If the Secret Service was tagging around after Kystarnik, they weren’t being too secretive about it—those security cameras dotting Kystarnik’s fence would have spotted the utility truck long ago. Maybe the feds were hoping to pressure him into a misstep. If he was laundering money, maybe they thought he’d reveal his bank accounts to their electronic scanners. Maybe I should have suggested they look at Club Gouge, but, for all I knew, they already had a lead on Rodney and the club. More than ever, I wanted to get my cousin out of the place.
I guess it had been instructive to drive up here, although it was hard to say what I’d gained besides seeing my tax dollars at work.
I turned to my voice mail, which had been beeping at me in some indignation. “You have eleven new messages,” it cried in my ear.
One of the calls was from Sanford Rieff at the Cheviot labs, saying he’d found something interesting. Since I was in their neck of the woods, I drove on west to Cheviot’s complex.
Rieff came out to the lobby to see me. “Vic! I don’t have anything so dramatic or definite that you needed to make a trip out here.”
“I was in the area,” I explained. “What’s up?”
“We’re still waiting for a report back from a national ballistics clearing center to see if the two guns are involved in any other shootings, but we’ve done an analysis of the beer cans. Mass spectrometry shows a high concentration of Rohypnol. Roofie, you probably call it. In beer like that—whoever drank it is probably very sick.”
Roofie. The date rape drug.
“He’s in a coma,” I said slowly. “Is there any way to tell if he put it in the beer himself?”
Rieff smiled. “That’s the interesting piece of your little puzzle. If this comes to court, it’s going to be tricky, very tricky. Lawyers and expert witnesses will battle for days, and defendants will watch their bank accounts vanish before their startled eyes.”
“Thanks, Sandy, but why?”
He led me back to his office and brought my report up on his computer screen so I could see the graphics.
“The fingerprints on the cans are odd, at least to Louis Arata, who’s our expert. If you pick up a can or a glass yourself, you press only one finger, usually the middle, full against it. Besides your thumb, of course. You touch the can with the tips of the other fingers. Here, face on, we have prints for all five fingers.”
He tapped the screen with a soft pointer to show me what he meant. “The can is clean except for those five fingers. Usually, you pick a can up, put it down, pick it up. Your prints soon overlay one another. I’m betting—or Louis Arata is betting—that a third party held the drinker’s fingers on the can. I’ll put it all in writing for you.”
I stared at the screen while Rieff rotated the image for me. Who would have gone to so much trouble to frame Chad Vishneski? Rodney and Olympia? Karen Buckley? Anton Kystarnik? And why? That was the even more urgent question.
I got up to go.
“I’d say this is pretty darn dramatic, Sandy. Guard those beer cans and so on in your deepest vault.”
Back in my car, I talked with Lotty’s clinic nurse, Jewel Kim, and told her about the Rohypnol. “Can you make sure that Lotty and her pet neurosurgeon know ASAP? I don’t know if it can help with Chad’s treatment this many days out, but that’s probably what put him in the coma.”
Jewel looked at Lotty’s notes on Chad. “She’s ordered a broad-spectrum search for drugs, but I will let her know that she can narrow it down to Rohypnol. Thanks, Vic.”
I stared out the windshield for a long time, thinking over Rieff’s report. I e-mailed the gist of it to Freeman Carter, and then, even though I knew Freeman would advise against it, I called Terry Finchley. He answered the line himself, but when I announced myself his voice grew cold. He was still angry, which prompted me to become super-perky.
“Guess where I am right now.”
“If you said sunning yourself on a Florida beach, now that would cheer me up.”
“Almost. I’m on the banks of the Skokie Lagoon. At the Cheviot labs, where they did some nifty forensic work on the beer cans that had been in Chad Vishneski’s bed. Guess what they found?”
“I’m not in the mood, V.I. Just tell me.”
“Roofies.”
“So the perp tried to off himself. Make my day.”
“The fingerprint analysis suggests a third party was present.”
The dogs had been cooped up in the car too long. They were whining at me, making it hard to hear Finchley. Cheviot’s building sat in a culde-sac that backed into one of the lagoons that dot the area. I let Mitch and Peppy out.
“Why are you doing this?” Finchley demanded.
“Doing what?”
“Trying to show me up over the Guaman homicide. I know you and I have had our differences, but—”
“Terry, I’ve always liked you, and I respect you as a cop. I’m not trying to show you up. If I were, I’d be giving my news to Murray Ryerson to broadcast wholesale instead of telling you.”
Mitch had found something to roll in. Peppy was barking at him, demanding her turn. I pretended I didn’t know them.