Fit To Be Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 1) (14 page)

Twenty-Two

“Poisons? We’re going where? Aggie, did you hit your head? Are you dizzy?”

“Nope. I’m perfectly lucid.”

My forehead did feel peculiar. I stretched my bangs down over the point of impact and discovered it hurt to touch my brow.

“Steven Eagleton is meeting us at the San Antonio Testing Laboratory. I found the lab in the yellow pages and called him on Friday...told him I had evidence somebody might be poisoning health club members.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Your sickness is from poison? How do you know?”

“Because I stopped eating at Tofu Temptations Grill, but whenever I worked out at Fit and Firm, I felt terrible, sometimes right away, sometimes an hour or more later. I had headaches, perspired, felt flushed and became irritable and confused. I acted weird in Dr. Carmody’s class. There’s no telling what I said. You know how sick I was at Sheldon’s party Thursday night. If food from the grill wasn’t making me sick, the only other substances entering my body had to come from the locker room, most likely from toiletries. So I swiped a few bottles to have them analyzed.”

Her eyes opened wider. “I used their sprays and creams, too. I remember feeling ill once. Since I always shower and change before going to Conrad’s office, I decided to bring my own products.”

“Good thing you did.”

She furrowed her brow. “What about other people who use the club?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.” I wasn’t ready to tell her I suspected the poison was intended primarily for me and was related to Holly’s death.

“Do you think somebody poisoned bottles in the men’s locker room, too?”

I thought about Harry Thorne’s hospitalization. “I don’t know. The same housekeeper cleans both areas between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. when there’s hardly anybody there. Anyone could switch poisoned bottles for regular bottles and put them on her cleaning tray. She could carry them back and forth without even knowing it.” I knew what Meredith would say. I was ready.

“Surely, Aggie, you told Sam about this.”

“He said to have the bottles analyzed, and when we obtained answers, he’d take the investigation from there.” My ability to lie was downright amazing.

In my explanation to Meredith, I left out two things (besides the fact that somebody’d pushed me): my head throbbed from whapping it on the floor when I landed, and I’d agreed to pay extra to get the poison evaluation quickly, in case the lab felt compelled to report its findings to SAPD. I intended to go back to the health club armed with new knowledge and without interference from nosy police officers.

Meredith drove south on IH 35 and exited at South Laredo Street. We saw the San Antonio Testing Laboratory from the freeway. The backside of the building was painted with a replica of the solar system on a bright blue background. This establishment was definitely not a secret agency.

The yellow page ad said the lab could analyze metals, volatile and semi-volatile compounds, and had a microbiology lab to analyze bacteria and a wet chemistry lab. I wasn’t sure what all that meant, but lab director Steve Eagleton had assured me his laboratory was adequate for testing the contents of Fit and Firm’s bottles.

When Meredith got out of the car, I transferred Harry’s boxing photograph and my magnifying glass from the evidence bag to my purse. I didn’t want Eagleton speculating about why I possessed those items.

We rang the bell and Eagleton let us in. Tall and thin, like a clothespin with sandy hair, he pierced us with hazel eyes. He sized us up, giving Meredith a thorough perusal. He asked us a few questions before accepting my gym bag containing the bounty.

I told him since I repeatedly felt ill after working out at Fit and Firm, my SAPD friend suggested I have the club’s toiletries analyzed. I intimated the detective had urged me to grab samples from the club on Saturday for immediate analysis. If they proved toxic or allergenic, police could notify the manager before the club opened Monday morning.

Naturally, I didn’t reveal Sam’s name or breathe a word about Holly Holmgreen. A
Flash-News
obituary had reported her death, but I figured Eagleton would immerse himself in studying test tubes and not connect our visit with her demise. Besides, she’d been run over, not poisoned. He led us to his office, a modest room that included a wooden desk, three serviceable chairs and a shelf against one wall covered with magazines, mysterious gadgets, reports and a bottle of Eco Toilet Sanitizer.

“Let’s have a look at what you brought.” He pulled on sterile gloves and lifted each item from the bag. Holding the perfume atomizer at arm’s length, he sniffed and set the bottle on his desk without comment. His eyebrows peaked when he saw the bath crystals from Grace’s house. When he found the second bag of crystals, he eyed me quizzically.

“I got them from two separate locations. Could you label one ‘home’ and one ‘club?’”

He nodded, drew markers from his desk drawer and tagged the crystals as I instructed.

He seemed less interested in the washcloths, but he honed in on Fit and Firm’s opaque bottles, which were supposedly filled with body lotion, body cream and hair spray. Holding them up, he studied the delivery plungers.

“These bottles are identical except the plungers have different sized holes to release substances. Some liquids are naturally thicker than others. Or something was added.”

What poisons had I absorbed through those plastic tubes?

Eagleton squinted at words on the bottles. “The club’s logo is clear, but labels describing contents are hard to read.”

“Yes. Meredith and I discovered how easy it is to confuse products.”

