The Headmaster's Wife (39 page)

“How do you do?” Gregor responded automatically, shaking what felt like a skeleton in a skin bag.

Kay Hanrahan sat down and threw a pile of papers on the conference table. “I've been looking over these since the hospital sent them,” she said, “and they've given me several hair samples to analyze on my own. On our own, I should say. And I'm coming in late here. But I must say, from a cursory look, this is truly extraordinary.”

“The arsenic makes it truly extraordinary?” Gregor asked.

“It's not the arsenic per se,” Kay said, “it's the apparent trail of dosages.” She fanned the papers out in front of her. “I have to caution you that I'm interpreting somebody else's test results. I'm not going to be completely sure I know what's happened here until I've got results of tests we've done ourselves. But I do know the lab at the hospital, and it'sgenerally very reliable. I don't know them ever to have had a problem with raw results. For the moment let's assume that these numbers are reliable.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“The note here says that Mark received a ‘massive' dose of arsenic last night,” Kay says, “but that's not entirely accurate. People can develop a tolerance to arsenic, and Mark must have had one, if the analysis of the hair samples is to be believed at all. The amount of arsenic found in his stomach contents and in the vomit on his clothes indicates a dose that would have killed him without that tolerance but not necessarily a dose that would have killed him with it. The interesting thing to me is that he was given enough to throw up, but not enough to be sure he'd die. You'd think that anyone who had gone to all the trouble of habituating him to arsenic over a period of two months minimum would know better. Either that or have had a reason for getting him to vomit.”

“It could have been a miscalculation,” Brian said. “Whoever it was could have been intending to murder him, or just to keep him sick, and misjudged the dose.”

“I agree,” Kay said. “In fact it's most likely to be a miscalculation. I just want to point out that the circumstances are curious. The other problem is that even with a tolerance in theory, the tolerance in fact will depend on a number of factors peculiar to the immediate circumstances. For instance, if he'd eaten more or less than usual that day, or if he'd had more or less sleep. Or if he'd had more or less caffeine, for that matter. This,” she flicked her hands at the pages, “seems to indicate quite a bit of caffeine, enough to kill him on its own. Does he have anything to say about why he was ingesting all this caffeine?”

“His mother says he claims not to have taken the tablets at all,” Gregor said, “and I want to stress something here. For the last several months, people have assumed he's been using drugs, and he's been insisting he wasn't; and from what we know, he was telling the truth. It makes sense to me to believe what he has to tell us.”

“I agree,” Kay said, “at least in this preliminary stage. Butif he didn't take the tablets himself, then somebody must have given them to him, either at the same time as the arsenic or immediately before or after. The issue, you see, is why. What was the person or persons trying to accomplish? It's all well and good to say that somebody wanted to kill this boy, but if that were the case, it would make as much sense to give him a whopping dose of arsenic the first time and get it over with. And it leaves in question the matter of the caffeine. You've got a very elaborate sequence of events here. What was the point? If the same person gave him both the arsenic and then caffeine, then it's hard to see what that person was trying to accomplish with both that couldn't be accomplished with one or the other. If two different people were giving him two different things—well. Now you've got a plot out of a fantasy novel. I would say it was damn near unheard of for two people to be running around trying to kill or injure the same person in an underhanded way as part of a plot to—well, you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean,” Gregor said. It had been bothering him, too. But there was something else, something he thought more important, and he wanted to make sure he had that nailed to the wall. “Give me something in the way of a time frame,” he said. “When did he have to have been given the caffeine that resulted in the pieces of tablets pumped out of his stomach? And when did he have to have been given the arsenic?”

Kay pulled the papers to her again, took a pen out of her shirt pocket, and made a few calculations. “The caffeine tablets, within twenty minutes or less, or they would have dissolved. The arsenic, anytime within an hour. It would act faster than that, of course, but it wouldn't necessarily kick in at full force all at once. There's the tolerance to consider. Still, I'd guess much less than an hour. I'd be happier with that same twenty minutes.”

“So would I,” Gregor said. He drummed his fingers on the table. There was another possibility, one he didn't like to consider, but he knew it would be brought up sooner or later. “There's always one other possibility,” he said slowly. “There's always the possibility that Mark did it all to himself.”

“Do you think that's likely?” Kay asked. She looked genuinely curious. “It brings you back to the question of why. Why would anybody want to do something like this to himself? It must have been excruciatingly painful at times. It must have been miserable nearly all the time. What possible motive could he have had?”

“I don't think he did do it to himself,” Gregor said, “but the possibility is there, and you know it's going to be brought up. You and I might think the idea is insane, but it would be the best possible solution for the school.”

Kay shrugged. “I've given up trying to understand what those people think of as a best possible solution for the school. If the local public school dealt with its drug problems the way Windsor Academy deals with theirs, it would be raided by the DEA. They get away with it because they have connections. It's a revelation, living next door to that place. You think you know how it works with connections, and then you find out you've vastly underestimated the whole process. But just because they might think that that's the best possible solution from their point of view doesn't mean it's any kind of solution at all from ours. If you want my professional opinion, it's not an impossible scenario because practically nothing is an impossible scenario, but it is so improbable as to make it legitimate that we not consider it—at least not seriously.”

“They could say,” Gregor said carefully, “that Mark was disturbed. That he was, is, mentally ill. He's got a history of erratic behavior, at least during this school year. That this was some kind of bid for attention.”

Brian cocked his head. “You do sound like you think it's plausible,” he said. “Is there something we don't know about?”

