Pretty Poison (28 page)

She took the hyacinths and Shakespeare into the house. The phone was ringing. She grabbed it as she released him from his leash. He bounded into the kitchen for his breakfast, and she breathlessly answered the call.

It was Hal Samson. “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you before now. I was testifying at an insurance case for the hospital. What’s wrong?”

Peggy told him about Mark’s death. She didn’t go into detail about everything, but she managed to explain about the similar poisoning.

“You think there’s some connection?”

“I don’t know. I think it might be worthwhile checking into. I’m free this afternoon. How about you?”

They agreed to meet at the county hospital in Columbia. Peggy called Al and gave him the details she knew about the poisoning in South Carolina.

“I can’t go with you officially,” Al told her. “But unofficially, I’d like to hear the case. It was pretty amazing what happened with Warner, huh?”

“It was. I can’t imagine how it happened, can you?”

 

 

THE MORNING PASSED QUICKLY AT the Potting Shed. Peggy’s first order of faux antique garden tools came in and sold out to the few customers who were there. She got on-line and ordered two more shipments. She knew the implements would be popular, but she didn’t imagine they’d be gone before she had time to advertise them.

She let Dawn close the shop while she hurried over to Ri-Ra’s Irish Restaurant and Pub on Tryon Street. The owner was interested in adding flower boxes to the upstairs deck. It was outside, in the shadow of the Hearst building. Not many people were eating out there in the cooler weather, but Peggy could imagine colorful boxes during the warmer parts of the year. Of course, there could always be pansies to liven up the cold months.

The owner also wanted a bid on maintaining the rest of the indoor plants combined with building and maintaining the flower boxes. Peggy promised to have something for him in the next few days. She shook his hand and went to meet Al.

He was waiting outside Latta Arcade in his blue Isuzu Trooper. “Lucky for me Mary was busy today. She doesn’t take kindly to me mentioning work on a Saturday.”

Peggy fastened her seat belt. “I’m glad you could go with me. Dr. Samson treated the woman who died. He consulted me because of my work with poisons. But he doesn’t know anything about police work. You may be able to shed some light on the investigation.”

“Did they arrest anyone for the poisoning?” Al turned the car on to Interstate 77 toward Columbia.

“They talked to Mrs. Stone’s husband and checked the people she worked with,” she answered. “They couldn’t find anything to connect her death to him or anyone else.”

“But you think there might be some connection to whoever killed Warner.”

“Anemonin poisoning is rare. These two incidents might have happened on the same day. I found Mark’s body that morning, and Dr. Samson consulted with me about the poisoning in Columbia that night. The woman was still alive when I talked to him.”

“So where does this stuff come from?” he asked without taking his eyes off the road.

“The chances are it was home-brewed. Whoever did it knows something about botanical poison and set up a little distillery. It wouldn’t take much.”

“If that’s the case, could forensics tell if the poison was the same on the two cases?”

Peggy shrugged. “Theoretically. I’m not a medical examiner, but I believe the poison would be traceable. I’ll have to do some research to verify that.”

Al laughed. “Damn, Peggy. Why aren’t you working for us?”

“There are thousands of cases of accidental poisoning every year, my friend. There are probably hundreds of intentional poisonings as well. But either medical examiners don’t catch them or the symptoms are mistaken for something else. I don’t think any police department has a botany professor on staff to look for plant poisonings.”

“And here I only thought you had a green thumb! You’re full of surprises.”

“Thanks.” She smiled at him.

“Like it wouldn’t surprise me to find out you were somehow involved in the whole fiasco with the Warner case. It has all the earmarks, doesn’t it? It involved a college prank, or what looked like a prank, that led to us discover he’d been poisoned with some kind of plant. Couple that with the fact that you found the body and you’ve been poking your nose in on the investigation. Someone might think you set the whole thing up.”

Peggy pulled down the sun visor and opened the mirror before she took out her lipstick. “That sounds like a real stretch of the imagination to me. First of all, if I’d known Mark was poisoned by anemonin, I would’ve simply told you, wouldn’t I?”