“Okay. Now that I know what you brought, let me give you a better idea of what we do here.” Eagleton either wanted to show off the facility, evaluate us further or both. He led us to a room with a six-foot wide refrigerator with glass doors that housed trays filled with tubes of liquid. Did the tubes hold poisons I’d read about? On the countertop behind us, three machines, slightly larger than microwaves, occupied space to the left of a sink. Trays of empty test tubes sat to the right.

“This is where we analyze volatile compounds. If someone smells an unusual odor, we go to their business and use pumps to capture air from their facility. We bring the pumps here, liquefy the contents in water and measure the amount of substances in the liquid.”

“So you change gases to liquids for analysis?” I asked.

“Or the reverse. We can also vaporize liquids to see if gases they produce are harmful.”

“A substance doesn’t have to smell bad to be poisonous, does it?”

“Not necessarily. Odors can be disguised by reducing them to liquids or combining them with other ingredients.”

“Can you give us examples of volatile compounds?”

“They vaporize if exposed to air like gasoline, paint cleaners and some polish removers. If they get too hot, they catch fire.”

My ears perked up. “The methanol used in paint varnish, paint remover and perfume is poisonous, correct?”

“You’re right. We test for methanol in our GC/MS lab. I’ll show you the lab in a minute.”

I might learn how close I’d come to being pickled. He led us into another room where refrigerators stored more liquid-filled test tubes.

“We analyze semi-volatile compounds here, like naphthalene and pesticides. They don’t catch fire, but they vaporize in air, so we keep them sealed and refrigerated.”

He proceeded to the GC/MS lab. A machine covered a linear table that filled the long narrow room. “This is our quarter-million-dollar gadget, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer or GC/MS. The device can analyze over 250,000 substances, separating compounds according to size, shape and chemical properties. It identifies the class of a suspected chemical but can’t tell us its exact makeup.”

“Can it identify poisonous substances?”

“After GC separates the sample into components, MS can identify each substance.”

“So you’ll know for sure whether there’s poison in each bottle I brought you?”

“Yes. We don’t test for poisons per se. We test for specific substances which we know can be poisonous, like methanol, alcohol, potassium...”

“Potassium permanganate?”

“Yes. The substance that looks like your bath crystals.”

Meredith turned pale. “Where did you get those?”

“By the hot tub at the club.”

Eagleton made a U-turn and led us back to his office.

“I think it’s the deodorant,” I said. “I used it more than anything else.”

“Then we’ll start with that. We’ll put your sample into GC/MS and distill it to fumes for analysis. If we find a toxic substance, we’ll obtain a duplicate of the substance and run it through GC/MS for confirmation. The duplicate must be within ten percent variation of your sample or we repeat the test.” Eagleton was all business when discussing data, but I thought he’d be a nice boss.

“When will you have results?”

“If the deodorant is poisonous, we’ll know today and do a confirmation test on Monday. If the deodorant is clean, and we need to test the other substances, we’ll have answers by the middle of the week. We’ll release the findings to you so you can inform the detective.”

Perfect. I’d get the results. After all, I was the poison recipient. “If you find poison in the deodorant, will you also test both samples of bath crystals?”

“You bet.” He seemed eager to get to work.

“I can’t thank you enough.” I handed him a card with my contact information.

“When I get a definitive answer that helps somebody, I really enjoy my job.” He shook our hands and admonished us to drive carefully.

Meredith drove me back to the club to get my car, “I can’t believe we’re having samples tested for poison—that somebody is actually trying to poison you.”

“It is hard to fathom. Maybe somebody accidentally mixed substances. It would be easy to do with all those identical opaque bottles.”

“Right. Just like somebody accidentally dropped the radio in the pool. How did you know about potassium...whatever?”

“Internet research.” I wasn’t up for much discussion, even with my practical friend. Relief engulfing me made me feel giddy. My pounding head felt swollen, but getting definitive, scientific answers would make me feel better. When Meredith dropped me at my car, I drove home and collapsed into bed.

Twenty-Three

When I woke Sunday, my head throbbed from my hard landing on the stairs the day before. My sides felt like hammered meat. If I moved, I ached. When I lifted my Garfield nightshirt, purple bruises sprawled from my ribs to my knees where I’d bounced down the steps and hit the floor.

Sleuthing was becoming unpleasant. After a few subtle doses of poison, somebody apparently decided pushing me down the stairs was a quicker way to get rid of me. I must be getting close to uncovering information the killer didn’t want me to have. The seriousness of my situation sank in. Somebody wanted me dead. I’d better step up my efforts to solve Holly’s murder before her killer wiped me out.

I stood but felt woozy, so I eased down on the bed and reached to the chair for my warm-up pants. I tugged them on, waited a few seconds and tried to remain calm. I’d barely survived an attempt on my life.

Standing slowly, I slid one foot, then the other, to the bathroom. When I peeked in the mirror, I discovered that overnight I’d sprouted an egg. The bulge protruded straight out from my forehead, two inches above my left eye. The territory between the egg and my eye was red and puffy. My eye drooped into a sleazy wink. When I raised my arms up, I discovered I couldn’t get my orange Garfield sleep shirt off over my head without smacking the egg.

