Chat - Archer Mayor [92]
“Hi, Beverly. It’s Joe.”
“I tried calling you,” she said, “but the message said you were out of the area.”
“I’m in Vermont,” he laughed. “So in their terms, I guess they’re right.”
“I heard back from toxicology about Mr. Nashman. That is the current name you’re using, isn’t it? The ex–Ready Freddy? I received an update from your office.”
“Yup, that’s it. The Freddy part turned out to be his first name. Anything interesting?”
“Oh, you bet,” she said in a rare burst of exhilaration. “His system had a lethal dose of fentanyl.”
He hesitated. “I’ve heard of it. An opiate? But I don’t know why it’s ringing a bell.”
“Excellent. That’s exactly right. A synthetic opioid, fifty to eighty times more potent than morphine, patented in France in the late fifties or early sixties. I had to look it up—fascinating. It’s used in childbirth, to control cancer pain—anytime a truly heavy gun is required. The biological effect is identical to heroin but much, much more potent, and it’s metabolized at a much faster pace.
“But the reason it probably sounds familiar,” she continued, “is because, in 2002, either it or something just like it was used by Russian security forces as part of an effort to take back a theater that Chechen rebels had seized, complete with some eight or nine hundred people.”
“They put gas through the ventilation system,” Joe blurted out, his memory revived.
“And killed over a hundred people in the process,” Hillstrom agreed. “All of the rebels died, but so did fifty hostages or so. I may be a little off with those numbers, but you get the idea.”
Joe made a face. “What I’m getting, I don’t like.”
“Oh, yes,” she reacted, “I see what you mean. You’re thinking of the terrorist angle. Well, that may be, although I think that’s a stretch. For one thing, I doubt that Nashman’s motel room was filled with fentanyl gas—sounds a little too James Bond, don’t you think?”
Joe thought back to all the careful planning that had gone into the killing of these two men. James Bond didn’t seem like such a stretch.
But he played along. “How else does it get administered?”
“Any number of ways, including a lollipop. When we and the Mossad and a few others were considering it as a chemical weapon years ago, all sorts of delivery systems cropped up. I read that we used it in darts during the Vietnam War, since, in the right dose, it can knock you out in a snap.”
He heard her fingers click over the phone.
“If it doesn’t kill you first,” he muttered.
Her mood was not to be dampened. “Right,” she said brightly. “That was the problem, and why we supposedly dropped its use for that purpose—the margin between effective and lethal was too narrow. But it does still work as a painkiller.”
“In more ways than one,” he added.
She chuckled. “True. But your question is directed at how this particular dose was delivered to Mr. Nashman.”
“Do you know?”
“I think I do. Did you find any food in his motel room—specifically cookies?”
Joe thought back. “No.”
“Well, there were recent remnants of a cookie in his stomach, which I also sent along for analysis. They found traces of DMSO—dimethyl sulfoxide—along with the fentanyl, mixed in.”
“What’s that tell you?”
“DMSO is a super carrier of other compounds through the skin and other membranes. By itself, it’s used as a topical analgesic and as a liniment for horses. It’s good for joint pain. But I think it was its first application that came into play this time. Whoever killed Mr. Nashman wanted to make sure the fentanyl really did its job and was taken deep into the body systems. Putting both it and the DMSO into a cookie guaranteed that the fentanyl would hit home like a bullet.”
Joe gazed out onto the snow-covered hills around him for a moment, mulling the scenario over in his mind. It was so far removed from the run-of-the-mill,