Down the Rabbit Hole

“Jumping out of a plane would give me a sensation of insanity.”


“Only if you did it without a chute. My skydiver, however, ran afoul of his business partner, who’d sabotaged his chute. His fall of thirteen thousand feet puts him at the top of my scale. Not as far for her, but the results . . .” He glanced down, quiet pity in his eyes. “She was a lovely young woman before that last step.”

“Yeah, and lovely young women are more inclined to pills for self-termination. What can you tell me about her?”

“At this point I haven’t found any injuries prior to that last step, but it’s going to take more time to be certain, given the state of her.”

“It’s the tox I’m most interested in right now. She and the brother? Friends of Louise’s.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Louise, Charles, and the woman’s fiancé—who looks to be in the clear on first pass—are all adamant she didn’t use. But the security feed on the brother’s door and two wits who saw her get out of the elevator all say she looked high on something.”

“I can tell you that before that last step, her liver, kidneys, lungs, heart showed no signs of abuse or disease. She wasn’t a habitual user. Her stomach contents? Tea, sugar cookies—real sugar—and about two ounces of white wine.”

She caught the inflection. “And?”

“The blend of tea to start.” He gestured to his comp screen, brought up some sort of colored chart with a lot of words she didn’t understand. “It was a chamomile base—harmless enough—but laced with other elements. Valerian, for one.”

It rang a bell. “A sedative, right?”

“Yes, it can be used as one. Peyote.”

“Hallucinogen. Shit. Is this like the Red Horse?”

“No. I remember that too well, and this wasn’t the same. Nothing in this would trigger violence. But there are elements here and in the other stomach contents I can’t identify. I’ve flagged it top priority for the lab, as requested. They’re minute traces, nothing debilitating. It may be that the combination of them caused such violent effects.”

“If we weigh in the insistence she didn’t use, it leans toward her being dosed.” Eve circled the body. Had she known she was falling? Eve wondered. Had she seen the ground rushing up?

“Where’d she get the scissors? That’s a question. Not the sort of thing you carry around in a purse—they were huge.”

“Shears, actually,” he corrected. “Nine-inch blades. I did a quick exam of his wounds. And I’d agree, it’s not the sort of thing most women carry.”

“And no reason I can see why her brother had them sitting out where she could grab them,” Eve said. “He had kitchen scissors—in a knife block—and a pair in his office, desk drawer. Which makes it lean premeditated. For somebody.”

Eve turned from Darlene, stepped over to Marcus.

“She was smiling,” Morris said.

“I’m sorry?”

“When she rang his buzzer. She was smiling—glassy-eyed, yeah, but smiling the way people do when they’re ready to say, hey, sorry about that. And nothing I get in my read of her says she had that kind of chill. That she could stand there, smiling, with a pair of nine-inch blades in her purse she intended to jab into her brother’s heart.”

She shook her head. “There wasn’t enough time for them to have a serious argument. Five, six minutes after she went in, he’s bleeding. Then she went straight out to the terrace and off. She was dosed, that’s my read on this. Who wanted her dead? Her and her brother.”

“She can’t tell me that.”

Eve let out a half laugh. “She believed she could. She was seeing psychics, mediums, all that crapola. Parents killed in an accident last June, and she’s got a secret stash of business cards and info on talking to dead people.”

Now Morris smiled. “I talk to them all the time. So do you.”

“Ever have them talk back?”