"You never pay for a body?"
"Absolutely not. We can't make budget as it is.
Does that wreck your plot?"
"It may."
"In that case, I'm sorry."
"One last time, just so I can be sure: There is no way someone can profit from selling bodies to medical schools?"
"Absolutely none."
"Thank you, Mr. Bishoff. You've been very helpfull."
"My pleasure. Now I have one question for you.
"Yes?"
"Do you think I should get an agent before or after I write my book?"
Laura smiled. "I think after might be better, Mr. Bishoff," she said.
She hung up and then dialed the number of the medical examiner Thaddeus Bushnell. A recording told her that the line was out of order.
Ten minutes later she was in a cab headed toward his lower Beacon Hill town house, hoping that in midday she Might find him a bit more sober and easier to talk to.
At the Turn onto Bushnell's street, she spotted the wooden barriers on the sidewalk in front of his place.
The building itself was gutted-a burned-out shell.
The stench of smoke and charred wood hung heavy in the air.
She asked the cabbie to wait and walked to the barriers. A uniformed fire inspector was standing beside what remained of the front doorway.
"What happened?" she asked.
The man stared at her.
"The house burned down," he said, his tone asking: What do you think happened?
"What about Dr. Bushnell?"
Laura sensed ominously that she needn't have bothered asking the question.
"You a friend?"
"I… I knew him."
The man softened. "I'm sorry," he said. "The old guy never made it out."
"I knew he would do this to himself," Laura said.
"Pardon?"
"Dr. Bushnell. I saw him the other night, and he was drinking too much and smoking. I was frightened that something like this might happen to him."
The inspector looked back at the house, and then at Laura.
"You a reporter?" he asked.
"No, why?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm… I'm visiting from the South. Why?"
"Because I'm not supposed to talk to anyone until we've checked on a few more things."
"Please," Laura said, suddenly apprehensive.
"Please tell me what happened. It… it's very important." The man sized her up for a few moments and then said simply, "The fire was set.
Professional job from the looks of it, but not the best. The old guy was on the second floor. The thing was put together in such a Way that he probably couldn't have gotten out even if he wanted to…
Miss? You look a little pale."
Laura pictured the frail little man, wrapped in his blanket, speaking of events long past as if they had happened yesterday.
"I'm feeling a little pale," she said. "There are some terrible things going on around here."
The man gazed again at the shell that was once Thaddeus Bushnell's home.
"Yes. Yes, I suppose there are." He put his hand out and peered overhead. "Rain's startin'," he said.
Except for the elegant county Medical Library on Huntington Avenue, the Hoffman Medical Library at White Memorial was the largest in the city.
Eric planned to start his research there with a screening of basic textbooks in the areas of toxicology, metabolism, and cardiOlOgy- He would pay special attention to the bibliographies at the end of each pertinent chapter, and set up a card file of the journal articles that would form phase two of his project. His operating thesis was that somehow the two patients had encountered the same Poison or environmental Pollutant-a toxin powerful enough to cause cardiovascular collapse and profound metabolic slowing.
It was just after four in the afternoon. Earlier in the day a light rain had moved in on the city, floating a slick of embedded oil up onto the highways. The result-a series of multivictim accidents-had kept him at work in the E.R. longer than he had wished.
Finally he had signed out to the senior resident Joe Silver had appointed-to take Reed's place, and agreed to split shifts with the man each day until a more permanent arrangement could be made.
Earlier in the day, Laura had phoned with a report of her call to the anatomy department and news of the probable murder of Thaddeus Bushnell.
Hoping to come up with an explanation for the similarities between the deaths of John Doe and Loretta Leone, Eric had battled back the urge to tell her right then of the horrible error he might have made. Very soon, though, they would have to have that talk.
With a growing sense of urgency, he piled the texts on the corner of a table and began. Within an hour his list of toxins was at forty.
Aconite, curare, botulin, belladonna, sapotoxin, physostigmine, tetrodotoxin, cyanide, arsenic, acetanilide, antimony, barbiturates, bee venom, mandrake root, muscarine, amanita, picrotoxin, reptile neurotoxin, strychnine…
One by one on index cards he fisted the substances, their toxic doses, routes of administration, sources, and principal symptoms. Each of them was capable of causing death by neurologic or cardiac paralysis, and by inference, specific doses of each might induce a marked metabolic slowdown. The task of sorting them out seemed overwhelming. But so, too, Eric reminded himself, were the hundreds of organic chemistry formulas he was once faced with memorizing.
An hour passed, then another, as he worked his way through his cards.
Bit by bit the list grew smaller.
For a time, one toxin or another would catch his fancy, only to be discarded by the question- How could both victims have been exposed? or Could the effect of the substance possibly stop after metabolic paralysis and before death? Amanita, a mushroom poison, was one of the leading candidates. So for a time were strychnine and the toad poison bufotoxin. But again and again, as if daring him to refute it, one substance kept cropping up. tetrodotoxin, a product found in certain species of puffer fish, and believed by one researcher at least to be the long-sought-after zombi poison.
In Japan certain chefs were certified by the government in the preparation of fugu, a puffer-fish sashimi dish that straddled the line between food and drug. The chefs, some of whom occasionally died from sampling their wares, sought to preserve just enough tetrodotoxin to cause flushing of the skin, tingling of the lips and extremities, and a mild euphoria. But numerous cases of puffer-fish poisoning had been documented, the effects being, in part, pulmonary edema due to cardiac slowing, respiratory failure, and marked metabolic depression.
Could Loretta Leone and John Doe somehow have inadvertently eaten fugu?
The idea made no sense.
Outside the library the gray evening gave way to ebony night.
Inside, the pile of journals on Eric's table grew. Amanita mushrooms, fugu, aconite plant alkaloid. One by one, Eric pared his list until finally only those three remained. Each, in the proper dosage, seemed capable of inducing a state of metabolic slowdown that might be indistinguishable from death.
Behind him the library door opened, then closed.
Eric did not look up. Moments later he felt a massive hand on his shoulder.
" Dr. Subarsky, — I presume," he said as he enated strychnine once and for all from his prospects.
"You are certainly a diligent little beaver," the biochemist said.
"Surely you must have something more exotic to do with your free time."
He dropped a load of books on a nearby table, settled. in across from Eric, and scanned the books he was using.
"Journal of Toxicology… Poisons of the World… Journal of Ethnopharmacology…
"See, I am doing something exotic," Eric said, realizing only then how much time had elapsed.
"And what, exactly, is that?"
Subarsky leaned back and propped his gunboat sneakers on the table.
I "I'm looking into the case of the lady that Reed Marshall pronounced dead Yesterday," Eric said.