Fit To Be Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 1) Read online

  Naturally, I didn’t reveal Sam’s name or breathe a word about Holly Holmgreen. A Flash-News obituary had reported her death, but I figured Eagleton would immerse himself in studying test tubes and not connect our visit with her demise. Besides, she’d been run over, not poisoned. He led us to his office, a modest room that included a wooden desk, three serviceable chairs and a shelf against one wall covered with magazines, mysterious gadgets, reports and a bottle of Eco Toilet Sanitizer.

  “Let’s have a look at what you brought.” He pulled on sterile gloves and lifted each item from the bag. Holding the perfume atomizer at arm’s length, he sniffed and set the bottle on his desk without comment. His eyebrows peaked when he saw the bath crystals from Grace’s house. When he found the second bag of crystals, he eyed me quizzically.

  “I got them from two separate locations. Could you label one ‘home’ and one ‘club?’”

  He nodded, drew markers from his desk drawer and tagged the crystals as I instructed.

  He seemed less interested in the washcloths, but he honed in on Fit and Firm’s opaque bottles, which were supposedly filled with body lotion, body cream and hair spray. Holding them up, he studied the delivery plungers.

  “These bottles are identical except the plungers have different sized holes to release substances. Some liquids are naturally thicker than others. Or something was added.”

  What poisons had I absorbed through those plastic tubes?

  Eagleton squinted at words on the bottles. “The club’s logo is clear, but labels describing contents are hard to read.”

  “Yes. Meredith and I discovered how easy it is to confuse products.”

  “Okay. Now that I know what you brought, let me give you a better idea of what we do here.” Eagleton either wanted to show off the facility, evaluate us further or both. He led us to a room with a six-foot wide refrigerator with glass doors that housed trays filled with tubes of liquid. Did the tubes hold poisons I’d read about? On the countertop behind us, three machines, slightly larger than microwaves, occupied space to the left of a sink. Trays of empty test tubes sat to the right.

  “This is where we analyze volatile compounds. If someone smells an unusual odor, we go to their business and use pumps to capture air from their facility. We bring the pumps here, liquefy the contents in water and measure the amount of substances in the liquid.”

  “So you change gases to liquids for analysis?” I asked.

  “Or the reverse. We can also vaporize liquids to see if gases they produce are harmful.”

  “A substance doesn’t have to smell bad to be poisonous, does it?”

  “Not necessarily. Odors can be disguised by reducing them to liquids or combining them with other ingredients.”

  “Can you give us examples of volatile compounds?”

  “They vaporize if exposed to air like gasoline, paint cleaners and some polish removers. If they get too hot, they catch fire.”

  My ears perked up. “The methanol used in paint varnish, paint remover and perfume is poisonous, correct?”

  “You’re right. We test for methanol in our GC/MS lab. I’ll show you the lab in a minute.”

  I might learn how close I’d come to being pickled. He led us into another room where refrigerators stored more liquid-filled test tubes.

  “We analyze semi-volatile compounds here, like naphthalene and pesticides. They don’t catch fire, but they vaporize in air, so we keep them sealed and refrigerated.”

  He proceeded to the GC/MS lab. A machine covered a linear table that filled the long narrow room. “This is our quarter-million-dollar gadget, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer or GC/MS. The device can analyze over 250,000 substances, separating compounds according to size, shape and chemical properties. It identifies the class of a suspected chemical but can’t tell us its exact makeup.”

  “Can it identify poisonous substances?”

  “After GC separates the sample into components, MS can identify each substance.”

  “So you’ll know for sure whether there’s poison in each bottle I brought you?”

  “Yes. We don’t test for poisons per se. We test for specific substances which we know can be poisonous, like methanol, alcohol, potassium...”

  “Potassium permanganate?”

  “Yes. The substance that looks like your bath crystals.”

  Meredith turned pale. “Where did you get those?”

  “By the hot tub at the club.”

  Eagleton made a U-turn and led us back to his office.

  “I think it’s the deodorant,” I said. “I used it more than anything else.”

  “Then we’ll start with that. We’ll put your sample into GC/MS and distill it to fumes for analysis. If we find a toxic substance, we’ll obtain a duplicate of the substance and run it through GC/MS for confirmation. The duplicate must be within ten percent variation of your sample or we repeat the test.” Eagleton was all business when discussing data, but I thought he’d be a nice boss.

  “When will you have results?”

