, if there’s even the slightest possibility that the bigger target is our troops — that what we’re dealing with is the preliminary if not plenary stages of a terrorist plot,” I’m explaining, as Benton appears.

“She isn’t going to say it outright.” He tells me about his conversation with Special Agent Douglas Burke, who is a woman. “But reading between the lines, the answer is yes. Fifteen-cent stamps matching the description we have were found in Dawn Kincaid’s cell. A pane of ten with three removed that are on a letter she didn’t get around to mailing. A letter to one of her lawyers.”

“The question is, where might she have gotten the stamps?” I ask.

“Dawn received mail yesterday afternoon from Kathleen Lawler,” Benton says. “Douglas wouldn’t confirm that the stamps were included, but the fact that she is letting me know about the letter suggests it.”

“Written on party stationery?” I ask.

“She didn’t say.”

“Mentioning something about a PNG and a bribe? In other words, derisive comments, probably about me?”

“Douglas didn’t go into that level of detail.”

“Fragments of indented writing I could make out while in Kathleen’s cell. What struck me as sarcastic, and understandably so, if she were under the impression that I sent her the stamps and stationery, what would appear to be cheap leftovers, something I didn’t want,” I say, as I recall Kathleen’s snide comment about people sending inmates their detritus, things leftover and expired that they no longer want. “That I might try to butter her up or bribe her with such a stingy gift,” I continue. “Only it wasn’t from me. The forged letter likely accompanying these items was mailed in Savannah on June twenty-sixth, meaning there was ample time for Kathleen to mail a pane of these same stamps to Dawn.”

“It seems she did, but Douglas wouldn’t go into detail, and she didn’t refer to you,” Benton replies. “Although I certainly was clear about obvious forged documents and a campaign on the part of an individual or individuals to set you up and that none of it is plausible.”

“An accident,” I decide. “Her incarcerated mother sends her incarcerated daughter stamps so they can be prison pen pals, having no idea the glue on the back has been tampered with. But Kathleen was too selfish to send the good ones.”

“What good ones?” Marino frowns.

“She had current stamps, forty-four-cent ones, in her cell, but she didn’t share those. Just the ones that were, quote, ‘shit’ other people didn’t want anymore. Ones she thought were from a PNG. From me.”

“That’s what stinginess will get you. She gives away her daughter and twenty-three years later gives her botulism,” Marino says as Benton empties the serving bowl of pasta into the trash and it lands in a solid mass.

“Sorry about that,” says my husband, who is rather worthless in the kitchen. “And washing the lettuce in hot water wasn’t the best idea, either.”

“You’d have to boil lettuce a good ten minutes to destroy botulinum toxin, which is very heat-resistant,” I inform him.

“So you ruined it for nothing,” Marino is happy to let Benton know. “If Dawn wasn’t an intended victim, that tells us something,” Benton says.

“The stamps didn’t poison Kathleen. It doesn’t appear she ever touched the stamps, and that tells us something, too,” Marino says, as we return to the dining-room table, where Lucy is working on her computer and has committed the only act that she considers a crime.

Paper. She doesn’t believe in printouts, but there is too much information to sort through, so much to look at and connect. Images, security-company billing information and logs, decision trees, datasets, and her searches continue. Out of consideration for the rest of us, she is doing her best to make it easy, sending files to the printer in the other room.

“It’s looking like she got killed by what she ate, right? Maybe chicken and pasta and cheese spread, and not the stamps.” Marino pulls out a chair and sits. “That’s really something. Maybe she’s lucky she didn’t live to learn that her daughter licked three of those stamps to put on the letter to her lawyer. How much botulism could you get on three stamps?”

“About three hundred and fifty grams of botulinum toxin is enough to kill everyone on the planet,” I reply. “Or about twelve ounces.”

“No fucking shit.”

“So it wouldn’t take much on the back of stamps to create a potent poison that would have caused a rapid onset of symptoms,” I add. “My guess is that within several hours Dawn Kincaid was feeling really bad. If Kathleen had used the stamps when she first received them, I wouldn’t have been able to interview her because she would have been dead.”

“Maybe that was the intention,” Benton says.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “But you have to wonder.”

“But that’s not what killed her, and that’s what’s weird.” Lucy hands out stacks of whatever she’s printed so far. “Someone sends her stamps spiked with botulinum toxin but doesn’t wait for her to use them. Why? Seems to me she would have used the stamps eventually, and when she did, she was going to die.”