“I hope so.” He laughed. “I think you’re right. I think that might be reaching, even for you.”

She laughed with him, but her heart was fluttering in her chest. He was closer to the truth than she hoped he’d ever know. She certainly wouldn’t ever tell him.

“You know this puts your little assistant in a bad light.” Al took out a pack of gum and offered her a stick. “The chances are the DA will do exactly what you’ve been wanting him to do and drop the charges on Mr. Cheever. But this new evidence gives us a more complete picture of the killer. Not only did she need opportunity at the shop to use the shovel, she needed prior knowledge about plants and how to use them. She needed to know something about Warner’s habits, too.”

Peggy thought about his accusations. He was right. She helped prove Mr. Cheever was innocent. But her confession put Keeley in the spotlight. “Keeley doesn’t have the kind of information she’d need to poison Mark.”

“And how hard would that be to get? She could probably go on the Internet and look it up. You said the killer wouldn’t need sophisticated equipment. Ms. Prinz told us she asked Warner to meet her at the shop that night. All she had to do was administer the poison. Forensics should be able to tell us how long it was between when that happened and when he died.”

“Is that what Jonas is thinking?”

Al wouldn’t commit. “I’m not sure. But it’s what
I’m
thinking. So what are the chances?”

Peggy didn’t want to speculate on that yet. If the two poisoning cases were related, that could immediately change the picture for Keeley. What were the chances she knew Molly Stone? She changed the subject, and they talked about John and times past as they finished the trip to Columbia.

 

 

HAL SAMSON WAS WAITING ANXIOUSLY. He jumped up from his chair when he saw them. “I’m so glad you could come. Maybe there’ll be an answer to this.”

Al and Peggy sat down beside the doctor’s cluttered desk. The office was sparsely furnished with older office equipment. The green-and-white tile floor was clean but worn. The place smelled strongly of disinfectant.

“Peggy told me what she knew about this case,” Al said. “How about you filling in the rest, Doctor?”

Samson already had the file out. He passed Al and Peggy pictures of Molly Stone. “I’m sure Peggy told you that her husband brought her here presenting with unusual symptoms. Her skin was cold to the touch. She had almost no pulse. Her respiration was slow, almost failing.”

“What made you think about poison?” Al asked as he took notes.

“Blood work showed she had a high level of anemonin in her system. We immediately called poison control as well as the CDC since we weren’t sure how she came by the toxin. It wasn’t injected. I learned this morning that it was in a bottle of root beer she had at the bank. The police assume someone put it there. They just don’t know who.”

“What time do they think it happened?” Peggy wondered.

“Her husband brought her the root beer at work right before closing, about five p.M. Apparently, she didn’t drink it all. She sipped on it until she left the bank at six when he picked her up and they went out for dinner. It was their anniversary.”

Peggy asked, “What bank did she work for?”

Samson looked through his papers. “Bank of America in downtown Columbia.”

Al nodded when she looked at him. “It’s too big a coincidence that both victims worked for Bank of America.”

Samson was astonished. “Do you think there’s a plot against Bank of America employees?”

“I guess I may be here in my official capacity after all,” Al said. “I’m going to have to speak to the Columbia police. Maybe together we can find out what’s going on.”

Al used his cell phone to call the detective in charge of Molly Stone’s case. Peggy and Dr. Samson accompanied him to the downtown precinct, against his better judgment.

“You’ll need us,” Peggy argued. “Besides, I didn’t come all this way to sit in a cafeteria and wait for you.”

“And you wouldn’t know there was a link between these two cases without us,” Samson agreed with her while he looked through the information she brought about Mark Warner.

Detective Bather Ramsey was less than welcoming when they arrived at the precinct. “I think we can probably figure out who killed Ms. Stone without help from Charlotte, Detective McDonald.” His pug face was angry and hostile.

