Page 74 of Random in Death

“No, I have not.”

“This is what causes it. What he did here, what I’m seeing here, is he coated the needle with Treponema pallidum bacteria—with a chemical booster for fast action. It ain’t fatal, and she’d be dead before she showed any symptoms. But that’s the infection at the injection site.”

“A roofie and an STD,” Eve murmured.

“It’s the same formula, the same dosage in the second vic. The exact same down to the frigging microliter. I’m running them both again. See that? That’s an agent, a compound, and what it does is it inhibits the enzymes in the bloodstream, the CYP3A. Can’t do its job, so the drug works faster, the bloodstream absorbs more of it, gives it a bigger punch.”

Careful, Eve thought. Took no chances.

“It had to work fast,” she said. “He couldn’t have them lucking out with medical intervention.”

“Easier to dump some cyanide in their fizzy. This took work, precision—and I mean precision—knowledge, and some goddamn skill. It’s fucking science. It’s bad science, fucking mean science, but it’s science.”

“Yeah, it is. Where would he get the ingredients?”

“A goddamn lab.” Visibly pissed, Berenski threw up his arms. “It’s not just getting them. We don’t have heroin this pure around here. You guys hit a gold mine like that on a raid, maybe somebody skims some. Or maybe he makes it his damn self.”

Bang, Eve thought. That was a fresh bang.

“From poppies?”

“From freaking poppies. Research lab, biochem lab, medical lab. A roofie’s not hard to come by, and you can score some Kettle on the street. But the rest?”

He shook his head. “Even if you have access, you need damn fine skill to make this mix. And a sick fuck brain, Dallas, to think it up.”

“All right, appreciate it. I need to talk to Harvo about the fabric from the window at the first scene.”

“Like she’s got nothing else on her plate.” Then he shrugged his shoulders, beetled his eyebrows. “Go ahead. I’m running these again.”

“Peabody,” Eve said as they wound through the lab, “find out if we’ve hit a gold mine on an illegals raid in the last three years.”

“I think we’d have heard if the NYPSD confiscated a hunk of pure heroin, but I’ll tag Detective Strong in Illegals.”

With a nod, Eve kept winding to Harvo’s workspace.

The Queen of Hair and Fiber had a chin-length bob of blue hair today, about the same shade as Morris’s tie. She wore a pink T-shirt where what looked like a rat in a lab coat held a smoking petri dish and wore a maniacal grin.

Below it read:

BEWARE THE LAB RATS!

THEY’RE SMARTER THAN YOU.

With it she wore blue baggies and pink air sneaks.

“Hey, Dallas. Running your Saturday night fiber now. Nothing came to me on the Sunday night thing.”

“Nothing to send.”

“You know, I was thinking of hitting the Battle of the Bands Sunday, but I zipped to the Hamptons. My cousin’s boyfriend’s sister had a place up there for a couple weeks, did an open house deal for the weekend. Pretty frosty.”

Swiveling, she placed a speck of fiber on a slide under her scope.

“I can tell you by eyeballing this, it’s a cheap, synthetic blend. I’m going to say from pants, and new ones. Nothing the killer had in his closet for a while, nothing he washed.”

“You can tell that by eyeballing?”

She grinned, much like her cartoon lab rat.

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