Peril in Paperback: A Bibliophile Mystery

whipped cream just made me hungry. I had to get back to my notes.
    While researching the subject, I’d found out something awful that was totally unrelated to our murder investigation. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so irritated, but the first article I read said that in many third-world countries, the women of the towns and villages were the ones who were in charge of processing the cassava plants. This left them all vulnerable to the cyanide gas that escaped in the process. A snarky voice inside me wondered why men couldn’t get in on some of that action.
    That was a little harsh of me, I guess. It’s not that I wanted men to suffer, but why was it the women who were forced to endure the debilitating effects of cyanide poisoning? There had to be better, more modern ways to accomplish the job.
    I dragged myself back to the exact question I’d been trying to research: How did someone process the cassava root so wrongly, so defectively that he produced cyanide? I tried to Google that phrase but got nothing, so I worked backward and searched for the
right
way to process the root.
    The right way involved crushing the root with a mallet, then drying it on a wire sheet, then soaking it in vats of water, and finally rinsing it and baking it. And that’s all it took, in theory, to effectively reduce the chemical substance in the root that induced the cyanide. It was incredibly time-consuming.
    After reading over all my notes, I arrived at the bottom line: for a killer to produce cyanide from cassava root, all he had to do was chop up one or two tubers and add them to something that would disguise the flavor of the root itself. Say, a favorite meat loaf recipe. And voilà, death by meat loaf! Or whatever your food of choice might be.
    So basically, after all of my cassava-plant reading and note taking, I concluded that Gabriel had been right in the first place. The most effective way to get to the cyanide was to chew the root raw. Who would do that?
    But the real question was, Why would a killer go to all that mess and trouble when he could pop open a bottle of weed killer and accomplish the same thing?
    And which one had been used to kill Bella? Had the cyanide come from the missing cassava root or from the bottle of weed killer?
    If it was the cassava root, I had to wonder what kind of killer we were dealing with. A dumb one? A crazy one? Or maybe the guy was really smart and looking for a challenge. Maybe he’d heard about cassava and wanted to try a new twist on an old theme.
    “I really hate this killer,” I muttered. I threw down my pen, feeling frustrated. He—or she—was leaving me with more and more stupid questions and absolutely no answers.
    I checked the time. Another hour to go before lunchtime. I had no idea where Gabriel had run off to, and I hadn’t seen Nathan since last night. Was Nathan somewhere in the house, searching for missing books?
    Or chopping up cassava root?
    Now where had that thought come from?
    “Nathan? A killer?” I said aloud, then shook my head. “I don’t think so.” He was too nice and he had a really good sense of humor. He was a librarian, for goodness’s sake. But I had to admit, he more than met the smart criterion.
    I shoved the idea of Nathan as a cold-blooded killer out of my head and considered my next move. I was a little antsy from my recent cup of coffee, so taking a nap wasn’t in the cards. This would be a great time to get a massage, if only Kiki wasn’t resting from her near-fatal fall.
    “Hey, Brooklyn. How are you?”
    I barely kept from jumping out of my chair. Nathan stood there smiling, unaware that he had scared the daylights out of me just as I’d been mentally measuring him for a lovely orange jumpsuit.
    “Hi, Nathan,” I said after recovering my wits. “I was hoping you’d show up.”
    “Yeah?” He emptied his arms of a pile of books he’d been carrying and stacked them on his desk. Then he sat and looked my way. “What’s up?
    “I wanted to take a look at your cataloging system. I was hoping you’d give me your opinion on the best one to buy for a small business.”
    “Oh. Sure. Let me…” He turned around and powered up his laptop. He fiddled with a few keys, then swore under his breath.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “It’s been freezing up lately.” He closed the cover, then stood and slid the slim computer under his arm. “Listen, why don’t I run to my room and get my bigger laptop and bring it down here?”
    “I