A Dinner to Die For Read Online Free PDF

grabbed his throat or maybe his stomach. Maybe he tried to scream. Then he dropped the bowl and ran outside, into that junk garden in the front. Into one of those birds of paradise. The bird of paradise, it gutted him.”

CHAPTER 4
    “Y OU WANT TO SEE the bird of paradise that speared Biekma?” Sergeant Grayson asked.
    I eyed him, trying to decide whether his offer could have been as innocent as it sounded, or if he was angling to set me up. But Grayson was well schooled in bluffing; his dark eyes hadn’t narrowed, his full cheeks hadn’t risen a millimeter in an anticipatory smile. “Not now,” I said. “All we need is for those reporters to spot us eyeing that, and realize Biekma was speared by his own garden. Can’t you see the headlines—‘Biekma Beaked’? No, we’ll check it out after they leave.”
    Grayson shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t the way he’d run an investigation. Having made his point, he folded his arms and leaned back against the partition that separated the foyer from the front part of the dining room, where Mitchell Biekma’s body lay.
    By the front window Raksen, the ID tech, stood tapping a finger against his camera. He looked like a miniature schnauzer, dark-eyed, wiry-haired, frenetically eager to get going.
    Photographing the dead was not everyone’s choice of what to do at two in the morning. But Raksen loved his work. According to the book, the tech photographs the body from intersecting directions, so that by checking the two prints an observer can discern where the body is in relation to doors, windows, furniture, etc. No tech I knew of took just two photos; no one was that confident, or foolhardy. No one else took the number that Raksen did, either. His goal was one print so definitive that it would answer any question any expert could conceive, any challenge any lawyer could attempt. In his effort to get that masterpiece, Raksen used more film than a portrait photographer photographing an ugly child. He was always in hot water with the auditor. The captain had given up preaching moderation. And though the definitive shot still eluded Raksen, his work had clinched a case more than once.
    I had seen him balancing precariously on wobbly chairs or hanging over rickety railings, to get the right angle. I’d seen him checking and rechecking each measurement, dusting for a print with the loving care of an archaeologist uncovering the Ten Commandments, pondering urine samples like a wine connoisseur.
    “Poison?” Raksen savored the word. Grayson had briefed him. Without pause for a clean breath, he bent down close to the body.
    “Any guesses?” I asked. Raksen wasn’t an expert, but it would be days or weeks before we got a report from one. No autopsy, no matter how vital, could be expected in less than twenty-four hours. Three days was more likely. Lab tests took an average of three weeks. And no matter how important the deceased, how much pressure you got from the press, from the inspector, or from the city council, lab cultures grew at their own rate. The best you could hope for was an educated guess from the coroner, and he, a twenty-year survivor at the job, was too wise to stick his neck out.
    “Amount of the vomit and the evidence of convulsions are consistent with poisoning, but, of course, not conclusive.”
    I nodded. Unintentionally, Raksen mimicked the coroner, word and intonation. Raksen had applied to medical school three times.
    “On the other hand, the metal spear pierced the skin, and may have caused severe internal damage,” Raksen continued, managing to avoid committing himself in classic coroner fashion.
    I sighed. “This could give us a lot of trouble in court.”
    “Right,” Grayson said, “unless we want to put the metal stalk behind bars.”
    “Any idea where the poison came from?” I asked.
    “In a restaurant?” Raksen laughed, his thin, schnauzer-like body shaking. “Listen, they tell you the bathroom’s the most dangerous room in the