Last Dance, Last Chance

from Children’s Hospital after being tested for arsenic intoxication. Ralph showed no excess arsenic in his system at all, although Lauren had ingested a bit more than average at some time over the previous several weeks. There wasn’t enough in her body to do her any harm. A few days later, Pat Finnerty and Chuck Craven talked to the children at their uncle Carmine’s house.
    Their search of the Pignataro home hadn’t netted anything unusual or ominous. As Anthony had said, the box in the garage held nothing more than the usual garden products used to kill bugs and snails. A careful reading of the labels didn’t reveal any arsenic in the ingredients.
    One fascinating item, however, was a manuscript they found lying on the coffee table in the living room, almost as if someone had wanted them to read it. It was well over a hundred pages long, typed single-spaced: a book in progress titled M.D.: Mass Destruction. A cursory glance indicated that it had been written by Debbie Pignataro and that it was a kind of protest about the way her husband had been treated after the Sarah Smith case.
    They had Debbie’s permission to remove any item, and they took it with them. Finally, Anthony had two readers who were very interested in the book he was sure would vindicate him. With Frank Sedita, he actually had three new readers.
     
    In their uncle’s home, the two detectives asked Ralph and Lauren about their family and what they recalled of the summer that was almost over. Any good cop hates to question children, always wishing that there were some other way to gather intelligence. But the Pignataro children were the only constant witnesses to the way things had been in their home.
    Ralph was hesitant, protective of his mother, silent about his father, and very cautious about revealing family secrets. He was only 12, and he had been through so much in the past year: first his father’s arrest and imprisonment, then a too brief period of happy reconciliation before his parents separated for a few months. His father had come back, but then his mother had grown so ill.
    Ralph was obviously intelligent and responsible, mature beyond his years. But he really didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and at his age he wasn’t even sure what the wrong thing would be. He looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
    Lauren was more open, a pretty, bubbly little girl. She told them about how she got sick sometime in July. Her dad had made some soup for her mother. “I ate some of it,” she said, “and I got sick and threw up at practice.”
    Lauren had a very small amount of arsenic in her system compared with the massive dose Debbie had ingested—but it was there. Anthony had said he didn’t know where to get arsenic. Debbie said to Chuck Craven that they had had problems with carpenter ants. But arsenic isn’t an ingredient in the kind of bug-killing spray effective against carpenter ants.
    Lauren remembered that her daddy had put some little round tins out around the house to “kill ants.” She had seen him placing them in various spots, and he had explained to her what they were for.
    Prosecutor Frank Sedita was doing his own research on arsenic poisoning. In early September, he called Dr. Jahangir Koleini, the family practice physician who was the Pignataros’ family doctor. Dr. Koleini had seen Debbie, of course, during July and August when she was admitted to the hospital, and said that Debbie was still complaining of pain when she left the hospital on July 25. That was not the typical post-pancreatitis pattern. She should have felt much better at that point because pancreatitis is an acute situation. Dr. Koleini had felt uneasy enough to try to convince the Pignataros to put Debbie back in the hospital for further tests, but Anthony didn’t believe that was necessary.
    Although he didn’t share his thoughts with Pignataro, Dr. Koleini told the prosecutor that he was thinking that there might be “something toxic” involved. In his conversations with Anthony, Debbie’s physician had found him “not too concerned” about her condition, whether it was her pancreatitis or even that she had been poisoned with arsenic.
    Sedita spoke with Dr. Samie, too. Samie said she had agreed with Drs. Koleini and Snyderman that something “unusual” was going on. In fact, Dr. Samie had gone so far as to call the Pignataros on Saturday, August 7—three days before Debbie was hospitalized in crippled and