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Holly checked her address book again and dialed, this time on speaker phone, so Josh could hear. She motioned for him to turn off the Cuisinart.
“Hurd Wallace.”
“Hurd, what are you doing at your desk on a Sunday morning?”
“Hey, Holly. You know how it is; I’m just going over all the reports on Bruno again.”
“Anything in there cast any doubt on the suicide?
”
“Not exactly.”
“But you’re beginning to doubt it, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure why.”
“I’m thinking the same thing. Any anomalies in the reports?”
Josh spoke up. “Hurd, it’s Josh Harmon. In the ME’s report, what did the blood work say?”
There was a shuffling of papers on Hurd’s desk. “Blood alcohol was two point four, three times the legal limit for driving. And he had taken at least two Ambien.”
“There’s your anomaly,” Josh said.
“How’s that?” Hurd asked.
“Nobody could stay awake long with that combination in his bloodstream.”
“He could have shot himself before the Ambien took effect,” Hurd said.
“My point is,” Josh said, “anybody could have gone into Bruno’s house and stomped around all he liked, and Bruno would never have woken up. It would have been easy to kill him.”
“You still thinking suicide, Hurd?” Holly asked.
“It’s still possible, but I’m leaning the other way.”
“Did you do any work on Bruno’s signature on the note?”
“No experts, but there was an insurance card in the desk drawer with his signature on it, and they looked like they matched.”
“If you found that card, Hurd, maybe the killer did, too, and he used it to forge the signature.”
“That works for me,” Hurd replied, “but all we’ve got is the possibility of homicide. We don’t have a suspect.”
“Is there any other anomaly in the reports?”
“Well, there was a partial print on the vaccination gun that wasn’t Bruno’s. Forensics ran the print, but there wasn’t enough for a match in the database.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t Bruno’s?”
“Because he had printed Bruno’s corpse and couldn’t match it to the right pinkie, which is the finger he said it was.”
“So if we had another suspect, he could do a direct comparison and maybe get a match?” Holly asked.
“That’s right.”
“Hurd,” Holly said, “pull Jimmy Weathers’s prints off the computer and have the guy do a direct comparison.”
