The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 39

Joe’s mouth tasted like old carpet. He rolled over to get the glass of water he usually kept on his bedside table and realized two things: his foot was heavy and painful, and he wasn’t at home.

His eyelids snapped open, and panic coursed through him. A snuffle in his ear calmed him down. Edison was here. He was in a hotel room. The rest of the day before settled back into place.

Time to get up. He maneuvered his leg out of the bed. The pain made him swear, and a figure appeared in the entrance to his suite.

“Do you require assistance, Mr. Tesla?”

Joe couldn’t remember his name. A jazz musician. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker. That was it. “I got it, Mr. Parker. Thanks.”

Edison jumped out of bed and walked across to a wheelchair parked against the wall. He released the brake with his mouth, then pushed the empty wheelchair next to Joe’s bed.

“You’re full of surprises, buddy,” Joe said. The breadth of Edison’s training always amazed him.

Joe heaved himself into the chair, got to the bathroom, and managed to shower by tying a plastic bag over his cast. Someone had delivered fresh clothes, a toothbrush, and a razor while he slept. Marnie, probably, since she usually thought of everything.

Edison proved himself again and again, fetching Joe a towel, always knowing where to stand to keep Joe from slipping, and just in general being the best dog in the world. Joe was out of dog treats, too. Marnie hadn’t thought of that.

In much less time than he’d expected, he was sitting at work, eating breakfast while Parker walked and fed the dog. It had been tough to convince Parker to leave him alone long enough to take the dog out, but Edison so clearly needed to go that the large man had given in. Edison’s brown eyes were persuasive.

Marnie popped her head into his office. “Are you better today?”

“How bad was I yesterday?”

“An eight on the loopiness scale, I’d say.”

Eight was purple, a pretty high number. “Did I offend anyone mortally?”

“Luckily, it was a Sunday.”

That wasn’t a no. Joe’s foot throbbed, but he wasn’t going to take any more pain medication after what he remembered of his performance last night, which wasn’t much. “Great.”

“The team is at an off-site today, so it’s just you and me. I moved your schedule around so you don’t have any meetings, in person or on Skype. I thought you might need the time to… err… recover.”

He nodded his thanks. “Anything else?”

“You got a call from a Detective Norbye. He said that Salvatore Blue was a transit officer who committed suicide by train about six months ago.”

Six (orange). Even if he’d been responsible for the other deaths, he couldn’t have been in the tunnel last night. Marnie raised her coffee cup and left him alone.

Joe checked through the names he’d given Dirk the day before — those who’d had access to his food when he’d been poisoned. He’d reviewed those names regularly ever since discovering his condition was caused by poison and not random changes in his brain. He hadn’t been able to narrow the list by much, but now that he knew the dates when the murders were performed, he could rule out everyone who wasn’t in New York during those times.

He double checked his work calendars, and it was an easy matter to clear everyone at Pellucid. Like him, they had mostly been in California during the previous years. His heart lightened. He’d worked side by side with those people, considered them friends, and he was glad to know that they hadn’t betrayed him.

The FBI agents, Bister and Dobrin, were impossible to alibi so simply. He could verify when they were in California meeting with him, but that didn’t knock any dates off the list. Other than that, he had no idea where they were on any given date. But he’d always considered them long shots. Sure, they had a grudge against him. He’d prevented them from taking over Pellucid’s facial recognition software and turning it into a government secret. But it was a stretch to imagine them poisoning him, and harder to picture them as serial killers.

That left Leandro, his socialite friends, and the investment bankers, Alvin Ross and Thomas Lee. Everyone in that group lived in New York. Eliminating them from suspicion was going to take work.

A quick browse through Leandro’s Facebook page showed that he went to Fantasy Fest every year. Although posts could be backdated now, that feature hadn’t been around a couple of years ago, so the old timestamps were probably accurate. Fantasy Fest didn’t give Leandro an alibi for all the murders, but it did for a couple, and that was enough. Joe was certain that all ten murders had been committed by the same man.

On a whim, Joe looked up Alan Wright’s whereabouts during the murders. Alan was a busy man, often in the press, traveling around the world. It shouldn’t be that difficult to exclude him from the list of suspects. But it was. Joe was able to track his movements for the last several years pretty easily using information on the Internet. And none of it ruled him out. Alan Wright, billionaire with a busy, international schedule, had been in New York for every single murder.

A rap on his door brought him back to the room and reminded him that his foot still hurt mightily. He was sorely tempted to take the pain meds Dr. Stauss had left for him and abandon himself to loopiness, but he didn’t dare. The next innocent victim was still out there.

Parker dropped off Edison and said he’d be there until two (blue). Apparently, he was pulling a double shift. Joe didn’t like having a babysitter, but he didn’t quibble about the extra security this time.

Joe started checking up on Alvin Ross. The banker had a Facebook page, but he rarely posted, so that didn’t help. Ditto for twitter. He showed up at various charity events and was sometimes quoted in news articles about the high-tech industry. Joe dug deeper. Last year, he’d had a regular blog for the Wall Street Journal. Unlike many columnists, he responded to comments on his pieces, and those comments were time and date stamped, presumably by the Wall Street Journal server and unlikely to be hackable by a financial columnist.

He’d been responding to someone asking about hedge funds at around the time that Sandra Haines was killed. It didn’t take him entirely out of the running, but it didn’t seem likely that he’d take a break from seducing her to write a hundred (cyan, black, black) word response to a comment posted only twenty (blue, black) minutes before.

Joe pushed back his wheelchair and rubbed his eyes. He was sure that Dirk and his team were already covering this ground, but he couldn’t think what else to do. His stomach growled, and he checked the time on his computer. Almost noon (cyan, blue). A long time since breakfast.

“Hungry?” he asked Edison.

Edison jumped up and wagged his tail. Edison was always hungry.

He’d get lunch and then send the dog off with Parker for a quick turn around the block. His regular dog walker, Andres Peterson, could give him a longer walk that afternoon.

His cell phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize.

With a prickling in his stomach, he answered.

“This is Genesis Labs,” said a woman with a chipper voice and a Bronx accent. “You sent us several samples yesterday for testing.”

He was glad that Marnie had followed through. In his pain and drug-induced haze yesterday, he’d forgotten about them. “Yes?”

“We’ll email you the electronic results, of course, but I thought you might want a call, being as you paid so much for the expedited testing.”

That didn’t sound good. “Thanks. What are the results?”

“One of your samples came up positive for a scopolamine derivative.”

Joe’s foot throbbed, and he felt nauseous. “Which one?”

“The blueberry yogurt.”

He wasn’t hungry any more. Someone had poisoned him — taken away his ordinary life and driven him underground. Not satisfied with that, he’d tried again. The killer had a key. He’d been in Joe’s kitchen. In his ice box. In his yogurt.

And damn near in his bloodstream, too.

Again.