Final Option

made love with Stephen, and felt so lost that he might have been anyone.
     
    When the alarm went off at eight, I woke to the sound of coffee beans being ground in the kitchen. I groaned and covered my head with a pillow. A few minutes later Stephen came in and presented me with a cup of coffee and the Tribune.
    “Front page of the Metro section—Elkin Caufield expressing outrage at his client’s arrest,” related Stephen. “Otherwise there’s nothing new.”
    Every morning Stephen rolled out of bed, did twenty minutes of calisthenics followed by twenty minutes on the rowing machine and another twenty on the stair climber. He had an extra bedroom filled with exercise equipment and he put in his hour in it every morning as automatically as brushing his teeth. He stood next to the bed dressed only in sneakers and a pair of black bicycle shorts, his bare chest glistening. Maybe there should be a charity calendar, I thought—Hunks of the Fortune 500.
    “Lots of work today?” he inquired as I skimmed the lead article on the Hexter murder. In the photo that they ran with the story, Elkin Caufield positively glowed.
    “Yeah, I’ve got to figure out what to do about the CFTC. According to one of Hexter’s former employees, the whole thing was just a way for Hexter to hide money from his wife.”
    “So he didn’t trade the two accounts in order to exceed position limits?”
    “Obviously he exceeded position limits,” I replied absently. “But according to Savage you’d have thought he’d have been careful not to. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”
    Stephen put two fingers to the side of his neck, checking his heart rate after he’d cooled down from exercise.
    “Do you know anything about a heart condition called ventricular tachycardia?” I asked.
    “Ventricular tachycardia is a very fast heart rhythm that originates in an abnormal site in the heart—usually one of the ventricles,” replied Stephen. “Why do you ask?”
    “Bart Hexter developed it after a massive heart attack. The medical examiner said that his heart was badly damaged and that he wouldn’t have lived that much longer if he hadn’t been shot. His wife said that sometimes he had blackouts.”
    “Episodes are usually associated with syncope— blackouts,” confirmed Stephen. “It’s a very serious condition in someone who’s had a severe heart attack. Until last year the only truly effective way to treat it was to implant a defibrillator in the patient’s chest.”
    “Barton Jr. said that Hexter was taking some new drug instead.”
    “It’s one of ours. We’ve developed a new generation of amiodarone—that’s the medication that they used to use for VT patients. It’s called Ventrinome, and it’s very effective.”
    “Sounds better than having something implanted in your chest that sends out electrical shocks.”
    “Did you say that Hexter and his wife lived together?”
    “Of course they lived together,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
    “Well, one of the drawbacks of Ventrinome is that the body becomes totally dependent on it. If you don’t take it, even for one day, there’s a chance that you’ll go into VT. For someone with Hexter’s history, that would almost certainly be fatal. I’m sure his cardiologist sat them both down and explained it.”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “Azor Pharmaceuticals has the patent on Ventri-nome'—there are no competing brands, so we don’t spend anything extra on making it look unique. It’s just a round white pill—like an aspirin or any number of vitamins that are sold over the counter.”
    “So?”
    “So why would Pamela Hexter shoot her husband when all she had to do was switch his heart medication with aspirin and wait for him to die of natural causes?”
     
    I like Callahan Ross the best on the weekends. The place is younger on Saturdays and Sundays. The dead wood partners are on the golf course or at their clubs or wherever they disappear to at the end of the week. The phones are quiet. Free from pretense and office politics, weekends are a time for real work to get done.
    As soon as I got in, I called Detective Ruskowski and left a message. Then I set to work on Bart Hexter’s legacy to me, the boxed paper trail that had been delivered to my office over the course of the last week. Besides the trading tickets that were finally ordered and sorted in the conference room, there were still yards of documents in the Hexter file I had yet to