Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [54]
“Bomb?” said Dr. Kronen, then, “Never mind. I don’t care to know. The reason I’m calling is I’ve turned up some unusual results from your overdose murder.”
I sat down on the steps, biting my lip. “The Blackburn kid.”
“His tox screen came back with some… interesting markers,” said Kronen. A door slamming sounded in the background and Kronen lowered his voice. “Could you please stop by my office? I feel these results need to be discussed in person.”
The back of my neck prickled at his secretive tone. “Something wrong, Bart?”
He was silent for a long time. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “I’ll know better when I can show you what I’ve found.”
CHAPTER 17
Kronen’s office door was shut when I arrived, and I knocked softly after checking to make sure I was alone in the hallway. His head poked out a moment later.
“Come in, Detective.” His office was the same, softly lit with crackling jazz coming from his computer speakers. “Shut the door,” he said.
“What’s going on, Bart?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you found alien DNA.”
He didn’t smile, which I took as a bad sign. “Before I share these results, Detective, I want you to know that I pride myself and my lab on our competency. I have no doubt these results are accurate.”
“Bart,” I said, “I’ve never called your results into question.” One of the first lessons I’d learned on the job was that you can teach a cop to be a human lie detector, but you’ll never teach them to quantify evidence as well as a medical examiner. The MEs live for the minute and the obscure, and they’re our best weapons, sort of like Batman and his utility belt.
“I just want to establish that before I share this report with you,” said Bart. “Because it’s odd. Very odd.” He flipped open one of his ubiquitous plain brown folders and handed me a toxicology report labeled with Vincent Blackburn’s name and case number. I pretended to make sense of the squiggly lines on the chart and the periodic abbreviations showing what chemicals had been in Vincent when he died.
“This,” said Kronen, pointing to one line, “is the victim’s blood type—A positive, as you can see. This”—he slid his finger to the next line—”is a second blood type found around the puncture mark and in trace amounts throughout his circulatory system.”
“I thought they only doled out one blood type per body,” I murmured.
“They do,” said Kronen. “Someone injected this into him.”
I felt a warning brush of sickness in my gut. “Gods, what would that do?”
“For someone with A-positive blood, injecting him with another type in sufficient amounts would cause anaphylactic shock,” Kronen said.
I closed my eyes and imagined Vincent Blackburn suffocating as his airway closed off and his heart went into overdrive to expel the poison. You only killed someone that way if you truly wanted them to suffer.
“There are some other trace elements,” said Kronen. I turned the page and saw his neat, cramped handwriting next to the chemical signatures. Charcoal. Lead. Copper. The throbbing between my eyes returned with a vengeance. I’d seen the list before, in my grandmother’s slanted script.
“Any of this hold significance, Detective?” asked Kronen. “Because frankly, when I screen a man’s blood expecting to find heroin and turn up trace metals instead, I become a bit puzzled.”
“They’re ingredients.” I sighed. “Ingredients for a caster witch brewing a spell.”
Kronen’s eyebrow crooked. “What does this mean?”
“It means we’re right,” I said, blood pumping in my ears a little too loudly. “The Blackburn case is a murder, someone planned this out carefully, and he sure as hell wasn’t a random OD.” Damn Shelby to hell. She could have prevented this by telling me the truth about the feud after we found Vincent. She could have saved her uncle’s life.
“These results are also consistent with the OD case you brought to me,” said Kronen. “Although in lesser amounts, and a slightly different composition.”
Trying to grasp at the threads was like being blind in a roomful of cat’s cradles. But then, the switch flipped, and I saw it. “Son of a bitch!” I said,