“Methanol! But that’s a compound of embalming fluid, isn’t it? What if the embalming fluid did get in there?”
“That’s a concern. And in case you didn’t know, there are differences in embalming fluids. High-budget embalming fluids have less methanol but more formaldehyde. Low-budget ones, like Martin’s, have higher levels of pure methanol. Added to that is that methanol is found in lots of things, like wine and liquor. Martin was reportedly a heavy drinker. That might account for the spike, the M.E. couldn’t be sure. Bottom line, though, for a man as terminally ill as Bill Martin it wouldn’t have taken a large dose of methanol to kill him.”
She took out a file and flipped through it. “The autopsy also found organ damage, shrunken mucous membranes, stomach lining torn, all markers for methanol poisoning. And yet he had cancer throughout his body and had undergone radiation and chemotherapy. All in all the M.E. had a mess on her hands. The probable cause of death was circulatory failure, but there are lots of reasons a very elderly man with a terminal illness would have died from circulatory failure.”
“Yet killing someone with methanol, knowing he’d probably be embalmed without an autopsy, that’s pretty ingenious,” said Michelle.
“Actually that’s pretty damn scary.”
“But he must have been murdered,” said Michelle. “They couldn’t just wait around hoping Martin would die on his own and then have his body at the funeral home precisely when Bruno was passing through.” She paused. “List of suspects?”
“I really can’t say. It’s an ongoing investigation, and I’ve already told you more than I should have. I might have to pass a polygraph on this, you know.”
When the check came, Michelle was quick to grab it. As they walked out together, her friend said, “So what are you going to do? Lie low? Look for another position?”
“The ‘lying low’ part, yes; the ‘looking for another job,’ not yet.”
“So what, then?”
“I’m not ready to give up my career at the Service without a fight.”
Her friend eyed her warily. “I know that look. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking you’re FBI, and it’s better that you don’t know. Like you said, you might have to pass a polygraph.”
10
The worst day of Sean King’s life had been September 26, 1996, the day Clyde Ritter died while then Secret Service agent King was focusing on something else. Unfortunately the second worst day of his life happened to be right now. His office had been filled with police, federal agents and technical crews asking lots of questions and not getting lots of answers. Amid all this forensic foraging they’d taken fingerprint samples from King, Phil Baxter and their secretary; for elimination purposes, they said. That could cut both ways, King well knew.
The local press had arrived too. Fortunately he knew them personally and gave vague answers that they accepted with little comment. The national press would be coming very soon, because there was something extremely newsworthy about the murdered man. King had suspected it, and those suspicions were confirmed when a contingent of folks from the U.S. Marshals Service showed up on his doorstep.
The dead man, Howard Jennings, had been employed at King’s law practice as a title searcher, proofreader, overseer of trust account records and a gofer, sort of a jack-of-all-trades. His office was on the lower level of the law building. He was quiet, hardworking, and kept to himself. There was nothing whatsoever remarkable about what the man did for a living. However, he was very special in one respect.
Jennings was a member of WITSEC, the program more popularly known as witness protection. Forty-eight years old with a degree in accounting, Jennings (that, of course, wasn’t his real name) had once been gainfully employed as a bean counter for a criminal organization operating in the Midwest. These folks specialized in racketeering, extortion and money laundering and used arson, beatings, disfigurements and the occasional homicide to get their point across. The matter had attracted great national attention because of the lethality of the organization’s methods and the complexities of the case.
Jennings had quickly seen the light and helped send a slew of very dangerous folks to penitentiaries. Yet some of the most deadly had escaped the federal net; hence his enrollment in WITSEC.
Now he was a corpse and King’s headache was just beginning. As a former federal agent with high-level clearances, King had dealt with WITSEC in some joint efforts between the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals. When Jennings interviewed with him, his background check and other due diligence made King suspect that Jennings was in the program. He didn’t know for certain, of course; it wasn’t like the Marshals Service would confide in him about the identity of one of its people, but he had his suspicions, suspicions that he’d never shared with anyone. It had to do with Jennings’s paucity of references and work background, something that would occur when one has wiped out his former life.
King was not a suspect in Jennings’s murder, he was told, which, of course, meant that he was probably near the top of the list. If he informed the investigators that he believed Jennings was WITSEC, he might very well find himself in front of a grand jury. He decided to play dumb for now.
He spent the rest of the day calming down his partner. Baxter was a big, burly former UVA football player who’d spent a couple of years in the NFL riding the bench before going on to become an aggressive and highly competent trial lawyer. However, the ex-jock was not used to corpses in his office. That was a form of “sudden death” he wasn’t very comfortable with. King, on the other hand, had spent years at the Secret Service working counterfeiting and fraud involving very dangerous gangs. And he’d killed men as well. Thus he was better equipped to deal with a murder than his partner was.
King had sent his receptionist, Mona Hall, home for the day. Mona was a frail, nervous type, so the sight of blood and body would not have set well with her. However, she was also a confirmed and accomplished gossip, and King had no doubt that the local phone exchange was being burned up with wild speculation about the homicidal goings-on at the offices of King Baxter. In a quiet community such as Wrightsburg, that could lead the topics of conversation for months if not years to come.
With the building now shut down by the feds and under around-the-clock security, King Baxter had to move its legal operations temporarily to its partners’ homes. That evening the two lawyers carried out boxes, files and other work to their cars. As beefy Phil Baxter drove off in his equally large SUV, King leaned against the hood of his car and stared up at his office. With lights ablaze, the investigators were still going hard and heavy in there, scrutinizing the place for any clue as to who had put a bullet into the chest of Howard Jennings. King took in the mountain vistas behind the building. Up there was his home, a place he’d built out of the ruin of one life. It had been good therapy for him. Now?
He drove home, wondering what the next morning would bring. He ate a bowl of soup in the kitchen while he watched the local news. There were pictures of him on the screen, references to his career at the Secret Service, including his disgraced exit, his law career in Wrightsburg and assorted speculation about the dead Howard Jennings. He switched off the television and tried to focus on some work he’d brought home. However, his attention kept wandering, and he finally just sat in his den surrounded by his world of law books and boring documents and stared into space. With a jolt he came out of his musings.
He changed into shorts and a sweater, grabbed a bottle of redwine and a plastic glass and went down to the covered dock behind his house. There he boarded the twenty-foot jet boat he kept there along with a fourteen-foot sailboat and a Sea-Doo personal watercraft or PWC, which was akin to a motorcycle on water, plus a kayak and a canoe. About a half mile across at its widest point, and perhaps eight miles long with numerous coves and inlets, the lake was very popular with recreational boaters and fishermen; stripers, bluegill and catfish filled the deep, clear waters. The summer was over now, the renters and seasonal residents gone.