out.”
“Join the crowd, only I think I’ll eat here. Eating at my desk depresses me.”
Jill laughed, her round, radiant face glowing beneath short, black, shiny hair. “That’s the advantage of working in forensics,” she said. “Squeaky-clean stainlesssteel tables, big refrigerators, and the sharpest knives and forks in town. Why don’t you come back with me? The car’s right outside.”
“Well, I… sure, why not?”
They ordered chef’s salads and Tabs to go. “I’ll run you back,” Jill said as they climbed into her car and headed for D.C. General. “It’s good to see you, Connie. Nobody beats down the door to visit me at the morgue.”
The autopsy room was empty. It was a large cold room made to feel colder by multiple fluorescent fixtures that bathed everything in a harsh, flat white light. There were four stainless steel examining tables with metal rims around them. A puddle of clear liquid (water, Connie hoped) had formed in the corner of one. Along a wall was a light box in which color photographs of recent autopsies were displayed. It reminded Lake of the giant Kodak display in New York’s Grand Central Station. A TV camera was mounted high in one corner; the days of next-of-kin looking down into the face of a loved one were over. They viewed bodies upstairs, on a TV monitor.
There were white freezer doors along a wall. At the other end was a door leading to a room reserved for badly decomposed bodies. Microphones used by forensic doctors for their play-by-play of autopsies dangled from the ceiling. Lake was aware of three sounds in the room: the gentle whoosh of an oscillating fan, a hum from the fluorescent lights, and disco music from a small radio that sat on the floor in the corner. The only odor came from the salad dressing.
“It ain’t much, but I call it home,” Jill said as she pulled two stools up to the middle table, and found two small, white hand towels in a drawer. Cups for the Tab came from a water cooler at the far side of the room.
“I’m starved,” said Jill.
“Me, too,” Connie said. “Who was your last dinner guest?”
“On this table?” Jill grinned. “Oh, who
rested
here last? I have no idea. Probably an inept rapist or a junkie who held out on the boys.”
“Pass the dressing.”
They talked about many things as they ate—the Redskins, fashions, political gossip, new TV shows. Eventually, it came around to the men in their lives. “How’s the Italian stallion?” Jill asked.
“Morizio? A stallion he’s not. He’s busy, preoccupied, obsessed, as usual.”
“Obsessed with what?”
Connie hesitated, then said, “With the James case.”
“So’s everybody else in D.C. It’d make a great novel, wouldn’t it, British Ambassador to the United States poisoned in his own embassy by his Iranian manservant. Juicy.”
“And hard to swallow, you should pardon the expression. Too pat, Jill, too many unanswered questions. For instance, you told me that none of the food you tested contained poison. How did James get it?”
Jill shrugged and filled her mouth with lettuce, saying through it, “Maybe sexually.”
“Huh?”
“Like AIDS, or herpes.”
“Be serious.”
“I have no idea how it got into his body, Connie. Somebody must have fed it to him, maybe in a brownie. Maybe it wasn’t ricin that killed him.”
“Huh?”
“Maybe it was borax.”
“Borax?”
“That caviar James was eating at the time of hisdeath contained borax. The rest of the caviar from the party didn’t.”
“So?”
“So, borax was outlawed in this country by the FDA forty years ago because it left a poisonous film on baby bottles after they were cleaned with it.”
“Then why would it be in James’s caviar?”
“Got me. More dressing, please.”
Lake handed it to her. “Could borax really have killed him?” she asked.
“Not unless he ingested a ton of it. No, it was ricin, but the borax thing interested me, that’s all.”
“I’d better get
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