“No,” Gregor said, “not at all. I'd bet my life Mark wasn't doing a thing to himself. But it does seem to me to be the tack somebody would take if they were trying to defend the school. And it also seems to me to be the possible explanation for why somebody would do what they did to Mark, assuming that the same person who fed him the arsenic fed him the caffeine tablets.”

“And what reason is that?” Brian said.

“To discredit him,” Gregor said. “Look, the kid was drinking enough caffeine on his own to give himself serious problems. At the very least, he'd be jittery and unfocussed and highly anxious. The arsenic would have given him stomach problems, and after he'd had enough of it it would have given him short-term memory problems, too. Put it all together and what you get is a mess of a kid who can't be relied on in any way at all. He looks like he has a drug problem, and even if that's ruled out, he looks like he's mentally ill.”

“But what would be the
point?”
Kay asked in exasperation. “Why bother to do all that?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “Mark was rooming with a boy who was known to be having a sexual relationship with the headmaster's wife and to be selling drugs. Maybe there were things going on that Mark couldn't help seeing that somebody didn't want him to be able to report to anyone else. Maybe the idea was to make sure that if Mark saw what he wasn't supposed to see, and told somebody about it, nobody would believe him.”

“Did he see something?” Brian asked.

“My guess is that he doesn't think he did,” Gregor said, “but then that would be handy, too. If you get him addled and distracted enough, maybe he won't even notice the thing you don't want him to notice.”

“I think this is a really dodgy device to do that sort of thing,” Kay said. “And why bother with it, really? Why not just use straightforward illegal drugs? If this other boy was selling them, couldn't whoever it was have gotten hold of some hallucinogen? Or some speed, some crystal meth, something with a kick to it. It would have done pretty much the same sort of thing, especially the hallucinogen, but it wouldn't have had the danger that you'd end up killing him. And if they found out he had LSD or something in his system, so what? They thought he had a drug problem anyway.

They'd just kick him out of school, and that would be the end of the trouble whoever was having with Mark.”

“Very good,” Gregor said. “I've got to assume, then, that whoever it was had access to arsenic and caffeine tablets but didn't have access to illegal street drugs. That's interesting in and of itself.”

“Everybody has access to caffeine tablets,” Brian said.

“But not everybody has access to arsenic,” Gregor said. “Would you do me a favor?”

“If I can,” Brian said.

“First, check with the pharmacies in the area and find out if anybody bought anything with arsenic in it recently that can be traced. Pesticides. That kind of thing. The lab should do an analysis to look for some of the other things in those formulae. Second, I've talked to Michael Feyre's mother. Michael still isn't buried, and I've prevailed on her to forgo embalming for another day or two. She can't wait much longer, even with the boy in the freezer. Run some more tests. Check for arsenic. Check for tranquilizers and other prescription relaxants. Check for sleeping pills, both prescription and over-the-counter.”

“There really isn't any way for Michael Feyre to have been murdered,” Kay said. “I worked on that one myself. He definitely died from hanging, and I defy you to find a way that anybody could get a large, strong, very young man into that position and then kick the chair out from under him. He wouldn't go quietly. And if he was unconscious, he'd be one hell of a deadweight.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “there is one other way.”

“What way is that?” Brian asked.

“Sex.”

Gregor didn't want to go charging over to Windsor Academy in his new official capacity, brandishing his credentials and demanding that faculty and students both cooperate in a formal investigation. It was just going on eight o'clock, dark and cold, and what he wanted was to look at that place in the library that Mark had told him about. Then he wanted to go back to the hospital and make the end of evening visiting hours. He wondered if Mark still thought it was “cool” that somebody had tried to poison him. Mark being Mark, he probably did.

Gregor went down Main Street without marveling at the stores. If they ever made a Hip Urban Liberal with a Social Conscience Barbie, her main street would look like this. If they made a Rural Conservative Barbie, she'd probably come with a miniature Wal-Mart. He pulled the collar of his coat high on his neck. It was snowing, steadily and heavily, and the snow was sticking on the clean sidewalks under his feet. He went down to East Gate and crossed the street in the middle of traffic. Main Street was so crowded most of the time that the cars weren't moving fast enough to hurt him when he jaywalked. He went through East Gate and onto the quad. Then he turned to the left and headed for the library.

The library building was impressive, he had to admit that. It reminded him of a church, and there was a lot of it. It was easily the largest building on campus that he could see. He went up the front steps and into the foyer and was impressed again. The ceiling was far above his head and arched. The floors and the base of the checkout desk were made of dark, polished hardwood and the surface of the checkout desk was marble. Through the arched doorway into the main reading room, he could see an enormous stained-glass window. The building had been designed to awe. It succeeded.

It was when Gregor got past that arched doorway and into the main reading room that he first sensed that something was wrong—not wrong wrong, not menacing, but
off.
He looked around at the long tables with students studying at them and the carrels with computers where students were doing everything from academic work to playing computer games, and for the longest time he couldn't put his finger on it. It was a college Gothic library. Schools all over the country had them. Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia hadthe one he liked the best. He turned around and around, and then it hit him.

There weren't any books.

No, that wasn't quite right. There were some books, there just weren't very many of them. Where any other school library would have had tall shelves full of volumes, dividing the tables from each other in rows along each wall, or crammed in without tables between them at all, this one had the minimum number of bookcases, and most of those cases were at least half empty. Of the books he could see, most looked old and oddly bound, like textbooks, or library editions of standard classics. There were a lot of things other than books around: framed posters for African art exhibits and South American cultural festivals; row on row of audiotapes and videotapes and DVDS; CDs and CD players, with headphones, to listen to them on. Gregor didn't know what to think. He had seen elementary school libraries with more and better volumes than this. He was sure Father Tibor had more all by himself.