pause as he listened. “Really? That puts a new spin on things. Thanks a lot, Russ, much appreciated. Yeah, right—thanks.”
He closed the cell phone and whistled softly. “That was Russell Kim from the M.E.'s office—the tox screen on our first two vics just came back.”
Lee knew Russell Kim—a quiet, dedicated Korean pathologist known for his thoroughness and reliability.
“Okay,” he said impatiently, “and—?”
Butts paused for dramatic effect. “GBH.”
“Jesus.” GBH, or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, was well known to law enforcement as the “date rape drug.” It was a soporific, and could be added to a mixed drink without the victim being aware of its presence.
“Yup, one and the same.”
Neither of them said what they were both thinking—that Ana’s tox screen results would be identical. Lee tried not to think about her last hours, but he couldn’t help it—he could only hope that perhaps the barbiturate effect of the drug had made the ordeal less horrible, but he wasn’t ready to bet on it.
“That still doesn’t explain the lack of forced entry in the bathtub killing,” Lee said.
“Right. Either the killer gives it to him somewhere else or follows him into the apartment and forces him to drink it there. Either way, we still have missing pieces.”
Lee turned onto Route 202, leaving the interstate to cut straight southwest through the farm fields of central Jersey, heading down to the Delaware River town of Lambertville. His mother and his niece lived not far from where they were going, but he would be seeing them in a few days, and today’s trip was not about pleasure.
“This part of Jersey is real pretty, isn’t it?” Butts mused as they cruised past fields of grazing cows and horses. The sun sparkled on the damp meadows, the long grasses catching the yellow morning light in sprays of silver and gold.
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. But his mind was not on the beauty of the summer morning. He was thinking of the grim necessity of their task—to learn what they could about the life of a young woman whose time had ended far too soon.
The Swan Hotel was an eighteenth-century building tucked in between taller structures built a century later on Main Street in the former factory town of Lambertville, which hugged the valley between the Delaware to the west and the hills rising to the east. Lee knew the town well. When he was growing up it had the appearance of a hardbitten working-class town gone to seed. Lambertville was originally a hub on the D&R canal, but with the advent of the trucking industry, canal and rail traffic slowed to a trickle, and the town dried up.
Just across the Delaware was the hamlet of New Hope, Pennsylvania, accessible by car or by a footbridge spanning the river. With its thriving gay community, boutiques, cute restaurants, and B & B’s, many lodged in eighteenth-century buildings, it was a major tourist destination. Lambertville, its bulkier, lumpy cousin, watched from across the river as New Hope rapidly went from chic to gawdy, and then finally passé. Tourists still flocked to the overpriced boutiques and restaurants—Lee secretly continued to enjoy several of them himself—but the pronouncement among locals was that New Hope was hopelessly prettified, had been overrun by tourists, and—worst of all—had lost its authenticity.
Meanwhile, on the Delaware’s eastern shore, Lambertville was discovering itself—but without the sense of excess that had doomed New Hope to the scorn of local residents. Young professional couples were buying the handsome, sturdy town houses and fixing them up. Local businesses popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. The town was slowly shaking off its years of depression and realizing that ugly ducklings too could become swans—and with a minimum of fairy lights, purple shutters and lime-green window boxes. (Lee liked New Hope, complete with purple shutters and fairy lights, but never would have admitted this to his mother, who represented the mainstream, local conservative taste. She had not shied away from pronouncing the harshest possible verdict on New Hope: it was, that horror of horrors, so tacky.)
Central to Lambertville’s renaissance was the Swan Hotel. A low wooden building dating from 1743, it had been built as a tavern, and, in the late 1950s, was returned to its original use. It quickly became a gathering place for groups of aging Yale graduates, whose rivalry with their fellow Ivy Leaguers from Princeton, just a few miles to the east, was well known. On any given night when Lee was a teenager, you could hear the inebriated strains of “The