  “If the deodorant is poisonous, we’ll know today and do a confirmation test on Monday. If the deodorant is clean, and we need to test the other substances, we’ll have answers by the middle of the week. We’ll release the findings to you so you can inform the detective.”

  Perfect. I’d get the results. After all, I was the poison recipient. “If you find poison in the deodorant, will you also test both samples of bath crystals?”

  “You bet.” He seemed eager to get to work.

  “I can’t thank you enough.” I handed him a card with my contact information.

  “When I get a definitive answer that helps somebody, I really enjoy my job.” He shook our hands and admonished us to drive carefully.

  Meredith drove me back to the club to get my car, “I can’t believe we’re having samples tested for poison—that somebody is actually trying to poison you.”

  “It is hard to fathom. Maybe somebody accidentally mixed substances. It would be easy to do with all those identical opaque bottles.”

  “Right. Just like somebody accidentally dropped the radio in the pool. How did you know about potassium...whatever?”

  “Internet research.” I wasn’t up for much discussion, even with my practical friend. Relief engulfing me made me feel giddy. My pounding head felt swollen, but getting definitive, scientific answers would make me feel better. When Meredith dropped me at my car, I drove home and collapsed into bed.

  Twenty-Three

  When I woke Sunday, my head throbbed from my hard landing on the stairs the day before. My sides felt like hammered meat. If I moved, I ached. When I lifted my Garfield nightshirt, purple bruises sprawled from my ribs to my knees where I’d bounced down the steps and hit the floor.

  Sleuthing was becoming unpleasant. After a few subtle doses of poison, somebody apparently decided pushing me down the stairs was a quicker way to get rid of me. I must be getting close to uncovering information the killer didn’t want me to have. The seriousness of my situation sank in. Somebody wanted me dead. I’d better step up my efforts to solve Holly’s murder before her killer wiped me out.

  I stood but felt woozy, so I eased down on the bed and reached to the chair for my warm-up pants. I tugged them on, waited a few seconds and tried to remain calm. I’d barely survived an attempt on my life.

  Standing slowly, I slid one foot, then the other, to the bathroom. When I peeked in the mirror, I discovered that overnight I’d sprouted an egg. The bulge protruded straight out from my forehead, two inches above my left eye. The territory between the egg and my eye was red and puffy. My eye drooped into a sleazy wink. When I raised my arms up, I discovered I couldn’t get my orange Garfield sleep shirt off over my head without smacking the egg.

  In the cabinet under the sink, I found an old ice bag I’d inherited from Aunt Novena, filled it with cold water and laid it gingerly on my head. The soft part of the bag sagged down over the protrusion. Pain prevented me from resting anything soli
d on my bump. I creaked to the kitchen to add ice to the bag. While I consumed hot tea and toast, I decided the best way to get my mind off my injuries was to figure out the connection between Holly Holmgreen and Harry Thorne.

  After I finished breakfast, I retrieved the boxing photo from my purse, hobbled to the living room and placed the photo face down beside my computer. While the machine powered up, I lowered my aching carcass into the ergonomic chair and studied the inscription on the back of Harry’s photograph, beginning with the scribbled date: 1975. Harry had said Billy was one of the last few soldiers killed in Saigon. My historical recall wasn’t great, so I searched for “dates+Vietnam+war.” One Web address looked promising: “A Vietnam War Timeline.” I clicked it and scrolled down to the 1975 headline that read:

  “Last Americans Evacuate As Saigon Falls to Communists.”

  A paragraph described how South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivered an unconditional surrender to the Communists in the early hours of April 30. I shuddered, thinking of all the fine American soldiers and South Vietnamese people who died there before our country and theirs suffered a tragic, ignominious end to the war.

  The final sentence of the paragraph caught my eye: “As remaining Americans evacuated Saigon, the last few US servicemen to die in Vietnam were killed when their helicopter crashed.”

  I yanked up Harry’s photograph and squinted at his note: “B’s crash. H, 3.”

  “B’s crash” could mean the crash of Billy’s helicopter. Billy Thorne could have been one of “the last few US servicemen to die” when his helicopter crashed in 1975. He would have been twenty-two years old when he died, just as Harry said. Everything fit together too well to be coincidental.

  If Billy died in 1975 at age twenty-two, Harry would have been twenty-three, a year older. That meant Harry was born in 1952 and Billy in 1953. Harry would now be in his forties, the age I’d guessed.

