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Calvin.
I immediately put the phone to my ear. “I’m so sorry,” I said breathlessly. “I was late coming back, and I totally forgot to call you to let you know how it went.”
“That’s fine,” he replied, his tone dry, almost amused. “Henry Lewis let me know about how he bumped into you at Jeffrey Sellers’ apartment.”
Oops. “I didn’t break in,” I said, knowing I sounded way too defensive.
“I know that,” Calvin replied. “Henry told me there was no sign of forced entry. Nothing missing, either, unless someone took that laptop we’re all looking for.”
If it existed at all. “The entire trip wasn’t much use,” I confessed. “I mean, it definitely reinforced my belief that Jeffrey Sellers was a world-class jerk, but NancyAnne really didn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know.”
“Well, I don’t think it was a total loss,” my husband said. “For one thing, Henry seems to be pretty mellow about the situation. I thought he called me just to rat you out, but he actually wanted to let me in on a few additional details about the case.”
“He did?” I responded, honestly surprised. While the police chief had clearly given up on trying to dissuade me from conducting my own independent investigations into Globe’s murders, I’d never thought he’d be happy about it.
A small chuckle came through my phone’s speaker. “Yes, I was just as shocked as you are. But he told me he doesn’t believe Victoria is guilty, especially now that he’s gotten the preliminary toxicology report. Apparently, what killed Jeffrey Sellers was a dose of atropine.”
“‘Atropine’?” I repeated. I knew I’d heard the word before, but I had absolutely no idea exactly what it was.
“It’s a drug used during anesthesia,” Calvin replied. “It’s usually administered intravenously, but it can also be swallowed. There were high levels in Jeffrey Sellers’ bloodstream and in the creamer the lab tested, so that’s why he collapsed so quickly after drinking that coffee. It basically shut down his nervous system.”
A chill went through me. Maybe it was a slightly better way to go than the stomach pain and convulsions Aaron Galloway had suffered after drinking a cup of arsenic-laced coffee backstage at his tent revival, but still.
Someone must have really hated Jeffrey Sellers to come up with such a cold-blooded means of ensuring his demise.
“But that’s why Henry thinks Victoria couldn’t have done it,” my husband went on. “Atropine isn’t the kind of thing you can exactly pick up at Walgreens or on a street corner somewhere. It’s a highly regulated drug that’s only stocked in hospitals and other medical facilities that administer general anesthesia.”
I nodded…but then another little shiver trickled its way down my spine. “Like the medical center where Sara Tilden works? She’s a respiratory therapist.”
A long pause. Then Calvin said, “Probably. Do you really think she could have done it?”
There was a question. On the surface, Sara had seemed nothing but friendly and helpful. But what if all that had been nothing more than a front designed to put me off the scent? What if she’d known Jeffrey Sellers was divorced, and had sent us to his office so we could find the incriminating paperwork about his ex-wife and his unpaid child support, and wanted to make it seem as if NancyAnne had much more of a motive for killing him?
I really didn’t want to think that about her. Right now, though, I had to consider every possible angle, and that meant adding Sara Tilden back to our list of suspects, especially since I didn’t have the auras to rely on, not with my powers being checked by the child in my womb.
A sudden thought occurred to me, and I said, “Calvin, do you know what NancyAnne’s occupation is? She never mentioned anything about that to me, but she must work somewhere.”
“Hang on a sec,” he said. “I’ll need to look at that file Ben put together for me.”
“Sure.”
I waited, phone pressed to my ear, while my husband presumably went searching for the file somewhere in one of the stacks on his perpetually messy desk at the station. The whole time, I could feel the seconds ticking by, and prayed Melanie wouldn’t return at this extremely inopportune time. True, there wasn’t anything about the situation that I necessarily had to keep from her, but —
Calvin came back, sounding excited. “She’s an LVN.”
Licensed vocational nurse. A nervous little thrill went through me. Had I let NancyAnne go too easily? Was she now laughing her way back to Iowa, thinking she’d gotten the better of me and the local police?
“Would she have access to atropine?” I asked.
“It depends on where she was working,” my husband said. A sound like him ruffling a couple of pages, probably in the file he was holding, and he added, “Looks like she works in a nursing home in Davenport.”
Hmm. I had no idea whether a nursing home would stock something like atropine. “Would a place like that have atropine on hand?”
“I doubt it,” Calvin said. “I mean, I obviously can’t say for sure, but usually those sorts of drugs are used for people going under general anesthesia, and that’s not the sort of thing you’d do at an elder-care facility. Any of the residents who needed surgery would be sent to a local hospital for their procedures.”
So much for that idea. Or maybe not. Just because NancyAnne wouldn’t have access to atropine at the facility where she worked didn’t mean she couldn’t still have gotten her hands on it somehow. Maybe she was friends with a nurse who worked at a hospital nearby, or someone who was an anesthesiologist at a surgery center. Drugs like that would be locked up, of course, but I knew people stole drugs from hospitals all the time.
Even so, it seemed much more likely that Sara was our real culprit. She worked in an honest-to-Goddess medical center, and probably wouldn’t have had too hard a time stealing the drug she needed.