“It might suggest that whoever sent them doesn’t work at the prison,” Benton remarks. “If you didn’t have access to Kathleen or what was in her cell or witness mail going out, you might assume the stamps were ineffective, not realizing she simply hadn’t gotten around to using them. So the person doing the tampering decided to try again.”

“The stamps sure as hell aren’t ineffective,” Marino comments. “And how would the poisoner know what’s effective?” Benton points out. “Who do you test your poisons on to make sure they work? Certainly not yourself.”

But you might test your poisons on inmates — a possibility I’ve considered throughout the evening — and that a warden might be inclined to allow it in certain cases, if she is driven by a need to control and punish, the way Tara Grimm seems to be. I remember the hard look in her eyes that wasn’t disguised by her southern charm when I sat in her office yesterday, and her obvious displeasure with the idea that a wrongfully convicted woman soon to be executed might go free or that a deal was in the works that could release Kathleen Lawler early. There could be no doubt that Tara resented Jaime Berger’s meddling in the lives of inmates and overriding the wishes of their respectable, highly praised warden, the daughter of another prominent warden, who designed the very facility that she considers rightfully hers.

It no longer seems possible Tara Grimm wasn’t aware of the kite Kathleen slipped to me. The warden probably knew all about it and not only didn’t care but considered my meeting with Jaime a gift, the ideal opportunity to have me intercepted by someone with a take-out bag that I suspect contained a potent dose of botulinum toxin serotype A injected into sushi or seaweed salad. Tara had known for almost two weeks that it was in the works for me to come to her facility, and somehow the woman with the take-out bag knew I was headed to Jaime’s apartment, and perhaps, as Lucy has suggested, this person was waiting in the nearby dark for me, possibly waiting all night and well into the morning, watching the silhouette of her victim walking past windows, waiting for lights to go off and back on, waiting for death.

People stalked and followed and spied on, and manipulated like puppets, by someone who is cunning and meticulous, a poisoner who is patient and precise and as cold as dry ice, and I can’t think of a more vulnerable population, a captive one like rats in a lab, especially if anyone working at the correctional facility is in collusion with whoever might be masterminding such sinister research. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t as you design a much bigger attack, biding your time, fine-tuning for months, for years.

Barrie Lou Rivers died suddenly while she was awaiting her execution. Rea Abernathy was found dead inside her cell, slumped over the toilet, and Shania Plames appeared to be a suicidal asphyxiation, supposedly hog-tying herself with her prison uniform pants. Then Kathleen Lawler, and Dawn Kincaid, and now Jaime Berger, all of the deaths disturbingly the same. Nothing is found on autopsy, the diagnosis one of exclusion. There was no reason, at least not in the earlier cases, to suspect homicidal poisonings that would elude routine toxicology screens.

It is almost two o’clock in the morning, and I don’t remember the last time I called General John Briggs at this hour. Whenever I’ve been as inconvenient as I’m about to be, I’ve had an ironclad reason. I’ve had proof. Lucy adds to my pile of printouts, and I take them with me. I go back to the bedroom and close the door as I imagine Briggs snapping up his cell phone wherever he’s sleeping or working. It could be the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, the headquarters of the AFME and its port mortuary where our military casualties are flown in and given dignified transfers and sophisticated forensic examinations, including three-dimensional CT and explosive-ordnance scans. He could be in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Africa, maybe not the MIR space station, but we speculate about it, not really joking, because AFMEs could end up any place where deaths are the jurisdiction of the federal government. What Briggs doesn’t need is one more thing to worry him needlessly. He doesn’t need me and my intuition.

“John Briggs,” his deep voice answers in my wireless earpiece. “It’s Kay,” and I tell him why I’m calling.

“Based on what?” he says what I knew he would.

“Do you want the short answer or a more involved one?” I prop pillows behind me on the bed and continue scanning the information Lucy has been printing out.

“I’m about to get on a plane in Kabul, but I have a few minutes. Then you’re not going to get me for about twenty-five hours. Short answers are my favorite, but go ahead.”

I give him the case histories, starting with suspicious deaths at the GPFW that Colin has told me about, and from there I move on to what has happened in the past twenty-four hours. I point out the obvious concern that the one confirmed poisoning by botulinum toxin serotype A, Dawn Kincaid, suggests an enhanced delivery system, something we’ve not seen before.

