“About all of them!” Savannah cried. “None of them would ever hurt anyone, especially not Monty.”
“But what about the affairs?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, who cares about that? We were all kids back in Paris. Everyone was sleeping with everyone else. Doesn’t mean anyone’s a killer.”
She didn’t have much more to add and I didn’t press her. But I wasn’t about to kick Margot off the suspect list. She came across as friendly and flirty, but she really wasn’t. She was always watching, judging, gauging…something. Why? Was she just insecure? You’d never know it by the way she dressed. Flamboyant and sexy, which would have been fine if only it matched her real personality. But it didn’t.
A while later, Derek caught up with me in our bedroom. “I have some news, and it isn’t pleasant.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about Montgomery. He was injected with a massive amount of rat poison. Its main ingredient is strychnine, as we surmised.”
I sank down onto the love seat. My heart ached for poor Montgomery. He’d suffered an agonizing death and he hadn’t deserved it. In fact, no one deserved that. “That’s horrifying. But how was he injected? And when?”
“Apparently, it was very late last night,” Derek said. “The killer used a meat injector.”
“A meat…ew.” I shivered at the thought. But it made an awful kind of sense. Most chefs probably carried their own with them wherever they traveled. Now that I thought about it, I realized that even my father owned one. He used it to marinate the Thanksgiving turkey, among other things. It was sold as part of a kit along with several needles of different sizes.
Needles. Ugh. And there went my stomach.
“That’s just unbelievable. Terrible.” I rubbed my queasy belly. “Do they have any idea who did it?”
“Not yet, but they plan to conduct a much more thorough search of everyone’s kitchen tools.”
I gasped and jumped up from the couch as a thought suddenly struck me. “It can’t be Savannah!”
Derek leaned his hip against the bureau. “No, of course not. But why do you say that?”
“Because she’s a vegetarian!” I laughed. I knew it was tasteless to be happy at the moment, but there was nothing more I could do for Montgomery, while Savannah needed all the help she could get. “She doesn’t even own a meat injector.”
He chuckled. “Good point, darling. I’ll mention that to the inspector.”
“Wait—it can’t be Raoul, either. He’s a pastry chef.”
“Yes, love,” Derek said softly. “But he’s married to someone who specializes in meats.”
I frowned. “Well, whatever.” It was a shabby comeback, but I couldn’t help it; I was in shock or something. The thought of someone using a meat injector to kill a sweetie like Montgomery made me feel sick and depressed.
I went in search of some ginger ale to calm my stomach and felt better after a few minutes. Derek was needed back at the office, so he took off after promising to return home by six o’clock.
By mutual, silent agreement, the rest of us all wandered off to do our own thing. I walked into my studio, where, true to his vow, Dalton had settled in at the desk and was poring over the cookbook pages. He had his laptop open and a spreadsheet in front of him.
I took a peek at the spreadsheet and saw a long column of the same hieroglyphic symbols I’d seen in the cookbook. He had transferred each symbol onto the sheet and was testing different letters of the alphabet as well as short phrases that might correspond to each of the squiggles.
Dalton had a tendency to swear under his breath every so often. I couldn’t blame him. If I was looking at that never-ending line of squiggles and numbers, I’d be cursing, too.
Savannah, meanwhile, had piled some of her cookbooks and several issues of Cook’s magazine at the opposite end of my worktable and pulled a high chair over to get some work done. She was compiling new menu selections, a job that was more difficult than it sounded, since it involved a lot of research, then experimenting and cooking and sampling and figuring out wine pairings.
Okay, that didn’t sound difficult in the least. In fact, it sounded like a dream job to me.
Savannah, though, worked night and day to maintain the level of quality that kept her at the top of the list of great chefs in the country. So I guess I could cut her some slack.
I got back to my own work and finished sewing the Jane Eyre signatures to the linen tapes, then cut the text block loose. I trimmed the tapes and then put my sewing frame back in its cupboard. After that, I prepared a batch of polyvinyl acetate. PVA was strong and water soluble and it stayed flexible for a long time. Plus, it didn’t yellow or crack, so that made it the glue of choice for discerning bookbinders everywhere.