Last Dance, Last Chance

sell to the general public. Several murderers, mostly female, had used Terro to get rid of spouses before the middle of the twentieth century, but it was long gone from store shelves in 2000.
    The product had been manufactured by the Senoret Chemical Company in St. Louis, Missouri, and Chuck Craven called the company to talk to the staff there. It was true that Terro Ant Killer was a thing of the past after the EPA recall, but Stewart Clark of Senoret told Craven that there was a company in San Leandro, California, that sold an ant-killing product said to contain arsenic trioxide.
    “It’s called Grant’s Labs.”
    Craven next talked to Lou Antonali, the chief operating officer at Grant’s. Antonali confirmed that they did manufacture ant killer containing arsenic trioxide. It was made of a waxy substance that contained 0.35 to 0.46 percent arsenic trioxide with a sweetener. The sweet taste attracted ants.
    “How much poison would that be?” Craven asked.
    “Well, they come in what we call hand stacks,” Antonali said. “Two hand stacks could conceivably give a 150-pound man a fatal toxicity level.”
    Craven held his breath. He then asked what a “hand stack” was—what it looked like.
    “‘Grant’s Kills Ants’ is sold in small round tins—four tins per stack.”
    Exactly what Lauren had described to Craven: “little round tins.” But all those little tins were gone when they had searched the Pignataros’ house.
    Craven found out that the arsenic trioxide used by Grant’s came from Kraft Chemical in Melrose Park, Illinois. He phoned that company and talked to an employee named Mattie Webb. When he asked her where they got the arsenic, she said it was imported from Mexico. However, most of their customers were in the Chicago area.
    “Would you sell to Canada?”
    The answer was no. It would be cost prohibitive and too much trouble to bother with customs. Mattie Webb knew of no sales at all to individuals. A single person attempting to buy arsenic would come under great suspicion. Kraft Chemical dealt only with major companies.
    Frank Sedita talked to a company in Philadelphia to see if they had sold any arsenic trioxide. No. They hadn’t had a single sale in 1999. They wouldn’t sell it to an individual, either.
    Frank Sedita tried another approach. He asked if the Pennsylvania company had any record of selling to Plastic Surgeons International, the Canadian corporation that Anthony was affiliated with. If not in 1999, then any previous year?
    No.
    As it turned out, finding an outlet for Grant’s Kills Ants wasn’t that difficult. It was right in front of them the whole time. Chuck Craven went to a Target Store in Cheektowaga, the Buffalo suburb. He headed toward the gardening and pest control section, and there it was on the shelf. There were several forms of Grant’s Kills Ants. One was an ant trap to be placed on the floor; another was a metal spike that could be stuck in the ground around shrubs and bushes (particularly peonies, which attract ants).
    The third form of ant killer containing arsenic trioxide was sold in the little round tins. Craven bought the products. He didn’t look like a detective, and he certainly didn’t tell the sales clerk why he wanted ant killer. He realized that was probably all Anthony had to do—just walk into a store and buy a product to kill annoying insects. They would never be able to trace his purchase now unless he’d used a credit card. Pat Finnerty was an expert on paper trails, but they didn’t find any purchases of ant killer memorialized on either Debbie’s or Anthony’s credit cards.
    Debbie Pignataro had told them that she usually drank Kool-Aid in the summer. It was sweet. She wouldn’t have tasted a sweet and deadly additive. Later, of course, everything tasted strange to her—that silvery metallic taste. Even chicken noodle soup tasted off to her. She wouldn’t have been able to recognize it if Anthony had put a massive dose of arsenic in her bowl of soup. She just got sicker, and she didn’t connect Lauren’s nausea to her own—not for a long time.
    Sedita, Finnerty, and Craven felt that the soup poisoning was probably the one that took Debbie out of the chronic poisoning category and plunged her into acute poisoning.
    It was time for them to move in. There was a very strong possibility that Anthony would bolt and run, perhaps even leave the country. He had confided his plans for an offshore clinic to reverse the ravages of