“While it’s theoretically possible that death or severe illness due to botulinun toxin can occur in as few as two to six hours,” I explain, “usually it’s more like twelve or twenty-four. It can take longer than a week.”

“Because the cases we’re accustomed to seeing are foodborne,” Briggs says, as I go through the printouts Lucy generated, studying an enhanced surveillance image of the woman who delivered the take-out bag of sushi last night.

A sadist, a poisoner, I believe.

“We don’t see cases of exposure to the pure toxin,” Briggs says. “I can’t think of a single one.”

The woman’s head and neck are completely whited out, but Lucy has produced sharply defined and enlarged images of the rest of her, including the silvery bicycle she walked across the street and leaned against the lamppost. She is in dark pants, running shoes and socks, no belt, and a light-colored short-sleeved blouse tucked in. The only flesh exposed is her forearms and her hands, and a close-up of her left ring finger shows a baguette-cut square band that might be white gold or yellow or platinum, I can’t tell. All of the images are infrared and in shades of white and gray.

“Food contaminated by the Clostridium botulinum spores that produce the toxin,” Briggs is saying, “and it’s got to work its way through the digestive tract, usually becoming absorbed in the small intestine before it gets into the bloodstream and begins attacking neuromuscular proteins, basically attacking the brain and preventing the release of neurotransmitters.”

The woman in the surveillance footage also has on a watch: what Lucy shows through other image files is a dark-faced Marathon wristwatch with a high-impact fibershell and waterproof and dustproof case, made by contract with the U.S. and Canadian governments for issuance to military personnel.

“What if a pure, extremely potent toxin was exposed to mucous membrane?” I propose, as I continue to worry that the killer has some sort of military connection.

Someone with access to military personnel, perhaps her real target.

“Think about people who apply drugs to the mouth, vagina, rectum,” I add. “Cocaine, for example. We know what happens. Imagine a poison like botulinum toxin.”

“A really big problem,” Briggs says. “No cases I’ve ever heard of, no precedents, nothing to compare it to, in other words. But could only be bad.”

“The pure toxin in the mucous membrane of the mouth.”

“Much faster absorption, as opposed to ingestion of the actual microbe, the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and its spores, what is actually in contaminated food,” Briggs contemplates. “The bacteria have to grow and produce the toxin, all of this taking hours, possibly days, before paralysis starts in the face and spreads down.”

“Nothing worked its way through the digestive tract, John. It would seem these people had an exposure that actually induced gastroparesis,” I reply, and I can see what Lucy wants me to realize about the bicycle.

It appears lightweight, with very small wheels, and she has included an article she pulled off the Internet. A folding bike. Someone possibly with a military connection and a folding bike.

“Could also be induced by severe stress,” Briggs says. “Fight-or-flight syndrome, and your digestion quits. But that would be true only if the onset of symptoms was rapid. Again, no cases to compare it to. A direct hit to the bloodstream, and everything vital starts shutting down, my guess. Eyes, mouth, digestion, lungs.”

A seven-speed bike with an aluminum frame that has quick-release hinges, the entire bike folding into a 12x25x29-inch package, and in a series of zoomed-in and enhanced photographs from the security camera, Lucy shows the woman taking off a backpack, opening it, and pulling out the take-out bag from Savannah Sushi Fusion. The next page is an ad from a sports and outdoors online site where one can order what appears to be the same type of backpack for $29.99. Not an insulated bag for delivering food but a folding bike backpack for carrying or transporting the bike when one isn’t riding it.

“But the truth is, we don’t know what extremely potent doses of botulinum toxin manufactured in a lab might do,” Briggs continues, as I listen intently and go through paperwork on the bed, my thoughts moving rapidly in multiple directions that somehow point at the same thing.

But who or what and why?

“I’m just not aware of any deaths from that, any homicides, as I’ve said,” he adds. “Not one.”

A folding bike that’s nothing more than a ruse, a prop, an explanation for the helmet that interferes with security cameras, Lucy is implying. It would look suspicious to be wearing a bike helmet with safety lights on it if you didn’t have a bike, and it would look equally odd if you were wearing a lighted hat or headband. That’s why the woman was walking the bike across the street when she appeared at Jaime’s building at almost the same moment I did, it occurs to me. The woman with the baguette ring and military watch wasn’t riding the bike at all, and probably had a car parked somewhere.

