Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“I’ll ‘relatively’ you, you supercilious-”

“Did I mention beautiful?”

“I need proof, and I don’t even know what it is I’m trying to prove.”

“Jillian Perry?”

“Yep.”

“So what’s your plan?”

She moved a bean-stuffed tiger to see him better. “What?”

“Don’t you have a plan?”

She stared at him for a few more moments before speaking. “I don’t. That’s been my whole problem.” She dug through a desk drawer and pulled out a legal pad. At the top she wrote, in block letters, MEANS, OPPORTUNITY, MOTIVE. Then she added a fourth column, PROOF.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to show Evan Kovacic that he’s not the only detail-oriented control freak in this city.”

“What do you want?” Oliver discouraged visitors to his corner of the toxicology lab. He kept all the spare gas tanks clustered in a fencelike barrier. He had removed all task chairs except his own, which he rarely left, his extra flesh overflowing the seat and his ponytail brushing the armrests. He displayed printed epigraphs such as I’LL TRY BEING NICER IF YOU’LL TRY BEING SMARTER and IT MAY BE THAT YOUR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO SERVE AS A WARNING TO OTHERS. He varied neither wardrobe nor hygiene. But he seemed to know everything in the world, particularly the chemical world. “I suppose you’re here about that piece of solder.”

“What?”

She’d seen Halloween masks with less of a scowl.

“That tiny sphere you gave me, the one you just had to have analyzed. I suppose you’re going to tell me, after I’ve done all this work, that it isn’t important and I can forget about it.”

“Not at all. It’s very important. It’s solder wire, the stuff you melt to hold metal things together?”

“Solder paste, actually. Tin, silver, a touch of bismuth. No lead. Water soluble.”

He did not continue. She strove to look properly awed by his abilities in inorganic analyses. “What does that mean?”

“Probably used in electronics.”

Suspicious, but not conclusive. Jillian Perry had been surrounded by electronics. “Thanks, that’s very helpful. Regarding that same case, I need to know about Jillian Perry’s blood work. Did she have anything in her system?”

“Normally we put such information into reports. You might have seen them, pieces of paper with words and multicolored graphs. These reports are given to the pathologist, who in this case is Christine Johnson, and since you two seem to be best friends, I’m sure she would share it with you if you asked nicely, or maybe took her some candy.”

“You did, and she did. The problem is-”

“Because otherwise I can’t release tox results, even to trace evidence staff, even though you passed biology, which I’m sure is an admirable achievement in some circles. Tox results are confidential. I’d have to kill you.”

“I’m trying to solve a murder here, and it’s not my own. Christine said you found a small amount of barbiturate?”

Oliver nodded. “I can confirm that, partly because you have already obtained the official results but mostly because I don’t give a shit about confidentiality. Diphenhydramine, forty nanograms.”

“Not enough to kill her?”

“Definitely not.”

“Enough to knock her out?”

“No.”

Theresa leaned against a gas tank. It shifted, and she jumped away. Explosions were so not her favorite thing. “Are you sure? She wasn’t a big person.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’d need at least thirty nanograms per milliliter to even feel drowsy.”

“Is there any way to tell what medication it was?”

“Other than clairvoyance? Unlikely. It could be anything that contains diphenhydramine hydrochloride-Sominex, NyQuil, a hundred other formulas. Did she have any such items in her medicine cabinet or nightstand? Prescription or over the counter?”

“I don’t know.”

Oliver raised one eyebrow. It gave her the distinct impression of a caterpillar trying to escape. “I beg your pardon, I thought you went to the scene.”

“I did. Nothing in the medicine cabinet except Tums and aspirin P.M.”

“Nightstand? Purse? Engraved wooden box on the coffee table?”

Theresa occupied herself with scraping loose paint from the compressed gas tank with her thumbnail. “I didn’t look.”

The overweight toxicologist gazed at her. Examining a victim’s home for drugs and medications would be done in all cases, from heart attack to homicide, by rote. The pathologist always needed the information, whether the drugs had caused the death or not. “You didn-”

“No. You can beat me later, but right now I need to get this straight. She didn’t have enough narcotics in her to put her to sleep?”

“Enough to make her sleepy, certainly, but not enough to make her sleep through her own killing.”

“And/or abduction?”

“And/or abduction.”

“What about the powder in her back pockets? Was that cocaine?”

“No, young woman, it was not cocaine. It wasn’t heroin or even aspirin. That powder you so thoughtfully threw on my pile of work to do contained various calciums-sulfate and hydroxide-and lime.”

“Plaster?”

“Got it in one. And with just a biology degree, no less.”

She thought about this long enough to forget about her previous experience and lean on the gas tank again. She grabbed the top valve to keep it from tipping over. “Don’t drugs, like, metabolize?”

“They’ve, like, been known to.” Oliver worked in sarcasm with the flair of a toddler in finger paints. All drugs metabolized, meaning they broke down into their components during the digestion process. In testing, some of those components might appear as normal by-products of the body and some might not. “And these did, to nordiphenhydramine, DM-never mind. I extrapolated from those to calculate the original dose.”

“So she might have had more in her system originally? Maybe enough to make her unconscious, but then her body absorbed part of the dose before she actually died?”

“Someone doped her, and then let her sleep most of it off before they killed her? Doesn’t sound very smart.”

“No. And he’s pretty smart. But he did have to transport the body. How long would that take?”

“Let me understand your question. You think Jillian Perry consumed enough narcotic to pass out, but then her killer left her alive long enough to metabolize some of the drug?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t want it to look like an overdose. Because he used the time to transport her. Because he was busy, I don’t know. How long would he have?”

Oliver frowned, but she ignored it since he almost constantly frowned anyway. “I’m not some kind of idiot savant who can break Vegas, you know. Those kinds of numbers would have to be worked out carefully, depending on her weight, activity level…a lot of work to establish a-what, guess?”

“Timeline. It’s important, Oliver. It might be the key to the whole case. Now, what about her gastrics?”

“What about them? No drugs, no undigested capsules.”

“So it had already passed out of her stomach? The narcotic?”

“Affirmative.”

“Did she have anything else in her stomach?”

“How should I know?” He shuddered in distaste. “That’s your job.”

Now Theresa shuddered. “I know. And I hate it.”

Forensics involved getting up close and personal with a great deal of icky, smelly, completely gross substances, but Theresa’s least favorite, by far, was gastric contents. The examination of same also lacked any great scientific certainty. The trace evidence department did not use a gas chromatograph or a mass spectrometer to detect chemical compounds like toxicology did. The trace evidence department used a plastic kitchen strainer, some running water, and, occasionally, nose plugs.