"...and finally," Marilee said, "we found trace levels of ethacrynic acid."
"Ethacrynic acid?" Marty was shaking his head. "That makes no sense at all. That's an oral diuretic."
"Correct."
"The guy was forty-six years old. His injuries were severe, but even so, I could tell he had been in fantastic physical shape - like he was a bodybuilder or something. Bodybuilders take those drugs. If he was taking an oral diuretic, that was probably why."
"You're assuming that he knew he was taking it," Hunter said. "Possibly he didn't know."
"You think somebody poisoned him?" Marty said.
She shrugged. "Toxic reactions include shock, hypotension, and coma. It could have contributed to his death."
"I don't know how you would determine that."
"You did the post," she reminded him, thumbing through the chart.
"Yes, I did. Weller's injuries were massive. Crush trauma to face and chest, pericardial rupture, fracture of hip and femur. His air bag didn't open."
"The car was checked, of course?"
Marty sighed. "Ask the cops. Not my job."
"It should have been checked."
"Look," Marty said, "this was a single-car fatality. There were witnesses. The guy is not drunk or in a coma. He drives straight into a freeway overpass at ninety miles an hour. Nearly all single-car fatalities are suicides. No surprise the victim turned off the air bag first."
"But you didn't check, Marty."
"No. Because we had no reason. The guy's tox screen was negative and his electrolytes were essentially normal, given his injuries and time of death."
"Except they weren't normal, Marty."
"Our tests came back normal."
"Umm," she said. "Are you sure the tests were actually done?"
And that was when Marty Roberts began to think seriously about Raza. Raza had said there was a rush order from the bone bank that night. Raza wanted to fill the order. So Raza would not have wanted Weller's body to lie in a locker for four or six days while the abnormal tox findings were analyzed.
"I'll have to check," Marty said, "to make sure the tests were done."
"I think we ought to," Marilee said. "Because according to the hospital file, the deceased's son works for a biotech company, and the wife works in a pediatrician's office. I assume both have access to biologicals. At this point, we can't be certain that Mr. Weller wasn't poisoned."
"Possible," Marty said. "Though unlikely."
She gave him a frosty look.
"I'll get right on it," Marty Roberts said.
Walking back tothe lab, he tried to decide what to do about Raza. The guy was a menace. Marty was certain now that Raza had never ordered the tox screen, which meant that the lab report had been faked. Either Raza had faked it himself, Xeroxing another report and changing the name, or he had an accomplice in the lab who faked it for him. Probably the latter. Dear God, another person involved in all this.
And now Miss Prissypants was on the hunt for wrongdoers because of trace ethacrynic acid. Ethacrynic acid. If John Weller really had been poisoned, Marty had to admit it was a clever choice. The guy was clearly vain about his body. At his age, he had to spend a couple of hours a day in the gym. Probably took a ton of supplements and shit. So it would be hard to prove that he hadn't taken the diuretic himself.
Hard. But not impossible...Ethacrynic acid was a prescription drug. There would be paper trails. Even if he got it from somebody, another bodybuilder, or a web site in Australia, all that would take days to check out. It wouldn't be long before somebody decided to take another look at the body and discovered the corpse had no arm and leg bones.
Shit.
Fucking Raza!
Marty started thinking about a forty-six-year-old bodybuilder. Guy that age, grown family - works his ass off to get a body like that, there's only two reasons. He's gay or he's got a girlfriend. Either way he's not humping his wife. So how does she feel about that? Pissed off?
Probably, yeah. Enough to poison the buff hubby? Couldn't rule it out. People killed their spouses for less. Marty found himself thinking hard about Mrs. Weller, recalling everything that had happened at the exhumation. He saw it in his mind: the tearful widow, leaning against her tall son, with the dutiful daughter standing beside, holding tissues for Mom. All very touching.
Except...
The minute the casket came out of the ground, Emily Weller got nervous.Suddenly the grieving widow wanted everything done fast. Don't take the body back to the hospital. Don't take too many tissue samples. The woman who had demanded a thorough DNA analysis suddenly seemed to change her mind.
Why, he wondered, had she done that?
He could think of only one possible answer: Mrs. Weller wanted her paternity test, but she never imagined the body would be taken back to the hospital for examination. She never thought they would take tissues from multiple organs. She thought they would just grab a blood sample, put the body back in the ground, and go home.
Anything more than that seemed to make Mrs. Weller nervous.
Maybe there was hope, after all.
He went intohis office and closed the door. He needed to call Mrs. Weller. It was a delicate call. There would be a hospital record of the date and time of the call. So, why was he calling her? He frowned.
Oh, yes: Because he had to collect her DNA, and that of her children.
Okay, fine. But why hadn't he collected the DNA from the family at the grave site? It was just a matter of cheek swabs. It would have taken only a moment.
Answer: Because he thought the DNA had already been collected by Miss Prissypants's lab.