“It’s about dosage,” Briggs continues. “Almost anything can be a poison if you get too much of it, including water. You can be poisoned by your wallpaper if there’s enough copper arsenide in it. That’s what happened to Clare Boothe Luce, paint chips falling from her bedroom ceiling when she was the ambassador to Italy.”

“I’m just wondering if there’s been anything new in efforts to weaponize botulinum toxin,” I say to him. “Any technologies that a violent sociopathic person might have gotten hold of. A rogue military person, for example. Like the Army scientist who was working on an improved anthrax vaccine and carried out anthrax attacks that left at least five people dead.”

“You always have to pick on the Army,” says Briggs, who couldn’t be more Army. “Nice of him to do us the courtesy of killing himself before the FBI could arrest him.”

“Any other scientists who have been banned from labs where such research is going on?” I ask. “Especially anyone with military ties.”

“If it becomes necessary to look for that, we could,” Briggs says. “In my opinion, it’s necessary.”

“Obviously that’s your opinion, which is why you’re up all night and calling me in Afghanistan.”

“No new technologies that the military might know about?” I again ask. “Anything classified, you don’t have to tell me what. Just that we should be considering such a possibility.”

“No, thank God. Nothing I’m aware of. A gram of pure crystalline toxin could kill a million people if it was inhaled, and to weaponize it, you’d need a way to produce a large aerosol. Fortunately, there’s still no effective method.”

“What about a small aerosol distributed to a lot of people?” I ask. “In other words, an approach that is different, more painstaking. Or a distribution of small packages of poison that are mass-produced like MREs.”

“I’m curious about why you’re mentioning MREs specifically.”

I tell him about Kathleen Lawler, about the burns on her foot and the trace evidence in her sink, and that her gastric contents were similar to an MRE menu of chicken and pasta with a ration of cheese spread.

“How the hell would an inmate get hold of an MRE?” he asks. “Exactly,” I reply. “Almost any food could have been poisoned, so why an MRE? Unless someone is experimenting with them to use on a bigger target.”

“That would be pretty damn awful, and it would have to be a systematic approach, a highly organized one. Someone working in the factory where rations are being produced and packaged, otherwise you’re talking about a lot of vials of the toxin and hypodermic needles and hijacked delivery trucks.”

“You wouldn’t need a systematic approach if the point is terror,” I reply.

“Well, I guess that’s true,” he reconsiders. “Have a hundred or three hundred or a thousand casualties at once in theater or on military bases or in operational areas, and the impact would be destabilizing. It would be disastrous to morale, would empower the enemy and further cripple the U.S. economy.”

“So not anything we’re doing or working on,” I make sure. “Not research our government might be involved in to damage morale and cripple the economy of the enemy. To terrorize.”

“It’s just not practical,” he replies. “Russia’s given up trying to weaponize botulinum toxin, as has the U.S., for which I’m grateful. A terrible idea, and I hope no one ever cracks the technology, but that’s just me. A point source aerosol release, and ten percent of the people downwind of it up to a third of a mile away are going to be incapacitated or dead. God forbid it drifts to a school or a shopping mall. One thing we need to figure out is why some people are dead while others aren’t or weren’t intentional targets.”

“We don’t think Dawn Kincaid was intentional.”

“But you think her mother was, and also the prosecutor.”

“Yes.”

“And based on what you’re telling me, you think that whoever is responsible really wanted the prosecutor …”

“Jaime Berger and Kathleen Lawler. Yes, I believe whoever is responsible really wanted them dead.”

“Then they’re not necessarily what you’re considering research, like the deaths of inmates, if what you suspect is true. A science project. I don’t mean to trivialize the death of anyone who might have been killed with botulinum toxin. A hell of a way to die, for fuck’s sake.”

“I feel as if something changed,” I reply. “I feel as if whoever is doing this is meticulous and has a plan, and then something came up she wasn’t expecting. Possibly because of Jaime. Somebody doesn’t like what she was doing.”

“You believe this person is female.”

“A woman delivered the sushi last night.”

“Well, if that’s confirmed.”

“I suspect it’s going to be, and then what?” I say to him.

“Three cases of homicidal poisoning by botulinum toxin that include a tampered-with MRE? All hell’s going to break loose, Kay,” he says. “And you need to stay out of the way. A million miles from it.”

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