Page 17 of The Botanist's Assistant
“The police won’t take me seriously.”
“I think you should always be taken seriously, Margaret,”Joe says, and they agree to meet at Dr. Deaver’s office door intwenty minutes. He says he needs to finish the floor to avoid streaks, which Margaret understands completely. She, however, dreads what she must do next.
She goes into the hallway and takes up her phone.
“But they’ve already put in our orders,” Keith says when she tells him she needs to work late and will miss their dinner. His voice carries a whiny quality she only now notices. “How will I eat two dinners?”
“Just take my order home and have it tomorrow.”
“I’m supposed to pay for a dinner I don’t want?”
“I’ll send you a check for half,” she says.
“Don’t forget the 15 percent tip.”
“I won’t.”
“This is upsetting,” he says. “People are staring.”
“Don’t look at them.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Goodbye,” he says stiffly.
What did he mean by that?
12
Breaking and Entering
If Margaret had known howexciting it was to be a burglar, she might have considered the profession earlier. Adrenaline floods her body and her senses sharpen as Joe lets her into Dr. Deaver’s office. The light inside is dim but serviceable for what she needs. Immediately, she sees that Dr. Deaver’s award photo has been set upright, the trash has been emptied and the Diet Coke bottle is missing.
“Did you…,” she begins.
“I was told not to clean the room.”
Who disturbed the scene, then?
She glances behind her. Dr. Deaver’s beloved jacket is still on the floor near the file cabinet. He always looked so dashing in it. She remembers him striding into a lecture hall wearing that coat. Hadn’t she seen the admiring eyes, the murmurs of respect? A lump forms in her throat. How she misses his resonant voice, his enthusiasm, his intellect. She will not cry.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Margaret shoves away her sorrow and clears her throat. It’s time to work, not to fall apart.
“You could look for a cocktail glass if you want, the one Dr. Deaver used to drink his scotch. It’s engraved with his initials, JMD. It’s not in its usual place.”
There was a famous case in 1994 in which a physician attempted to poison his wife by slippingAtropa belladonna(atropine) into her nightly gin and tonic. He tried to cover his tracks by going to a nearby supermarket ahead of time and putting small doses of atropine into several bottles of tonic water—just enough to sicken people and raise a general alarm. Then he could claim his wife was a victim of another person’s poisoning plot. He might have gotten away with it, too, except the paramedic helping the poisoned wife snatched up the half-full glass of the wife’s gin and tonic. Testing later showed a much higher level of atropine in the drink than in any of the supermarket bottles. Margaret doubts the paramedics who arrived at Dr. Deaver’s office had been as clever.
While Joe begins to search, Margaret double-gloves, catalogs the places Zhang might have touched, and begins her sampling: the armrests of the chair where visitors sat, the inside and outside doorknobs, the window latches, the drawer where he kept the key to the locked cabinet, although the key with its distinctive redwood-shaped key chain is missing. Where is it?
“Anything?” she asks Joe.
“No cocktail glass, but I found this under the couch.” He holds up a navy-blue button.
The button is medium-sized and could have come from anyone, even Dr. Deaver himself. Still, Margaret pockets it as a possible clue.
“And this.” He holds out a dark-green envelope. “It was on the floor, under the desk.”
On the front of the envelope is Margaret’s name written in an exuberant scrawl. Her heart races. It’s Professor Deaver’s handwriting.
