"She doesn't have his address. just a phone number.
I've called it several times, but all I get is an answering machine. He hasn't returned my calls. I was hoping you'd have his office address."
Telford considered this information for a moment.
He looked uncomfortable. "I don't think Oberhurst has an office."
"What's he do, work out of his home?"
"I guess. We always met here."
"What about bills? Where did you send his checks?"
"Cash. He wanted cash. Up front."
"Sounds a little unusual."
"yeah. Well, he's a little unusual." Telford paused.
"Look, I'll try to help you find Oberhurst, but there's something you need to know. Some of the stuff he does isn't on the up-and-up. You follow me?"
"I'm not sure I do."
Telford leaned forward conspiratorially. "Say you want to find out what someone says when they think the conversation is private, you hire Oberhurst. See what I mean?"
"Electronics?"
Telford nodded. "Phones, rooms. He hinted he's not above a little b. and e. And the guy's got a record for it. I think he did penitentiary time down south somewhere for burglary."
Sounds pretty unsavory."
"Yeah. I didn't like him. I only used him that one time and I'm sorry I did."
"Why?" Telford tapped his fingers on his desk. Betsy let him decide what he wanted to say.
"Can we keep this confidential?"
Betsy nodded.
"what Peg wanted… Well, she was a little hysterical. Didn't take the divorce well. Anyway, I was sort of like a middleman with this. She said she wanted someone to do something, a private investigator who wouldn't ask too many questions. I hooked them up and paid him his money. I never really used him to work on the case.
"Anyway, someone beat up Mark Fulton about a week or so after I introduced Oberhurst to Peg. It was pretty bad from what I hear. The police thought it was a robbery."
"Why do you think different?"
"Oberhurst tried to shake me down. He came to my office a week after the beating. Showed me a newspaper article about it. He said he could keep me out of it for two thousand bucks.
"I told him to take a hike. I didn't know a goddamn thing about it. For all I knew, he could have been making the whole thing up. I mean, he reads the article, figures he can touch me for two grand and I won't squawk because the amount's not worth the risk."
"Weren't you afraid?"
"Damn straight. He's a big guy. He even looks like a gangster. He has a broken nose, talks tough. The whole bit. Only, I figured he was testing me. If I'd given in, he would have kept coming back. Besides, I didn't do anything wrong. Like I said, I only hooked them up."
"How do I get to Oberhurst?" Betsy asked.
"I got his name from Steve Wong at a party. Try him Say I told you to call."
Telford thumbed through a lawyer's directory and wrote Wong's number on the back of a business card.
"Thanks."
"Glad I could help. And be careful with Oberhurst, he's bad news."
Betsy ate lunch at Zen, then shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue for a suit. It was one-fifteen when she returned to her office. There were several phone messages in her slot and two dozen red roses on her desk. Her first thought was that they were from Rick, and the idea made her heart pound. Rick sent her flowers when they were dating and on Valentine's Day. It was something he would do if he wanted to come home.
"Who are these from?" she asked Ann.
"I don't know. They were just delivered. There's a card."
Betsy put down her phone messages. A small envelope was taped to the vase. Her fingers trembled as she pried open the flap of the envelope and pulled out a small white card that said:
For man's best friend, his lawyer.
You did a bang-up job, A VERY GRATEFUL CLIENT Martin Betsy put down the card. Her excitement turned sour.
"They're from Darius," she told Ann, hoping her disappointment didn't show.
"How thoughtful."
Betsy said nothing. She had wished so hard that the flowers were from Rick. Betsy debated with herself for a moment, then dialed his number.
"Mr. Tannenbaum's office," Rick's secretary said.
"Julie, this is Betsy. Is Rick in?"
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Tannenbaum, He's out of the office all day. Should I tell him you called?"
"No, thanks. That's okay."
The line went dead. Betsy held the receiver for a moment, then hung up.
What would she have said if Rick had taken the call? Would she have risked humiliation and told him she wanted to get together-? What would Rick have said? Betsy closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm her heart. To clear herself, she looked through her phone messages.
Most could be put off, but one was from Dr. Keene. When Betsy was back in control, she dialed his number.
"Sue did a good job, Betsy," the pathologist said, when they finally got down to business, "but I've got something for you."
"Let me get a pad. Okay, shoot."
"A medical examiner always collects urine samples from the body to screen for drugs. Most labs only do a d.a.u., which screens for five drugs of abuse to see if the victim used morphine, cocaine, amphetamines and so on.
That's what Sue did. I had my lab do a urine screen for other substances. We came up with strong positive barbiturate readings for the women. I retested the blood.
Every one of these ladies showed pentobarbital levels that were off scale."
"What does that mean?"
"Pentobarbital is not a common drug of abuse, which is why the lab didn't find it. It's an anesthetic."
"I don't follow."
"It's used in hospitals to anesthetize patients. This is not a drug these women would take themselves. Someone gave it to them. Now, this is where it gets strange, Betsy.
These women all had three to four milligrams percent of pentobarbital in their blood. That's a very high level. In fact, it's a fatal level."
"What are you telling me?"
"I'm telling you that the three women died from an overdose of pentobarbital, not from their wounds."
"But they were tortured."
"They were mutilated, all right. I saw burn marks that were probably from cigarettes and electrical wires, there were cuts made with razor blades, the breasts were mutilated and there's evidence that objects had been inserted into their anus. But there's a chance the women were unconscious when these injuries were inflicted. Microscopic sections from around the wounds showed an early repair process. This tells me death occurred about twelve to twenty-four hours after the wounds were inflicted."
Betsy was quiet for a moment. When she spoke she sounded confused. "That doesn't make sense, Ray. What possible benefit is there in torturing someone who's unconscious?"
"Beats me. That's your problem. I'm just a sawbones."
"What about the man?"
"Here we have a different story. First, there's no pentobarbital.
None. Second, there is evidence of repair around several wounds, indicating that he was tortured over a period of time. Death was sometime later from a gunshot wound, just like Sue said."
"How could Dr. Gregg have been fooled about the cause of death of the women?"
"Easy. You see a person cut from crotch to chest, the heart torn out, the intestines hanging out, you assume that's what killed 'em. I would have thought the same, if I hadn't found pentobarbital."
"You've given me a king-size headache, Ray."
"Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
"Very funny."
"I'm glad I could bring some joy into your life."
They hung up, but Betsy kept staring at her notes.
She doodled on the pad. The drawings made as much sense as what Dr.
Keene had just told her.
Reggie Stewart's cross-country flight arrived late at JFK, so he had to sprint through the terminal to catch the connecting, upstate flight. He felt ragged by the time the plane landed at Albany County Airport. After checking into a motel near the airport, Stewart ate a hot meal, took a shower, and exchanged his cowboy boots, jeans and a flannel shirt for a navy blue suit, a white shirt and a tie with narrow red and yellow stripes. He was feeling human again by the time he parked his rental car in the lot of Marlin Steel's corporate headquarters, fifteen minutes before his scheduled appointment with Frank Grimsbo.