In the cabinet under the sink, I found an old ice bag I’d inherited from Aunt Novena, filled it with cold water and laid it gingerly on my head. The soft part of the bag sagged down over the protrusion. Pain prevented me from resting anything solid on my bump. I creaked to the kitchen to add ice to the bag. While I consumed hot tea and toast, I decided the best way to get my mind off my injuries was to figure out the connection between Holly Holmgreen and Harry Thorne.

After I finished breakfast, I retrieved the boxing photo from my purse, hobbled to the living room and placed the photo face down beside my computer. While the machine powered up, I lowered my aching carcass into the ergonomic chair and studied the inscription on the back of Harry’s photograph, beginning with the scribbled date: 1975. Harry had said Billy was one of the last few soldiers killed in Saigon. My historical recall wasn’t great, so I searched for “dates+Vietnam+war.” One Web address looked promising: “A Vietnam War Timeline.” I clicked it and scrolled down to the 1975 headline that read:

“Last Americans Evacuate As Saigon Falls to Communists.”

A paragraph described how South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivered an unconditional surrender to the Communists in the early hours of April 30. I shuddered, thinking of all the fine American soldiers and South Vietnamese people who died there before our country and theirs suffered a tragic, ignominious end to the war.

The final sentence of the paragraph caught my eye: “As remaining Americans evacuated Saigon, the last few US servicemen to die in Vietnam were killed when their helicopter crashed.”

I yanked up Harry’s photograph and squinted at his note: “B’s crash. H, 3.”

“B’s crash” could mean the crash of Billy’s helicopter. Billy Thorne could have been one of “the last few US servicemen to die” when his helicopter crashed in 1975. He would have been twenty-two years old when he died, just as Harry said. Everything fit together too well to be coincidental.

If Billy died in 1975 at age twenty-two, Harry would have been twenty-three, a year older. That meant Harry was born in 1952 and Billy in 1953. Harry would now be in his forties, the age I’d guessed.

What about the other item Harry scribbled, “H, 3?” When I’d moved my magnifying glass over the photo in Harry’s office, I thought the child perched on the metal chair, dressed like Shirley Temple, resembled Holly Holmgreen. I reached in my purse for the magnifier and passed it again over the child’s face. Her features were tiny and perfect in her doll-like face. Her huge eyes were exactly like Holly’s.

I stared at the distinctive mass of curls springing from the child’s head and remembered the wet ringlets plastered to Holly’s head at the pool. I’d never forget the half-dry springy curls bouncing from the poor girl’s head as she lay on the concrete near the parking garage.

The child in Harry’s photograph, primly perched within ten feet of violence and sweat in the boxing ring, had to be Holly Holmgreen at age three. Harry’s cryptic note, “B’s crash. H, 3,” indicated somebody took Holly’s picture near the time of Billy Thorne’s fatal helicopter crash. Why would Harry write a note linking Billy’s death to Holly’s age unless Billy and Holly were related?

The light dawned: Billy Thorne was Holly’s father. Harry Thorne was her uncle. Either Holly had visited her Uncle Harry and grandfather, Arnold Thorne, at the boxing gym near the time Billy died, or she lived with them when Billy went to Vietnam. After Billy died, Arnold and Harry Thorne had raised her.

Where was Holly’s mother? Why was Holly’s last name Holmgreen instead of Thorne?

I couldn’t answer those questions, but Holly’s age in 1975 fit with what I surmised. If she was born in 1972, she would have been three years old in 1975. Had she lived, Holly would be in her twenties, which seemed to fit.

Uncle Harry Thorne, distraught with grief, would’ve submitted the bare minimum for Holly’s obituary. I could verify her and Harry’s ages by sneaking into the club’s personnel records. Being the controlling type, Harry probably kept staff and club members’ files in his private domain so he could check on people unobserved. Maybe I should sneak back into his office.

Suppose Billy got Holly’s mother pregnant before he went to Vietnam. If he went overseas in 1972, Billy would have been nineteen years old. Military records would confirm his age. Billy’s wife or girlfriend, Holly’s mother, was probably between seventeen and nineteen.

When my head started working better, I’d try to evaluate the relationship between Harry and Holly. Why did neither acknowledge that Harry was her uncle?

My head pounded. My body was stiffening to the shape of the chair. If I tried to stretch, my side hurt. I squirmed to a different sitting position and decided to research more poisons. When I entered my symptoms—nausea, vomiting, flushing, weakness, sweating, irritability, and dizziness—a long list of toxic chemicals appeared on the page. At the top loomed an orange and black skull and crossbones. Just as I began to read, the doorbell rang. I pushed up from the chair, moaned and waited for my pain to pass and dizziness to stop. Barely ambulatory, I clung to the bag on my head, shuffled barefoot to the door and opened it.

Sam stood on the front stoop in khaki pants and a mustard and orange checked shirt.