“I haven’t had a chance,” Pace replied honestly. “From what you told me, there didn’t sound like much reason to hurry.”
“There is now,” Jackson said. “It tweaked me a little when you pointed out I’d only tested for poisons and not for anything that could make death look natural. So I thought about ways you could kill someone without being obvious. There aren’t many.”
Pace was listening intently. “And you found something?”
“I tested a few theories and, I found something. You remember the Von Bulow case?”
“Vaguely,” Pace said.
“Oh, well, that’s not important. But it’s what prompted me to test for insulin.”
“Insulin?” Pace asked. “That’s for diabetes. Justin didn’t have diabetes, did he?”
“No,” Jackson said. “But his bloodstream was loaded with insulin.”
“Paint me a layman’s picture, Doctor,” Pace said.
“In its natural form, insulin is produced by the pancreas and regulates blood-sugar levels. If your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin—or doesn’t produce enough—blood sugar goes up, sometimes way up, and the result after a period of time can be heart attacks, stroke, blindness, gangrene, any one of a number of pretty horrible side effects. That’s why diabetics take insulin, either orally or subcutaneously, so they get what they need that their bodies aren’t providing.”
“And?”
“If I were going to check your blood sugar, I would tell you not to eat or drink anything after dinner, and to come in for the blood test about eight or nine the next morning. That’s called a fasting blood-sugar. I would expect, under normal circumstances, to find anywhere from six to twenty-six micro-units of insulin in your blood. Justin Smith’s stomach was empty, suggesting he hadn’t eaten in six or seven hours. His natural insulin level should have been down near the fasting level. But when I checked, his reading was ninety micro-units per cc. That’s off the scale. Coupled with the needle mark on his arm, I would say he was injected with fifty to fifty-five units of insulin intravenously.”
“And that would—”
“You’re not supposed to take insulin intravenously,” Jackson continued. “That would make an overdose even worse. Fifty to fifty-five units would have dropped his blood sugar too low for the body to survive it. Within minutes of the injection, he would have gone into seizure and died.”
“You think that’s what happened?” Pace asked.
“With a reading of ninety micro-units on an empty stomach? Yes, I think that’s what happened. I’m certain enough that I would testify in a court of law.”
Pace whistled softly. “Why didn’t you find this during the original autopsy?” he asked, more curious than accusatory.
“It’s not among the things we normally test for,” Jackson said. “I wouldn’t have spotted the needle mark. At least I wouldn’t have had second thoughts about it, if you hadn’t asked me to watch for anything suspicious. And I wouldn’t have tested for insulin if you hadn’t goaded me.”
So there it was, all laid out in a nicely corroborated package. Justin Smith becomes suspicious of the bird-strike theory. He takes his suspicions to Vernon Lund. And the same night he winds up dead of an overdose of insulin, administered to make death look natural.
Grimly, Pace told Sachs and Padgett of the medical examiner’s findings.
“What are these people hiding?” a stunned Ken Sachs demanded. “Who are they?”
“Well, Justin did come out here that day to see Vernon Lund,” Pace said.
“No,” Padgett responded. “With all due respect, Ken, Vernon Lund isn’t capable of ordering dinner without help, let alone somebody’s murder. And he wasn’t the only one who knew Justin was here and what he wanted.”
“Oh?”
“Sometime after Justin left, Vernon called me in to discuss the Times’ allegations. Elliott Parkhall was there, too.”
“Parkhall’s the one who strikes me as a little wimp,” Sachs said.
“The whole time we’re talking to Mr. Lund, Elliott is sweating and getting real jumpy,” Padgett said. “Then he starts raving about the press sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong. He was quite agitated. Near as I can recall, he said something like ‘They’re all trash, and we ought to wipe ’em out every time we catch ’em at it.’”
“Jesus,” Sachs said. “You don’t suppose he took himself literally?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Pace said.
Padgett was eager to get involved, so Sachs explained their theory about the amount of bird in the engine.
“That’s the most unbelievable thing I ever heard,” the IIC responded. “The power-plants team would have noticed.”
“Not necessarily,” Sachs said. “Not if they accepted at face value what was given to them. There’s bird all over the engine, therefore there must have been a bird strike. How much bird there is becomes irrelevant. It’s there. You accept that as a given and go on.”
Padgett nodded. “So what are you looking for in this pile of blades?”
“More blood,” Sachs said. “As my able colleague pointed out, if there was a bird strike, somewhere in here are the blades the bird actually hit. They should have blood on them. They should be as splattered with blood as those still attached to the fan.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Padgett acknowledged.
And so the three of them looked. They looked carefully, at everything. A few times they thought they’d found something, but the smears turned out to be caked mud or dried muddy water. At the end of an hour, they’d been through the entire pile, and there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere in it.
Padgett got up from his couch. “I don’t even want to begin to believe this,” he said.
Sachs stood up beside him. “Neither do I. But I don’t think I have any choice. I think it’s likely that whoever sprayed the bird gore in the engine missed these blades because they were still scattered all to hell-and-gone around the airport property. Our conspirators couldn’t find them.”
Padgett and Pace both nodded.
“Jim, I want these blades moved downtown to the lab right away in a locked and guarded vehicle,” Sachs ordered. “I want every surface, every edge, gone over by every scientific means at our disposal. I don’t want there to be even a single, remote, one-in-a-million chance that some evidence of the hawk is overlooked. And you don’t have to explain to anyone why we’re looking. Tell them I authorized the examination and if anybody has any questions, they can call me. When you get the blades out, I want this hangar sealed until further notice. Armed guards around the perimeter. Nobody gets in or out without your authorization and mine. They have to have both, okay?”
Padgett nodded.
Sachs watched the IIC depart and folded his arms as though he felt a chill. “Well, the investigation was never closed, so I guess it wouldn’t be right to say it’s been reopened,” he said. “But it’s certainly gone off on a new tangent.”
“Not to be parochial about this, Ken, but when can I write the story? Once word gets out that Justin Smith was murdered, everybody’s going to be turning over rocks.”
Sachs gave him a rueful smile. “You can be parochial all you want. That’s your job. You can write the story as soon as the lab finishes examination of the blades. I’ll call you personally, and I promise you at least a full twenty-four hours alone with the story. If the lab doesn’t find any more than we found, it will be conclusive in my eyes that we’ve got a problem here. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough, if it doesn’t leak before you call me.”
“It won’t leak. You, Jim, and I are the only ones who know, and Jim and I aren’t going to talk to anybody. It won’t leak from the lab because nobody at the lab will know why they’re checking the blades. You’re safe.”