the obituaries of so many dead women really set her off. I told her it wasn’t me, but I could tell she wasn’t going to drop it, so she forced my hand. She has no one to blame but herself. If she’d owned a regular cell phone without Internet access, she’d still be alive. Damn iPhones.”
“She can’t breathe!” I cried as Lucille’s face went white, her eyes exploding with something dark and terrifying.
“I was your second choice?” she rasped in a wounded voice.
“Third choice,” mocked Cameron. “But who’s counting?”
She drove her foot into his instep with such might that he dropped his arm from across her throat and howled like an injured beast.
“WOO! WOO! WOO!” chanted the crowd, egging her on.
As he hopped away from her on one foot, he bumped straight into Nana, on her way back from the restroom.
“Get him, Marion!” Lucille yelled. “He’s our killer!”
“EEEEEYAAAA,” cried Nana as she made a wavy gesture with her hands. Leaping straight up, she whirled like a dervish, snapped her leg out, and—WHAM!—drove the top of her foot into Cameron’s face. His limbs jerked wildly before he tottered, stiffened, then fell backward onto the pavement with a resounding BOOM.
The audience burst out in uproarious applause.
Whistles. Hoots. Cheers.
“Is this one of those interactive theater shows like ‘Tony n’
Tina’s Wedding’?” a woman asked Lucille.
“You guys rock,” a man complimented her. He took out his wallet and made a quick check of the ground. “Where’s your donation plate?”
“Your whole entertainment was so realistic,” a bystander told Nana. “Are you a professional or amateur troupe?”
I hurried over to Lucille and put my arms around her. “Are you all right, sweetie? Did he hurt you?”
“Nope,” she said as she took a deep breath and straightened her spine. “Only my pride.”
TWENTY-TWO
AT THE INVITATION OF Detective Constable Bean, we gathered at the police station the following morning—Nana, Wally, Erik, Alex, Etienne, and myself—to tie up a score of loose ends. Cameron remained in the Dumfries police station outside of Gretna Green, waiting to be transported back to Wick under armed guard.
“We’d been monitoring his activities ever since wife number five was exhumed,” Erik explained. “What looked like an unfortunate car accident turned out to be murder, but we couldn’t pin anything on him because we couldn’t draw a connection between him and the toxin that killed her.”
Alex nodded. “When the toxicology reports come back for Isobel and Dolly, I suspect they’ll indicate that both women were poisoned.”
“The results of Isobel Kronk’s labs just came in,” said Bean. “Arsenic poisoning. When Ms. Pinker’s come back, I imagine it’ll read the same.”
“But how did he pull it off ?” I questioned. “He could never go anywhere without all of those women absolutely smothering him. How did he poison two of them without the rest of them seeing him do it?”
“Maybe he done it when he had a minute all to hisself,” said Nana. “You remember that first night in Loch Ness when your father seen the monster? Them four girls was all in the potty at the same time, ’cuz I was in there with ’em, waitin’ for the stalls to open up. You s’pose that woulda give Cameron the chance he needed to slip somethin’ into Isobel’s dessert?”
“Wouldn’t she have been able to taste it?” asked Wally.
Erik shook his head. “Not if he used white arsenic. Dissolved in a cup of coffee, I’m told it’s virtually tasteless.”
“Okay, he might have taken advantage of an opportunity there,” I agreed, “but what about Dolly?”
Wally scratched the back of his head, looking pensive. “When we first arrived in Wick, Dolly complained about a headache coming on, so she asked me if I had any over-the-counter stuff I could give her. I told her I’d have to unpack my suitcase to get to it, but Cameron overhead us and told me not to bother because he had some extra-strength acetaminophen capsules on him.”
The room grew quiet.
“I imagine the capsules were packed with arsenic,” said Etienne.
Alex nodded. “You can buy white arsenic in powdered form over the Internet, so transferring it into pain capsules was probably the easiest part of the whole process.”
“Poor Lucille.” I shivered involuntarily. “She would have been next.”
“I’m still unclear as to why Lucille’s roommate didn’t notice she was missing until the following morning,” said Etienne. He offered me a perplexed look. “Isn’t Alice usually more observant than that?”
“It’s on account of that dang ferry ride,” Nana piped up. “Alice told me she was so sick that night, she slept