The Day After Tomorrow

15

SUCCINYLCHOLINE: AN ultrashort-acting depolarizing muscle relaxant. Neuromuscular transmission is inhibited so long as an adequate concentration of succinylcholine remains at the receptor site. Paralysis following an intra-muscular injection may vary from seventy-five seconds to three minutes, with general relaxation occurring within one minute.

A kind of synthetic curare, succinylcholine has no effect on consciousness or pain threshold. It works as a simple muscle relaxant beginning with the levator muscles of the eyelids, muscles of the jaw, limb muscles, abdominal muscles, muscles of the diaphragm, other skeletal muscles, and those controlling the lungs.

It is used during operations to relax the skeletal muscles, making it possible to administer lighter doses of more sensitive anesthetics.

A continuous IV drip of succinylcholine keeps the level of paralysis constant over the duration of an operation. A Single injection of .03 to 1.1 milligrams (dosage variety among individuals), while having the same effect, last only four to six minutes. Immediately afterward the drug breaks down in the body without causing harm or being pathologically apparent because succinylcholine’s break down products—succinic acid and choline—are normally present in the body.

Hence, a carefully measured dose of succinylcholine administered by injection would cause temporary paralysis—just long enough, say, for the subject to drown—and then fade, undetected, into the body’s own system.

And a medical examiner, unless he went over the entire body of the deceased with a magnifying glass, hoping to find a minute puncture wound caused by a syringe, would have little choice but to rule the drowning accidental.

From the beginning, in his first year of residency when he’d seen the drug used and had observed its effects in the operating room, Osborn’s fantasy of what to do should the day ever come and the murderer, by some miracle, suddenly materialize before him had begun to grow. He’d experimented with injections on laboratory mice, and later on himself. By the time he’d opened his practice he knew the exact dosage it would take to inject a man with succinylcholine and immobilize him for six to seven minutes. And with no control over skeletal or respiratory muscles, six to seven minutes in sufficiently deep water was more than enough time for that same man to drown.

His attack on Henri Kanarack had been foolish, done wholly out of emotion; the shock of recognition compounded by years of pent-up rage. In doing so, he had exposed himself both to Kanarack and the police. But now that had calmed. What he had to be careful of was that emotions didn’t rise again, as they had such a short time ago when he had foolishly solicited Jean Packard. He had No idea why he’d done it, except maybe fear. Murder was no easy thing, but then this was not murder, he told himself, any more than it would have been if a court had sentenced Kanarack to the gas chamber. Which it most certainly would have done had things happened differently. But they hadn’t, and accepting that, which Osborn did now, calmly and assuredly, he realized how private a thing it had become between him and this Henri Kanarack and that the responsibility now could never be anything but his alone.

He knew how to find Kanarack. And even if Kanarack suspected he was still being pursued, he would have no way of knowing he’d been found. The idea would be to surprise him, force him into an alley or other secluded area, then inject him with the succinylcholine and get him into a car that Osborn would have waiting. Kanarack would resist, of course, and Osborn would have to take that into consideration. The injection was the key. Once that was done, he would have to be on guard for sixty more seconds and then Kanarack would relax. No more than three minutes after that he would become paralyzed and be physically helpless.

Done at night and planned correctly, Osborn could use those initial minutes to get Kanarack into the car and drive from where the abduction took place to an out-of-the-way spot, a lake or, better yet, a river with a swift current. Then, taking Kanarack, limp but alive, from the car, he would simply lower him into the waterway. If he had time, he would even pour some whiskey down his throat. That way, when the body was eventually pulled from the water, it would appear to both the police and medical examiner that the man had been drinking and had somehow stumbled into the water and drowned.

And by then Dr. Paul Osborn would either be at home in Los Angeles, or airborne and en route. And if the police should ever piece it together and come all that way to ask him about it, what could they suggest? That it had been more than coincidence that the man he’d attacked in the Parisian brasserie was the same man who’d somehow drowned a few days later?

Hardly

Osborn didn’t know how far he’d walked—from boulevard du Montparnasse to the Eiffel Tower and across the Seine on Pont de’Iena, past the Palais de Chaillot and on to his hotel on avenue Kléber—or even what time it was or how long he’d been sitting at the mahogany bar on the ground floor of his hotel, staring at the untouched cognac in front of him. A glance at his watch told him it was a little past eleven. Suddenly he felt exhausted. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so tired. Standing, he signed the bar tab and started to walk out, then remembered he’d forgotten to tip the bartender. Going back, he placed a twenty-franc note on the bar

“Merci beaucoup,” the bartender said.

“Bonsoir” Osborn nodded, then smiled faintly and left.

As he did, the raised finger of another customer caught the bartender’s eye and he walked the dozen or so feet down the bar to him. The man had been sitting quietly, half staring into his nearly empty drink, his third in the hour and a half he’d been there. He was a gray man with s graying hair, nondescript and lonely, the kind who sits in hotel bars around the world unnoticed, hoping for the little action that almost always never comes.

“Oui, monsieur.”

“Another,” McVey said.