Kiss Me While I sleep Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rodrigo just had to discover which one.
    “Drive Mademoiselle Morel home,” Rodrigo told Tadeo after she had been there a week. She was steady on her feet now, and though she seldom left her bedroom, he wasn’t comfortable having a stranger under his roof. He was still busy consolidating his position-unfortunately, a couple of people had felt he wasn’t the man his father had been and were impelled to challenge his authority, which had in turn impelled him to have them killed-and there were some things a stranger shouldn’t accidentally see or hear. He would feel more comfortable when the house was once more a total haven.
    It took only a matter of minutes for the car to be brought around and the woman and her few belongings loaded inside. After Tadeo had left with the Frenchwoman, Rodrigo went into Salvatore’s study-his study now-and sat behind the huge carved desk that Salvatore had loved. Vincenzo’s report on the poison, analyzed from the dregs in the wine bottle recovered from the restaurant’s refuse, lay in front of him. He had looked over the report when he first received it, but now he picked it up again and thoroughly studied it, going over every detail.
    According to Vincenzo, the poison was chemically engineered. It contained some of the properties of orellanine, the poison in the deadly galerina mushroom, which was why he had first suspected mushrooms. Orellanine attacked several internal organs, most notably the liver, kidneys, heart, and the nervous system, but orellanine was also notoriously slow. Symptoms wouldn’t appear for ten hours or more, then the victim would appear to recover, only to die several months later. There was no known treatment or antidote for orellanine. The poison had also shown some relation to minoxidil, with the effects of bradycardia, heart failure, hypotension, and depressed respiration-which would help to render the victim unable to recover from the orellanine look alike. Minoxidil worked fast, orellanine worked slowly; somehow the two properties had been combined in such a way that there was a delay, but of only a few hours.
    Also according to Vincenzo, there were only a few chemists in the world capable of doing this work, and none of them worked in reputable drug corporations. Because of the nature of their work, they were both expensive to hire and difficult to contact. This particular poison, at such a potency that less than an ounce would kill a hundred-and-fifty-pound man-or woman-would cost a small fortune to produce.
    Rodrigo steepled his fingers and thoughtfully tapped them against his lips. Logic told him the killer he sought would almost certainly be a business rival or someone seeking to avenge a past grievance, but instinct kept him looking at Denise Morel. There was something about her that nagged at him. He couldn’t identify the source of his faint discomfort; so far his investigations had told him she was exactly what she purported to be. Moreover, she, too, had been poisoned and very nearly died, which any logical man would say proved she wasn’t the villain. And she had wept when he told her of Salvatore’s death.
    Nothing pointed to her. The waiter who had served the wine was a far more likely suspect, but exhaustive questioning of both M. Durand and the waiter had produced nothing but the information that M. Durand himself had put the bottle in the waiter’s hands and watched him take it, without detour, to the Nervi table. No, the person he sought was the one who had brought the availability of the bottle of wine to M. Durand’s attention, and so far there was no record of that person. The bottle had been bought from a company that didn’t exist.
    Therefore, the killer was fairly sophisticated in the trade, with the means of procuring both the poison and the wine. He-for convenience‘ sake Rodrigo thought of the killer as a “he”-had researched both his victim and his victim’s habits; he had known Salvatore frequented that particular