The Nicholas Linnear Novels Read Online Free PDF Page B

desk drawer, “that nobody knows about this … murder but us chickens right here in this room?”
    “That’s precisely what I mean,” Doc Deerforth said quietly.
    After a time, Florum said, “You know, there’s nothing shows up on these photos.” He shuffled the photos like a deck of cards until a closeup of the head and chest of the drowned man was on top. “Nothing but a routine drowning.”
    “You won’t find anything there.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “Doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t anything to see.”
    Florum sat back in his chair and crossed his hands over his ample belly. “Okay, Doc. I’m all ears. You tell me about it.”
    “What it boils down to is this. The man was dead before he even hit the water.” Doc Deerforth sighed. “It was something that might have been overlooked by even as good an M.E. as Flower.” Florum grunted but said nothing. “Look, there is a small traumatic puncture wound in the man’s chest, middle-left, and it could easily have been mistaken for a rock scrape—which it is not. The puncture led me to take blood samples, one of which was from the aorta, where this type of poison concentrates; it’s flushed from the rest of the bloodstream within perhaps twenty minutes of death, by what means I have no idea. It’s a highly unusual cardiovascular poison.”
    Florum snapped his fingers. “Poof! Heart attack.”
    “Yes.”
    “You sure about this?”
    “About the poison, yes. Otherwise you know I wouldn’t have come to you. But I’ve still got some more tests to run. It appears likely that a sliver of whatever punctured the man’s flesh is still lodged in his sternum.”
    “There’s no exit wound?”
    “No.”
    “The fall could have dislodged it. Or the sea—”
    “Or it was pulled free after the man fell.”
    “What you’re saying, Doc …” He paused and, pushing aside the photos, consulted a filled-out preprinted form. “This guy, Barry Braughm, an account executive at”—here he named Sam Goldman’s advertising agency in New York—“lived at three-oh-one East Sixty-third, was murdered. But in this way? For what reason? He was out here alone. No jealous wife or boyfriend …” He laughed. “He’s got a sister in Queens whom we’ve already contacted and interviewed. We checked on his house on Dune Road. Nada. No sign of it being broken into or even that anything was taken. His car was where he had driven it up and parked it in front of the house as secure as Fort Knox. There’s nothing to—”
    “There’s this,” Doc Deerforth said, knowing that, at last, he had come to the moment he had been dreading ever since he had discovered the puncture wound and, subsequently, had pulled the blood from the drowned man’s heart. It isn’t possible, he kept telling himself, all the while his hands and eyes were running the tests that were confirming it; saying it over and over to himself like a litany against evil. And he felt now rather out of himself, a dreamlike unreality that allowed him to sit in another part of this room and watch himself talking to Ray Florum just as if he were an actor in some film.
    Outside there came the sound of a child’s laughter, harsh and brittle, transformed by some aural magic into an eerie, other-worldly sound, the mocking shrillness of the macaws’ cries in the Philippine jungle.
    “It’s the poison,” he continued. “It’s a very specific type.” He ran his palms down the sides of his pants. It had been a long time since he had felt his hands wet with sweat. “I came across this particular compound when I was stationed overseas.”
    “During the war?” Florum said. “But, good God, man, that’s thirty-six years ago. Do you mean to tell me—”
    “I could not forget this poison, Ray, no matter how many years have passed. A patrol went out one night. Five men. Only one returned and he just made it to the perimeter. We’d heard no shots; nothing but the birds and the buzz of the