Page 30 of With a Vengeance

“You sure about that?” Seamus says.

“Not a hundred percent. But I’ve drunk enough martinis in my life to know they don’t smell like this. Someone put something toxic in Judd’s drink.”

“Told you it was murder,” Lapsford says with smug satisfaction.

While that fact is now obvious, Anna still doesn’t understand the motive behind it. Why would someone want to kill Judd Dodge? If anyone on this train is a target for murder, it’s her, followed closely by Seamus. Yet someone killed Judd instead.

“Did any of you have a grudge against Judd?” she asks, not expecting an honest answer.

Edith shakes her head, while Lapsford says, “I barely knew the man.”

“Not me,” Herb says. “But he did seem a bit jumpy when he first got here.”

“Jumpy how?” Anna says.

Looking jumpy himself, Herb wipes his brow with a handkerchief and then starts twisting it in his hands. “Nervous. Like he had a bad feeling about this night.”

“As well he should have,” Sal says. “Seeing how one of you offed him.”

On the other side of the car, Jack Lapsford looks her up and down. “Excluding yourself, I see. In my mind, that makes you the prime suspect.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Sal says.

“I had no reason to kill him,” Lapsford says. “Even though he all but confessed to treason and sabotage when he saw that blueprint.”

Whether intentional or not, Lapsford’s response provides Anna with a prime motive for murder. Judddidsay he drafted the blueprint that had been in the briefcase, even clarifying that it was for the locomotive that had been designed to explode. That’s as close to an admission of guilt as she could hope for.

Maybe one of the others, worried he’d easily confess to everything they’d done, resorted to murder to keep Judd quiet. But who? And when?

Anna tries to summon details from minutes earlier. Whoever did it had to have slipped the poison into Judd’s glass without anyone else noticing. But not much time had passed between Dante making the drinks and Judd’s sudden collapse to the floor. And Anna had been too distracted by the passing train—not to mention tending to Lapsford during his faked heart attack—to notice much of anything else.

“Who was standing next to Judd when he died?” she says.

“No one,” Seamus says. “He was alone.”

“And no one got near him after he grabbed his drink from the bar?”

“No.”

Seamus turns to the bar itself. Dante remains behind it, not having budged since pouring the martinis. Aware of the suspicious way everyone is looking at him, he says, “You don’t seriously think I did it, do you?”

“A man did just die while drinking a martiniyoumixed,” Seamus says.

“But why would I kill him?” Dante said. “Whencould I have killed him? You all saw me mix those martinis right in front of you. I made everyone’s drinks at the same time, in the same shaker. If I poisoned Judd’s, then Sal, Herb, and the lieutenant colonel here would also be dead.”

Sal stares at the glass still in her hand and, seeing that it’s mostly empty, lets it go with a gasp. The glass hits the floor, its stem snapping at her feet. Herb and Lapsford, both of whom had set their half-consumed drinks aside earlier, exchange stricken looks.

“But you’re not dead,” Dante adds. “Which means I didn’t poison Judd’s drink. How could I? I didn’t know who’d be taking which glass. I let them pick.”

“It’s true,” Anna says, recalling how Dante, as he did with everything, presented the drinks with a charming flourish. “He set out the glasses and poured the drinks, but the rest of it was random.”

“And Judd took the last glass that was left,” Dante says.

“Who took the first?”

“Sally,” Edith says, piping up from her chair by the window. “She chose first.”

Sal whirls on her. “So you’re saying I did it?”

---