Death by Chocolate

Seal of California and the county
emblem next to the doorbell.
    Dirk pushed the button, and
a nearby intercom sputtered and crackled.
    “Yeah?” asked a tired,
harried-sounding voice. “Coulter,” Dirk replied, sounding equally droopy and
irritable.
    “Come in.”
    A buzzer beeped, and he pushed
the heavy steel door open. Inside were the offices of the county’s forensic
laboratories where crime-scene evidence was processed.
    Over the years Savannah and
Dirk had brought everything here from hairs and fibers to chips of paint from
cars and casts made of tire prints, bloodstained clothing, murder weapons...
and a pet pygmy goat whom they’d suspected of eating a pair of rubber gloves
that had been used in an armed robbery.
    And Eileen Bradley and her
team of technicians had handled it all. Not always gracefully or
enthusiastically, but they had gotten the job done. A middle-aged woman,
big-boned, with long gray hair that she wore in a braid down her back, Eileen
wasn’t somebody to mess with. Her subordinates were pretty much terrified of
her, and that was just the way she liked it.
    But she and Savannah had
always gotten along. Even after Savannah left the force, she knew she was
welcome to drop by the lab and chat. As long as she didn’t get underfoot or
touch any of the equipment.
    “I told you not to come by
before noon,” Eileen barked at Dirk as she came out of her cubicle, which was
about twice as big as the other three cubicles. All gray. But Eileen’s had an
Elvis calendar pinned to the partition wall.
    “I was in the area,” Dirk
said. “I just thought I’d drop by and—”
    “You’re crowding me.”
Eileen walked up to Dirk and poked her finger at his chest. ‘You’re being
pushy, and I told you to knock that off. You can wait for your results, like
everybody else.”
    Ordinarily, Dirk would have
decked anybody who poked him in the chest, but in Eileen’s presence, he wilted
like a lettuce leaf in a frying pan.
    “If you’re not done yet,”
he said, “we can come back. No problem. I was just thinkin’ that—”
    “Yeah, yeah... I’ve heard
it all before.” Eileen looked over at Savannah, a faint twinkle in her eyes.
“How do you put up with this guy?”
    “Eh, he’s not so bad. He
buys me a Hershey bar every Valentine’s Day and takes me out to Mickey D’s on
my birthday.”
    “What a catch. You’d better
hang on to him.”
    “Okay, okay,” Dirk interjected.
“Is my stuff done or not?”
    “It’s done, but I don’t
think you’re going to like what you’ve got.” Eileen led them to the back of the
room where several long tables were set up with beakers, microscopes, and
assorted laboratory equipment that always reminded Savannah of her high school
biology class.
    “What have I got?” he
asked, following her like an obedient puppy. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing
wrong in any of those samples I brought you.”
    “Are you kidding?” Eileen
gave him a dirty look. ‘You brought me everything but the kitchen sink. I had
to find something in those samples or you probably would have dragged that in
next.”
    He brightened. “Then you did find something! ” Eileen strolled over to a pile of files that were lying on
one of the tables and picked up the top one, a bright yellow folder. She
flipped it open, taking her good old easy time.
    Savannah suppressed a
chuckle. Few people could get under Dirk’s skin as efficiently as Eileen. And he
didn’t dare retaliate, because his lab results would take twice as long the
next time.
    “The cake contained high
levels of phenyprophedrine,” she said.
    Dirk practically jumped out
of his jeans. “I knew it! And I’ll bet that it was in some of that stuff I
brought in here, too—the sugar or the flour, or—”
    “The cocoa.” Eileen glanced
down at the open folder in her hands. ‘The cocoa was absolutely full of it.”
    “I ate a bite of it,”
Savannah said, “and so did several others there that night. And obviously, we’re
all still kicking around. It must have not been a lethal dose.”
    “Not if a person only had a
few bites of the cake, and if that person were healthy,” Eileen said. ‘The most
they would feel would probably be a dry mouth, an elevated pulse, maybe some
anxiety or trembling.”
    “But if somebody had a bad
heart and was on phenylprophedrine?” Dirk asked. “Could it cause a heart
attack?”
    “Sure. It could
significandy raise the pulse rate and the blood pressure, which would put