Poison Read Online Free PDF Page A

report. He studied samples of hardened, sliced brain tissue under a microscope. There were no scars. But there had been swelling of the brain, a sign of oxygen debt. Lack of oxygen, but why? Parvesh Dhillon: a young woman, relatively healthy. She does have a history of headaches. A tumor could possibly have gone undetected. But it would be unlikely that an undetected, microscopic tumor could have caused a seizure powerful enough to kill her. An epileptic seizure could be the cause of death. It certainly had earmarks of it. Except Parvesh wasn’t epileptic. Murder? A forensic pathologist, King liked to say, has an unusually low threshold of suspicion. Medical students sitting before him were told the basic rule of forensic pathology—suspect the worst. “Not that we’re paranoid,” he said in his British accent, “but it’s our job.”
    It was part of King’s wiring to consider foul play and criminal poisoning from the start. The professional memory unwound in his mind, 30 years on the job, his vast library of cases, back to his education at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, England. Poisoning cases? There was the cyanide case he worked 15 years earlier. Police were stumped over a man’s sudden death. King examined the body, noticed something on the tissue, and asked a cop, had the deceased ever been involved in photography? Well, yes, he had. King knew that cyanide was once used as a chemical component in developing processes. The man had access to it. Suicide. Case closed. No cyanide in the case of Parvesh Dhillon, though.
    Tetanus? It causes prolonged, painful death, stiffness in its victims. But there would be a puncture wound of some kind. Her skin was unmarked. Other poisoning cases? Actually, that was precisely the title of one chapter in the classic 1950 biography of the Englishman Bernard Spilsbury, a pioneer in forensic pathology. At 18 years old, King gave his father, a family doctor, the Spilsbury biography for his birthday. The
son also hungrily devoured the forensic bible himself. Spilsbury specialized in discovering poison in corpses, often long after burial. Spilsbury, the gentleman pathologist, King’s hero. The legend once showed up at a graveside, dressed immaculately in a dark top hat. The coffin raised, Spilsbury ran his nose along it, straightened himself, cleared his throat and said, simply, “Arsenic, gentlemen.” Arsenic? No, gentlemen, not in the Parvesh Dhillon case. So what, exactly, was the damned answer? King had none.
    Parvesh suffered from anoxic brain damage, or a lack of oxygen to the brain. He didn’t know why. Years later, King would lament this case. In forensic pathology you spend a lifetime learning from your mistakes and those of others. He would never make the same mistake again. Except King was nearly retired. The harsh lesson would help another forensic pathologist, someday. What bothered him most was that, in hindsight, the clues were there. Not obvious, not at all. Making the connection would have been difficult for any forensic pathologist, regardless of experience.
    For one thing, he didn’t notice the contradiction between the claim in the hospital staff notes that the husband had given Parvesh a Fiorinal capsule, a barbiturate, and the drug screen just a few hours later showed no presence of the substance. At the time, the discrepancy didn’t ring a bell with King. But it should have. There was something else. He missed the key word in a note describing Parvesh’s “opisthotonic” position. The word was both misspelled and scrawled messily, and King’s eye had skipped right over it during his initial review of the charts. Had he deciphered the word, it would have been an instant tip-off. Opisthotonos refers to a rigid body and bowed back. It was a classic sign of a kind of poisoning. How could King miss it?
    Perhaps Spilsbury, the great man, would have figured it out. But then Spilsbury was not without weakness. After being knighted, the aging master left