sitting in the sun? I wouldn’t.”
Brian smirked. “I’ll feed them to Kam. That way, we’ll find out for sure.”
“Why—” But I knew why. Brian and Kam worked together, and the fact that Marty wasn’t speaking to me probably affected their friendship as well as their working relationship. Brian was taking my side. “Sure. If Kam doesn’t keel over, you can try one, too. Just make sure that you nuke them first. Kill off the biggest cooties.”
Brian took the plate, but he didn’t look happy. I didn’t care, he said he’d do it, and he would. That was one of the things I loved about him.
Brian came home Tuesday night, a look of disbelief on his face. “I think we have a positive for ricin. I would have called you, but I asked Roddy to run the test again, just to make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong. The mass spectrophotometer is his baby.”
“Rice ’n’ what?” I said. “Mass what?”
“Just ricin. It’s derived from the waste of processing castor beans. A powerful poison. I remember reading that it was used on an umbrella tip to poison someone in London. And the mass spectrophotometer takes the sample you give it and determines the molecular weight of all the compounds in it. Then it tells you what the ‘mother’ was. In this case, it was ricin.”
“So there’s no chance it could have gotten into the food accidentally?” I was reaching, I knew.
“None. The symptoms show up in a matter of hours, and if you’re not treated—well, there is no antidote, by the way—you can die within a couple of days.”
“So no one got into it at the wedding,” I said, half to myself. “Thank God for that, at least.”
Just then, Brian’s shorts rang. He pulled his phone from his pocket and answered it. “Yeah? Hey. Seriously? Wow. Okay, thanks, man. Just put it someplace…oh. Good idea. Thanks again.”
He hung up. “It was Roddy. He’s confirmed it. Holy shit.”
I sat down. “Yeah.”
“Okay, well, first thing, we should call the cops.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Which ones?”
“Hell, all of them. Stone Harbor first? I mean, that’s where the stuff showed up. And you know Bader there, so that can’t hurt.”
“I suppose.”
I called, and Bader was in. He greeted me in a friendly fashion. After he’d heard my story, he was concerned and then annoyed.
“You should have called me right away,” he said gruffly. “You shouldn’t go tampering with evidence like that.”
“What evidence? I mean, we know now. And if someone had eaten it, I guess we would have found out quickly enough. But at the time, what was I supposed to do? Call you in to investigate a plate of food? There was no crime scene!”
“You might have brought it straight to me, if you were that worried,” he insisted.
“Would you have believed me? And based on what evidence could you have brought it to the State Police crime lab? You know better than I how backed up and underfunded they are.”
“Just let me talk to your husband,” Bader said.
“Why?” I liked Bader, but he had an old-fashioned chauvinistic streak that occasionally rubbed me the wrong way. Like calling women girls, and that sort of thing.
“Don’t get up on your high horse. He was the one who conducted the test, right?”
“Hang on.” I handed the phone to Brian.
“Hello? Oh, yes, positive without a doubt. Or at least, so little doubt as to be…what? United Pharmaceuticals. In Cambridge. Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t be disturbed. The whole thing, plate and the rest of the sample? It’s been put into a storage freezer. Yep, very tightly wrapped and we marked it with tape that says “radioactive,” so I don’t think anyone will confuse it with their lunch. Just me, and my colleague. Emma and the chef, that’s right. Yes, we have her card,” Brian said, nodding at me, as I dug it out of my purse and waved it at him. “You’ll contact her? Good.”
There were a few more pauses, and I wished I’d put them on speaker phone. “No, it’s directed toward Emma,” Brian said. “Completely. No, we don’t know who, but it’s getting more and more serious all the time. I’m more than concerned. I’m scared out of my wits, actually.”
I put my hand on his arm.
“I didn’t catch that? Well, there was no body found, and there seem to be other clues that it’s him…his style, if you like. He would be the most likely—Perry Taylor’s in prison, isn’t she? I think it’s possible.