The garage is filled with dangrous fumes.
Finally Tal turned to the autopsy results. Death was, as they’d thought, due to carbon monoxide poisoning. There were no contusions, tissue damage or ligature marks to suggest they’d been forced into the car. There was alcohol in the blood, 010 percent in Sam’s system, 0.19 in Elizabeth’s, neither particularly high. But they both had medication in their bloodstreams, too. One, in particular, intrigued him.
Present in both victims were unusually large quantities of 9-fluoro, 7-chloro-1,3-dihydro-1-methyl-5-phenyl-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin, 5-hydroxytryptamine and N-(1-phenethyl-4-piperidyl) propionanilide citrate.
This was, the ME’s report continued, an analgesic/antianxiety drug sold under the trade name “Luminux.” The amount in their blood meant that the couple had nearly three times the normally prescribed strength of the drug, though it did not, the ME concluded, make them more susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning or otherwise directly contribute to their deaths.
Tal supposed it had been this combination of liquor and the drug that had been responsible for the unsteady handwriting.
Looking over his desk — too goddamn many papers! — he finally found another document and carefully read the inventory of the house, which the Crime Scene Unit had prepared. The Whitleys had plenty of medicine — for Sam’s heart problem, as well as for Elizabeth’s arthritis and other maladies — but no Luminux.
Shellee brought him the coffee. Her eyes cautiously took in the cluttered desktop.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
“Still lookin’ tired, boss.”
“Didn’t sleep well.” Instinctively he pulled his striped tie straight, kneaded the knot to make sure it was tight.
“It’s fine, boss,” she whispered, nodding at his shirt. Meaning: Quit fussing.
He winked at her.
Thinking about common denominators…
The Bensons’ suicide note, too, had been sloppy, Tal recalled. He rummaged through the piles on his desk and found their lawyer’s card then dialed the man’s office and was put through to him.
“Mr. Metzer, this’s Detective Simms. I met you at the Bensons’ a few days ago.”
“Right. I remember.”
“This is a little unusual but I’d like permission to take a blood sample.”
“From me?” he asked in a startled voice.
“No, no, from the Bensons.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to update our database about medicines and diseases of recent suicides. It’ll be completely anonymous.”
“Oh. Well, sorry, but they were cremated this morning.”
“They were? That was fast.”
“I don’t know if it was fast or it was slow. But that’s what they wanted. It was in their instructions to me. They wanted to be cremated as soon as possible and the contents of the house sold—”
“Wait. You’re telling me—”
“The contents of the house sold immediately.”
“When’s that going to happen?”
“It’s probably already done. We’ve had dealers in the house since Sunday morning. I don’t think there’s much left.”
“Can they do that? Isn’t it a crime scene?”
“There were some Greeley police officers there. They said the county called it a suicide so they didn’t think anybody’d care.”
Tal remembered the man at the Whitleys’ house — there to arrange for the liquidation of the estate. He wished he’d known about 2124-ing scenes at the Bensons’ house.
Common denominators…
“Do you still have the suicide note?”
“I didn’t take it. I imagine it was thrown out when the service cleaned the house.”
This’s all way too fast, Tal thought. He looked over the papers on his desk. “Do you know if either of them was taking a drug called Luminux?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Can you give me Mr. Benson’s cardiologist’s name?”
A pause then the lawyer said, “I suppose it’s okay. Yeah. Dr. Peter Brody. Over in Glenstead.”
Tal was about to hang up but then a thought occurred to him. “Mr. Metzer, when I met you on Friday, didn’t you tell me the Bensons weren’t religious?”
“That’s right. They were atheists…What’s this all about, Detective?”
“Like I say — just getting some statistics together. That’s all. Thanks for your time.”
He got Dr. Brody’s number and called the doctor’s office. The man was on vacation and his head nurse was reluctant to talk about patients, even deceased ones. She did admit, though, that Brody had not prescribed Luminux for them.
Tal then called the head of Crime Scene and learned that the gun the Bensons had killed themselves with was in an evidence locker. He asked that Latents look it over for prints. “Can you do a rush on it?”
“Happy to. It’s comin’ outa your budget, Detective,” the man said cheerfully. “Be about ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks.”
As he waited for the results on the gun, Tal opened his briefcase and noticed the three letters Sandra Whitley had in her purse at her parents’ house. Putting on a pair of Buy-Rite Pharmacy latex gloves once again, he ripped open the three envelopes and examined the contents.
The first one contained a bill from their lawyer for four hours of legal work, performed that month. The project, the bill summarized, was for “estate planning services.”
Did he mean redoing the will? Was this another common denominator? Metzer had said that the Bensons had just redone theirs.
The second letter was an insurance form destined for the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital, where Sam had been a patient.
Nothing unusual here.
But then he opened the third letter.
He sat back in his chair, looking at the ceiling then down at the letter once more.
Debating.
Then deciding that he didn’t have any choice. When you’re writing a proof you go anywhere the numbers take you. Tal rose and walked across the office, to the Real Crimes side of the pen. He leaned into an open door and knocked on the jamb. Greg LaTour was sitting back in his chair, boots up. He was reading a short document. “Fucking liar,” he muttered and put a large check mark next to one of the paragraphs. Looking up, he cocked an eyebrow.
Humping his calculator…
Tal tried to be pleasant. “Greg. You got a minute?”
“Just.”
“I want to talk to you about the case.”
“Case?” The man frowned. “Which case?”
“The Whitleys.”
“Who?”
“The suicides.”
“From Sunday? Yeah, okay. Drew a blank. I don’t think of suicides as cases.” LaTour’s meaty hand grabbed another piece of paper and pulled it in front of him. He looked down at it.
“You said that the cleaning lady’d probably been there? She’d left the glove prints? And the tire treads.”
It didn’t seem that he remembered at first. Then he nodded. “And?”
“Look.” He showed LaTour the third letter he’d found at the Whitleys. It was a note to Esmeralda Costanzo, the Whitleys’ cleaning lady, thanking her for her years of help and saying they wouldn’t be needing her services any longer. They’d enclosed the check that LaTour had spotted in the register.
“They’d put the check in the mail,” Tal pointed out. “That means she wasn’t there the day they died. Somebody else wore the gloves. And I got to thinking about it? Why would a cleaning lady wear kitchen gloves to clean the rest of the house? Doesn’t make sense.”
LaTour shrugged. His eyes dipped to the document on his desk and then returned once more to the letter Tal held.
The statistician added, “And that means the car wasn’t hers either. The tread marks. Somebody else was there around the time they died.”
“Well, Tal—”
“Couple other things,” he said quickly. “Both the Whitleys had high amounts of a prescription drug in their bloodstream. Some kind of narcotic. Luminux. But there were no prescription bottles for it in their house. And their lawyer’d just done some estate work for them. Maybe revising their wills.”