The Eyes of Darkness

instantaneously absorbed through the sinus membranes. In two seconds it was in his bloodstream, and the first seizure hit his heart.
    Evans's surprised expression turned to shock. Then a wild, twisted expression of agony wrenched his face as brutal pain slammed through him. He gagged, and a ribbon of foamy saliva unraveled from the corner of his mouth, down his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell.
    As Bruckster pocketed the miniature aerosol device, he said, "We have a sick man here."
    Heads turned toward him.
    "Give the man room," Bruckster said. "For God's sake, someone get a doctor!"
    No one could have seen the murder. It had been committed in a sheltered space within the crowd, hidden by the killer's and the victim's bodies. Even if someone had been monitoring that area from an overhead camera, there would not have been much for him to see.
    Willis Bruckster quickly knelt at Michael Evans's side and took his pulse as if he expected to find one. There was no heartbeat whatsoever, not even a faint lub-dub.
    A thin film of moisture covered the victim's nose and lips and chin, but this was only the harmless medium in which the toxin had been suspended. The active poison itself had already penetrated the victim's body, done its work, and begun to break down into a series of naturally occurring chemicals that would raise no alarms when the coroner later studied the results of the usual battery of forensic tests. In a few seconds the medium would evaporate too, leaving nothing unusual to arouse the initial attending physician's suspicion.
    A uniformed security guard shouldered through the mob of curious onlookers and stooped next to Bruckster. "Oh, damn, it's Mike Evans. What happened here?"
    "I'm no doctor," Bruckster said, "but it sure looks like a heart attack to me, the way he dropped like a stone, same way my uncle Ned went down last Fourth of July right in the middle of the fireworks display."
    The guard tried to find a pulse but wasn't able to do so. He began CPR, but then relented. "I think it's hopeless."
    "How could it be a heart attack, him being so young?" Bruckster wondered. "Jesus, you just never know, do you?"
    "You never know," the guard agreed.
    The hotel doctor would call it a heart attack after he had examined the body. So would the coroner. So would the death certificate.
    A perfect murder.
    Willis Bruckster suppressed a smile.
     
     
     
     

24
     
    judge harold kennebeck built exquisitely detailed ships in bottles. The walls of his den were lined with examples of his hobby. A tiny model of a seventeenth-century Dutch pinnace was perpetually under sail in a small, pale-blue bottle. A large four-masted topsail schooner filled a five-gallon jug. Here was a four-masted barkentine with sails taut in a perpetual wind; and here was a mid-sixteenth-century Swedish kravel. A fifteenth-century Spanish caravel. A British merchantman. A Baltimore clipper. Every ship was created with remarkable care and craftsmanship, and many were in uniquely shaped bottles that made their construction all the more difficult and admirable.
    Kennebeck stood before one of the display cases, studying the minutely detailed rigging of a late-eighteenth-century French frigate. As he gazed at the model, he wasn't transported back in time or lost in fantasies of high-seas adventure; rather, he was mulling over the recent developments in the Evans case. His ships, sealed in their glass worlds, relaxed him; he liked to spend time with them when he had a problem to work out or when he was on edge, for they made him feel serene, and that security allowed his mind to function at peak performance.
    The longer he thought about it, the less Kennebeck was able to believe that the Evans woman knew the truth about her son. Surely, if someone from Project Pandora had told her what had happened to that busload of scouts, she wouldn't have reacted to the news with equanimity. She would have been frightened, terrified . . . and damned angry. She would have gone straight to the police, the newspapers—or both.
    Instead, she had gone to Elliot Stryker.
    And that was where the paradox jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. On the one hand, she behaved as if she did not know the truth. But on the other hand, she was working through Stryker to have her son's grave reopened, which seemed to indicate that she knew something.
    If Stryker could be believed, the woman's motivations were innocent enough. According to the attorney, Mrs. Evans felt