Thomas Perry - Poison Flower

He was near the wing chair now. He noticed the glass of tequila she had poured herself on his coffee table beside the bottle. Keeping his eyes on hers, he bent his knees, took up the glass, sniffed it, smelled the tequila, and took a drink. He winced. It tasted much rougher than he'd expected-almost corrosive. He smacked his lips. "A little strong for you"

Jane shrugged. "It's almost pure."

He lifted the bottle and poured a little more over the ice, then took another drink. A few seconds passed, and then his eyes widened, and he gripped his belly. His face assumed a grimace and for the first time he seemed to forget to keep his eyes on Jane. He bent over, facing the floor. Both hands were on his knees. "I get it," he said. "What am I supposed to do How do I stop this"

"You're not supposed to do anything," she said. "You don't stop it."

His head jerked upward, and then he raised his gun. He pulled the trigger, but there was only a click. He held on to the empty gun. "Give me the antidote!" He seemed to become more determined. When he bent over in pain, he dropped the gun, jammed his trigger finger down his throat, and began to retch, but nothing came out.

Jane stood where she was. "Throw up, cut your head off-whatever you like. What I came to teach you wasn't that you were scared. It was that you were stupid."

He kept trying a few more times, but he couldn't get his vomit reflex to work now because the neurotoxin was taking over. He lost his balance and fell to the floor. He rocked back and forth, holding his belly for a few minutes, and went into convulsions. Then he lay still.

Jane put on her surgical gloves as she watched. She picked up his gun from the floor, using only the pen from her purse in the barrel, and set it on the coffee table beside the glass of hemlock distillate and tequila. She set the full magazine she had removed from the pistol beside it, then carefully pressed the magazine release with the pen so she could remove the empty one she had inserted.

She walked into his office and brought out his laptop computer. She plugged it in and read over the confession and suicide note she had written on the laptop. It was filled with the remorse and self-loathing he never had felt. The crime that the note claimed he regretted most was the murder of Susan Shelby and the framing of her husband for it. But there had been many other crimes. Jane saved the note, then knelt beside the body and pressed the fingers on the proper keys-the right hand on J, K, L, and all the right-side keys, and the left on A, S, D, F and all the left-side keys. Then she brought back the final note and left it on the screen. There was no printer in the house, so she was relieved of the chore of forging his signature.

The fact that his prints were on the gun, the glass of poison, the bottle, and the computer keyboard would be sufficient. She went back into the kitchen and left the bottle of Cicuta maculata poison she had brought, so there would be no question of why cicutoxin was found only in the drink and the tequila. She went to the den again and brought out the two photograph albums. She opened the second one to the pictures of what must have been the last hour of Susan Shelby's life, and propped the other album to keep it open.

Jane went through the house making sure everything else was the way she had found it, and there was nothing left that she had touched bare-handed. She went into the bedroom and found the video camera. She saw it was turned off, but turned it on, pressed the rewind button, then pressed "play," and watched the viewfinder just to be sure nothing had been taped. She rewound it and turned it off. It struck her that if Martel had gotten his way, he would have been taping himself killing her just about now. She went back through the living room to the entry.

It was dark out when she opened the door. She set the lock button and closed the door before she took off her surgical gloves. She used one to hold Martel's spare key to lock the bolt from outside. As she walked away, she felt as though she had just lit a very long fuse.

The gray Honda moved onto the interstate and out of the vicinity of Indianapolis, and then out of Indiana entirely. It was as though over a period of less than two days, a small shadow had passed over the town, and if people had seen it they had not separated it in their minds from all of the other variations in light and dark that had come and gone.

As Jane drove, thoughts of death had already receded and become distant to her-once again, just one of the things that she knew. What she was thinking was that right now it was time for Jane McKinnon to go home while there was still enough left of her marriage to coax back to life. She was almost certain that, even with the new scars to remind him of her imperfection, she would be able to make Carey glad she was back.