“Look here, Ramsey,” Al started, “I don’t want to solve your homicide for you. I was hoping to get your help solving
our
case of poisoning. We had one the same day as yours. It also involved a Bank of America employee.”

Ramsey’s expression changed to astonishment. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He glanced at Peggy. “Pardon my French, ma’am.”

“So you see, we have something in common,” Al continued. “But we didn’t know our vic was poisoned until yesterday. You have a head start on us. Anything you could tell me about your poisoning could help with ours.”

“What did you think happened to your vic if you didn’t think he was poisoned?” Ramsey asked, looking at the information Peggy brought about Warner.

Al explained the circumstances of the bank exec’s death. “A CSI finally brought the information to light for us. Now I find out you had a poisoning on the same day, same kind of poison.”

Ramsey nodded and picked up the phone. “I think I should call in my captain on this. If anyone is going to contact the bank, it should be him.”

While Ramsey was on the phone with the captain, Al called Lieutenant Rimer to let him know what was going on.

Peggy and Dr. Samson sat together and compared notes. Peggy wished she had both sets of police files to look at. What she had wasn’t complete. She couldn’t get the whole picture from partial facts.

“Do you think the poison could be traced?” Samson asked her.

“If there was a random sample to go with,” she replied. “We’d need that to compare to the others.”

“A conspiracy to kill bank employees in two states is a big deal,” Samson considered. “They’ll probably call in the FBI.”

“I don’t think it’s that kind of conspiracy. I hope they don’t jump to conclusions that way.”

But the captain decided to call in a bank liaison who would work with them on the poisonings. The liaison asked them not to call in the FBI until they had more information. He didn’t want to start a panic among the bank’s employees.

They all got in a large black police van and went to look at the bank branch where Molly worked. They walked through the procedure she would’ve used for closing the day she worked. They looked through the surveillance video footage between the time when her husband brought the root beer and when she left the bank with him. Only a handful of customers came into the bank during that time. Molly handled three of them at her window. Two women and one man.

“Unless the husband brought the root beer with the poison in it,” the captain said, “the drink had to be poisoned here by one of these people.”

“What about the people she worked with?” Al asked him.

“We questioned them in depth several times. None of them seem to have any motive to kill her,” Ramsey answered.

“And their psychological profiles don’t add up that way,” the BofA liaison added. “We carefully screen all our employees.”

“Which brought us back to the husband.” Ramsey stuck his hands in his pockets. “But no matter how we looked at this boy, he didn’t fit the pattern for someone who murders his wife. His prints were all over the root beer bottle. There wasn’t a life insurance policy. We all felt he just didn’t have it in him.”

“What about the bottling plant?” Al glanced up from his notes.

“We checked that out. They dumped hundreds of gallons of root beer for us. Not a tainted bottle in them. Except for this one.” The captain answered his cell phone as he finished speaking.

“That leaves us with these three people,” Ramsey finished. “We identified two of them. These two.” He pointed to the man and one woman on the tape. “Neither one of them had any connection to the victim.”

“What about this one?” Al asked the tape operator to stop. “What’s she doing over there anyway? Nobody needs to lean in that close.”

“We think she could be our suspect. Unfortunately, we can’t ID her. She came in and asked for change for a twenty. Notice she’s wearing gloves, so we can’t even get fingerprints from the twenty. Not that it would matter with that much money and that many prints without a comparison. If this is what she really looks like, she’s tall, long dark hair, slender build.”

Al looked at Peggy. “Could be Ms. Prinz.”

“What was your system of delivery on the poison in Charlotte?” The captain finished his phone call and questioned Al.

“We’re not sure yet. CSI is still working on it. Could be root beer for all we know. We
do
have a suspect who matches this woman on the tape.”

“Does she have some beef with Bank of America?” Ramsey asked.

“No. Her thing was the man.” Al’s face suddenly lit up. “We need to check out a few facts about this. If our suspect was responsible for Ms. Stone’s death as well, maybe they had something else in common.”

“Such as . . . the man?” Ramsey followed his thinking.