Bitter Business

was willing to do anything that might help. I walked toward the desk, gauging the distance, and then got down on the floor. “I think this is where she was lying.” I turned over on my stomach and arranged my arms and legs. “She was wearing a short skirt and it was hitched up over her left hip. Her underwear was showing.”
    “Any evidence of sexual assault?” Hackner asked Blades.
    “No. Not in either case,” Blades replied.
    The rough nap of the carpet pressed into my face. I smelled the acrid stench of old vomit. Once the police had sealed the room, no one must have been allowed in to clean. When all of this was over they’d probably have to replace the carpet.
    “Are you sure that’s the direction she was facing?” Hackner demanded.
    “Yes,” I replied. Elliott got down on his haunches and held out his hand to help me up. “Why is it so important?” I asked, brushing the lint from my sweater.
    “It’s not so much a question of where they ended up,” Blades answered, “but where they came from.” Tyrone Hackner was already out in the hall giving orders to the crime-lab techs. “From your initial statement it was clear that both women were trying to get to the desk when they collapsed—presumably to use the telephone to call for help. But up until now we’d all assumed that they’d come into the office from the hall. Assuming that Dr. Gordon is correct and only a very short time elapsed between the time the poison entered their bloodstreams and the moment they collapsed, it makes a big difference in narrowing down where they might have been poisoned. From what you just showed us, it looks like both women were coming out of the bathroom, not the hall.” Two evidence technicians appeared with their gear and went into the small bathroom at the end of the office opposite Dagny’s desk. I hadn’t noticed it before. From the open door I could see them methodically taking every item from inside the medicine chest above the sink and putting them, one by one, into individual glassine bags.
    “It’s too bad,” Elliott remarked. “From what Tyrone says, the bathroom is the one place the cleaning crew actually did anything. When they dusted for prints, the only ones they found were Dagny’s.”
    “So you think the poison was in the bathroom?” I demanded.
    “It’s as good a place as any to start looking,” Blades replied, stroking his beard. “Do you want to show Kate where the bulk chemicals are stored, Elliott?”
    “Sure,” said Elliott as his friend the detective tossed him a bunch of keys.
    “You don’t have to worry about touching anything,” said Blades as we went out the door. “We’re all done dusting for prints.”
    Elliott led me out the door and down the hall.
    “How was your grandmother’s birthday party?” he asked.
    “Very nice.”
    We walked through the reception room and through the doors that Eugene Cavanaugh had first taken me through on my tour of the plant. On the other side of the wall that separated the manufacturing floor from the administrative offices, Elliott stopped at what looked like the door to a broom closet. It was covered with the same crummy plastic paneling as the rest of the wall and had a cheap brass doorknob, the kind with a lock in the middle.
    “Anybody with either a screwdriver or half a brain could get into this thing,” he commented as he slid the key into the lock.
    “Any sign that somebody tried to break into it?”
    “None. They lifted a bunch of prints, but they haven’t ID’d them yet.”
    “In that case, I guess the question is who has the key?”
    “According to Joe, there were only four keys and the only people who had them were Cavanaughs—Jack, Philip, Eugene, and the deceased.”
    “You mean Dagny.”
    “Yes. Dagny had a key.”
    “Are any of them missing?”
    “Joe’s going to check on it.”
    Elliott turned the handle of the door and held it wide so that I could see inside. He switched on the light. The whole thing was about the size of a large coat closet, with dozens of brightly colored plastic containers, each clearly labeled poison in three languages.
    “The yellow ones are chromic acid, the blue ones are the sodium cyanide.” He pried the lid off one of the blue ones. It was filled with white granules that might have been sugar.
    “Do I have to stand back or anything?” I asked. “What if you breathe it in?”
    “You can’t. Not unless you mixed it with an acid and turned it into a gas. Like this