The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [108]
To his left, two elderly, very well dressed and obviously very rich matrons chattered in French over tea. They were cheery and animated and looked as if they’d been coming here every day at this hour for half a century.
Cradling a glass of Bordeaux, McVey found himself wishing that was the way he would go out. Not rich necessarily, but cheery and animated, and comfortable with the world around him.
Then a police car flew past with its emergency lights flashing, and he realized his last and final exit wasn’t as much on his mind as was Osborn. He’d lied about the mud on his shoes because he’d been caught. He was a man in love, a tourist who had probably walked near the Eiffel Tower recently enough to know the gardens had been dug up and were muddy, and had been quick enough to make up a cover story for himself when asked about it. The trouble was, the mud there was gray-black, not red.
Where Osborn had been that Thursday afternoon— barely four days ago—was at the riverbank by the park. The same place Merriman had been murdered and Osborn shot a day later.
What had Osborn planned that had gone sour? Was he going to kill Merriman himself, or had he set him up for the tall man? If the idea had been to kill him himself, where did the tall man tie in? If he had set him up for the tall man, how did it happen that Osborn became a victim as well? And why a guy like Osborn, a clean-cut, if somewhat fiery, orthopedic surgeon from California?
And then there was the drug the French police had found in Osborn’s room. Succinylcholine.
A call to Dr. Richman at the Royal College of Pathology in London had established succinylcholine as a presurgery anesthetic, a synthetic curare used to relax the muscles. Richman had warned that outside professional hands it could be very dangerous. The drug completely relaxed the skeletal muscles, and could cause suffocation if improperly administered.
“Is it unusual for a surgeon to have that kind of a drug in his possession?” McVey had asked directly.
Richman’s reply had been as forthcoming. “In his hotel room while he was ostensibly on vacation? I’d sure as hell say so!”
McVey had paused, thought a moment, then asked the million-dollar question, “Would you use it if you were going to sever a head?”
“Possibly. In conjunction with other anesthetics.”
“What about the freezing? Would you use it for that?”
“McVey, you have to understand, this is a sport neither I nor the colleagues whom I’ve queried have ever encountered before. We don’t have enough information about what was attempted or actually happened to even begin to suggest a procedure.”
“Doctor, do me a favor,” McVey had asked. “Get with Doctor Michaels and go over the corpses once more.”
“Detective, if you’re looking for succinylcholine, it breaks down in the body minutes after it’s injected. You’d never find a trace of it.”
“But you might find puncture wounds that would tell us they’d been injected with something, right?”
McVey could distinctly hear Richman agree with him and the sound of the phone as he hung up. Then all of a sudden it hit him. “Son of a bitch!” he said out loud. The little dog under the table jerked out of his sleep and started barking, while the two elderly ladies, who obviously understood enough English to be appalled, glared at him.
“Pardon,” McVey said. Getting up, he left a twenty-franc note on the table. “You too,” he said to the dog as he walked off.
Crossing Place Victor Hugo, McVey bought a token and entered the Métro. “Lebrun,” he heard himself say, as if he were still in the inspector’s office. “We never made a three-way association, did we?”
Looking at the Métro routes on a master scheduling board, McVey picked the route he thought would take him where he wanted to go and got on. His mind still focused on his imaginary meeting with Lebrun.
“We found Merriman because he left his print at the Jean Packard murder scene, right?”
“We knew Osborn hired Packard to find somebody.