Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

pressing the phone closer. “Vacor.”
    “Which is?”
    “Rat poison.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Where are you now?”
    “Home. Why?”
    “Because if you were at her place, I’d tell you to get the hell out.Now.”
    I waited.
    “The medication found next to her, the stuff the dog was lying on, the clone.” I could hear him lighting a cigarette, inhaling, blowing the smoke out before he continued. “It was the right stuff, her regular prescription. Burke called her doctor and checked it out.”
    “You’re saying Bianca brought her the anticonvulsant?“
    “To the best of her knowledge. At least it was the right container. And probably, in the right place, on her night-stand more than likely. Did she mention what she taught the dog to do, Rach, if it was by location? That would have made the most sense.”
    “I don’t know how she did it, Marty. It was a friend of hers who told me about this, a woman who worked with her.“
    “Name?”
    “Ruth Stewart. She’s the receptionist.”
    I heard him talking to someone else. Then there was a pause, Marty writing down the name I’d given him.
    “That would have been the easiest way,” I said, “to teach her to retrieve the medicine from the nightstand by back-chaining, you know, start the dog where you want her to end up, where the vial with the pills was kept, and work backward, a few feet at a time until she’d get it and take it to wherever Sophie was, anywhere in the house or garden.“
    “I know what back-chaining is, Rachel.”
    “Right. But I didn’t get the opportunity to discuss this with my client so I don’t know exactly how she taught the dog ...”
    “Doesn’t make much difference now.”
    “Anyway, if it were me, I’d check the container the dog brought me, just to make sure.”
    “Like I said, it was the right container. And when the victim opened it and removed a capsule, it looked the same as it always did, just the way it should have. But someone had emptied out one of the capsules, cleaned it out, and filled it with Vacor, someone knowing that eventually she’d get alerted that she was going to have a seizure and eventually she’d take the tainted pill.”
    “What do you mean, one of the capsules?”
    “The rest of them, they were fine. They had the anticonvulsant in it that she took to ward off her seizures.“
    “Then how do you know the Vacor was in one of the capsules?”
    ‘The ME recovered the outer material and no traces of the medication that should have been in it. And enough Vacor not to just make her wish she was dead, but to actually get the job done.”
    “But all the other pills—”
    “Were as they came from the pharmacy. Whoever killed her—”
    “Was willing to wait, let it happen when it happened.“
    “Precisely.”
    “Someone not in a rush.”
    “Gives me the creeps,” he said, “someone can be that calculating.”
    “That’s why you’re with the Bomb Squad.”
    “No one likes a wise ass, Rachel.”
    I heard someone talking in the background, saying, “I told him, fifty bucks for a haircut? That’s robbery.”
    Marty asked me to hold on.
    “That’s because you went to a stylist,” another voice said, “instead of a barbershop.”
    And then Marty came back on the line, saying he had another call, he had to go. But he didn’t hang up. “Someone else got it,” he said.
    For a moment, neither of us spoke.
    “Marty, I wonder if whoever did this was counting on the fact that there’d be no autopsy because of the increased risk of death with epilepsy. Maybe he figured the cause of death would be assumed to be epilepsy related.”
    “No one makes detective by assuming, Rachel. Things aren’t always what they seem to be. You know that.”
    “I do. But maybe whoever used the Vacor didn’t know that. I did some research on epilepsy. There’s a higher rate of suicide among epileptics. There are more accidental deaths, especially drowning, and there’s something called ‘unexplained death syndrome.’ ”
    “And there’s murder.”
    “That, too.”
    “Watch your back,” he said. “You hear?”
    I sat there holding the phone, thinking about what had happened a few hours earlier, the super coming in, using his key and walking into Sophie’s apartment without knocking. Then I thought about what had happened right afterward, about the unwelcome visitor in the garden, the price you pay for outdoor space in Manhattan.
    Joe, the super. He’d have rat poison in the basement. He’d have