Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

there’s going to be a big gate with a sign that says, Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well, for starters, it seems that Bianca brought Sophie the medication, as she was trained to do, and that Sophie had time to take the pill she needed.”
    “But?”
    “But someone had removed the medication from the capsule, swabbed it clean, and filled it with a rodenticide called Vacor.”
    “Not a fun way to go,” he said.
    “I’ve never been able to figure out a way that was.”
    I thought about my father closing the book he was reading and turning off the bedside lamp.
    “She appeared ...”
    But I stopped, thinking that it wasn’t really necessary to describe the grimace on her face or the convulsed state of her body. Chip didn’t need my help figuring out what Sophie had gone through after ingesting rat poison.
    “It seems the murderer is a very patient customer.“
    “How so?”
    “All the rest of the pills were unadulterated.”
    “You mean whoever did this was willing to wait until Sophie took the tainted pill, no matter how long that took? He was willing to leave the timing to chance?”
    “Apparently. Had she taken any one of the others, she’d still be alive. At least, for now.”
    “But eventually she would have taken that one.”
    “Yes. She would have. But the killer wasn’t in any kind of rush.” Nor was he with me, I thought. He’d prolong it, waiting until he was good and ready to strike. “Whoever did this,” I said, “didn’t act in the heat of the moment. This was entirely cold-blooded, something calculated. I bet that not knowing when was part of the thrill.”
    “Like Russian roulette.”
    “Except that in this case the other player didn’t consent to play.”
    “That’s a rather significant difference.”
    “It is.”
    “What were you doing at Penn Station, Rach?”
    “I went out to Jersey to talk to her ex-boyfriend.”
    “Was he any help?”
    “He wasn’t. That is to say, he wasn’t where I was told he’d be. Where he told me he’d be.”
    “You spoke?”
    “E-mailed. I’d gone to the dog run with this picture I found on Sophie’s refrigerator with the name of her boyfriend on the back of it, just in case I wasn’t bright enough to make that assumption.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “This woman said she recognized him, that they were friends, she and ‘Herbie.’ She told me he’d moved out to Metuchen for work. Then she gave me his E-mail and I wrote and he wrote right back. Anyway, he said I could come. Only when I got to where he was supposed to be, the address he’d given me didn’t exist. I think someone’s orchestrating this whole thing, Chip, the way they orchestrated Sophie’s death, someone who gets a kick out of playing with people in the most elaborate way. Sophie didn’t leave a picture of her ex on her refrigerator. The fact that it was there bothered me from the moment I found it, but I was so greedy to succeed, I ignored my better judgment and allowed myself to believe it was what it appeared to be even though it made no sense. After all, she didn’t save his phone number, his birth date, love notes. There was nothing like that in the apartment. I think whoever killed her put that there for me to find.”
    “How do they know about you?”
    “It seems that Sophie had trouble keeping secrets. Who knows who she told that she was going to hire a private investigator? She went around telling everyone in sight that Bianca was a clone, even though she’d been told that this was top-secret information. She told the dog walker, her friend at school, her students, her veterinarian. For all I know, there isn’t a soul she ran into who doesn’t know everything about her life. Some people are like that.”
    “It sounds as if she was very lonely.”
    “That could explain it. It’s an isolating disease, epilepsy. And she’d had it for a long, long time. One of her students told me she told the class that she’d had a sister who was killed in a car accident and that she’d survived, but that’s how it started, probably from a head injury.“
    “What a strange thing to tell her class.”
    “I think she meant it to be inspirational, a ‘march on despite your disability’ story. The kids said she told them they’d feel better if they talked and wrote about their own disabilities. That was the reason she’d talked about her sister, you know, teacher’s doing it. You’re next.”
    “It’s still a heavy