Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [8]
“And?” Hastroll said.
“She ate them.”
Hastroll grunted.
“He said they’d been in a fight,” Sheppard said.
“Did she know they could kill her?”
“He says she knew she was allergic.”
“Does she carry an EpiPen?” Hastroll asked.
“Several,” Sheppard said. “He claims she hid them.”
Hastroll glanced at Pepin, then whispered, “He did it.”
“Easy, Ward.”
“What happened to his fingers?”
“He said he was trying to clear her airway.” Sheppard loaded his pipe and lit it. “Apparently she bit him in the process.”
“You buy suicide?”
“She had a history of depression. She was on a combination of Wellbutrin and Prozac. Husband says she’d been going through a bad patch. Plus she’d also lost a lot of weight.”
“What’s a lot?” Hastroll asked.
“More than one hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Seems to me that would make her happy,” Hastroll said.
Sheppard shook his head. “She had hyperthyroidism. It can cause deliriums. Extreme agitation. He thinks she might have just snapped.”
“Did you speak to her doctor?”
“Psychiatrist corroborates about the medication. Not the ideation.”
Sheppard and Hastroll turned to look briefly at Pepin, who stared squarely back.
“What’s your feeling here, Sam? What’s the golden gut say?”
“I’d like to sniff around for a while.”
“Roger that,” Hastroll said.
“Try to track down those EpiPens. See whose fingerprints are on them.”
“I got plainclothes on it already.”
“Check his hands for traces of nutmeat or salt.”
“Already did it,” Hastroll said. “They’re clean.”
“Check the sinks. He might’ve washed his hands. Bag the bars of soap and the towels.”
Hastroll held up a plastic bag. The towels inside were bloody.
“What about samples from under his nails?” Sheppard said.
Hastroll snapped open an enormous switchblade. “Good thinking.”
“Then take him in for questioning,” Sheppard said.
In the Pepins’ kitchen, a CSI unit was dusting pieces of the broken plate for prints and swabbing blood samples from Alice’s mouth and teeth. Two men from the coroner’s office had arrived with a gurney and were waiting outside while the crime scene photographer took pictures. When he finished, the coroner’s men traced chalk around the body. While they slid the bag underneath it, Sheppard studied the woman’s face. Her lips had stretched away from her gums, her teeth were bared and gnashed in refusal, her hands clasped around her neck as if she could squeeze the obstruction from her windpipe as you would a splinter from your finger. So different from the expressions of suicides, Sheppard thought. Those were often sleepy or glum. Tired. Wiped out. As if they’d suddenly nodded off, like a narcoleptic. Sheppard remembered one he’d investigated, a beautiful girl who’d been jilted and had leapt from the Empire State Building observatory and landed on a cab, its roof crumpling like a soft mattress. Her left fist lay clenched over her heart, the other hand held just above her head, relaxed and open slightly. It seemed to Sheppard that if he’d jostled her shoulder she would’ve stirred, rolled off the taxi roof, and wandered off to bed. Or the CEO who’d blown his brains out in his office, gun to left temple, the right wall splattered with gray matter and blood as if a brush heavy with paint had been whipped across a canvas. He had only half a face, true, the one side of his head nuked outward, but there was no sign in what remained of terror or pain.
“Pretty lady,” one of the coroner’s men said. He was young, in his early twenties. He squatted by her feet. “Husband whack her?”
“She ate a peanut,” Sheppard said.
“Get out,” the kid said. He took the woman’s stiff leg and tucked it in the bag.
“A peanut can kill you,” his partner said. “Ain’t that right, Detective?”
But Sheppard wasn’t listening
The kid tucked in her other leg, followed by both her elbows; the other coroner slipped her shoulders under the flaps, then zipped up the bag. All three men stared at its black formless shape.
Then the coroners reached down. “On three,” the older one