  What about the other item Harry scribbled, “H, 3?” When I’d moved my magnifying glass over the photo in Harry’s office, I thought the child perched on the metal chair, dressed like Shirley Temple, resembled Holly Holmgreen. I reached in my purse for the magnifier and passed it again over the child’s face. Her features were tiny and perfect in her doll-like face. Her huge eyes were exactly like Holly’s.

  I stared at the distinctive mass of curls springing from the child’s head and remembered the wet ringlets plastered to Holly’s head at the pool. I’d never forget the half-dry springy curls bouncing from the poor girl’s head as she lay on the concrete near the parking garage.

  The child in Harry’s photograph, primly perched within ten feet of violence and sweat in the boxing ring, had to be Holly Holmgreen at age three. Harry’s cryptic note, “B’s crash. H, 3,” indicated somebody took Holly’s picture near the time of Billy Thorne’s fatal helicopter crash. Why would Harry write a note linking Billy’s death to Holly’s age unless Billy and Holly were related?

  The light dawned: Billy Thorne was Holly’s father. Harry Thorne was her uncle. Either Holly had visited her Uncle Harry and grandfather, Arnold Thorne, at the boxing gym near the time Billy died, or she lived with them when Billy went to Vietnam. After Billy died, Arnold and Harry Thorne had raised her.

  Where was Holly’s mother? Why was Holly’s last name Holmgreen instead of Thorne?

  I couldn’t answer those questions, but Holly’s age in 1975 fit with what I surmised. If she was born in 1972, she would have been three years old in 1975. Had she lived, Holly would be in her twenties, which seemed to fit.

  Uncle Harry Thorne, distraught with grief, would’ve submitted the bare minimum for Holly’s obituary. I could verify her and Harry’s ages by sneaking into the club’s personnel records. Being the controlling type, Harry probably kept staff and club members’ files in his private domain so he could check on people unobserved. Maybe I should sneak back into his office.

  Suppose Billy got Holly’s mother pregnant before he went to Vietnam. If he went overseas in 1972, Billy would have been nineteen years old. Military records would confirm his age. Billy’s wife or girlfriend, Holly’s mother, was probably between seventeen and nineteen.

  When my head started working better, I’d try to evaluate the relationship between Harry and Holly. Why did neither acknowledge that Harry was her uncle?

  My head pounded. My body was stiffening to the shape of the chair. If I tried to stretch, my side hurt. I squirmed to a different sitting position and decided to research more poisons. When I entered my symptoms—nausea, vomiting, flushing, weakness, sweating, irritability, and dizziness—a long list of toxic chemicals appeared on the page. At the top loomed an orange and black skull and crossbones. Just as I began to read, the doorbell rang. I pushed up from the chair, moaned and waited for my pain to pass and dizziness to stop. Barely ambulatory, I clung to the bag on my head, shuffled barefoot to the door and opened it.

  Sam stood on the front stoop in khaki pants and a mustard and orange checked shirt.

  Twenty-Four

  Sam’s colors were too much for a sick person.

  At the sight of me, his brows shot up. “For God’s sake, Agatha, what happened this time?”

  When he called me Agatha, my head throbbed. I obviously couldn’t tell him somebody pushed me down the gym’s stairs. If I did, he’d tell me not to return to Fit and Firm.

  “I fell down the stairs at the club. It’s nothing. Just a little egg on my head. I’ll be okay.”

  “You sure don’t look okay. Here, let me see. Get that mushroom off your head.”

  He didn’t have to remind me I didn’t look my best. With my operational right arm, I gingerly removed the ice bag. Dampness had flattened the left side of my hair. He stepped closer, gently holding my shoulders as he leaned forward to evaluate my egg. When he peered through his bifocals, chin up, his lips nearly touched my nose. I would have liked a nose kiss, but he focused on my protrusion. “You could have a concussion. Are you having any trouble staying awake? Any sudden sleepiness? You should see a doctor.”

  “For a little bump on the head? I slept well all night. I feel normal this morning except for being more sore than usual.” I wasn’t aware of any other sensations until Sam cradled my shoulders. He led me to the sofa, sat me down gently and handed me my ice bag. While I repositioned it, he inspected me. I considered falling against him.

  “If you feel any sudden drowsiness, or if that egg doesn’t start shrinking real fast, you need a head x-ray.” He took my hand and gazed into my eyes. “I’ll drive you to the hospital.” For the first time ever, I sensed he viewed me as more than a friend.

  Feeling tingly and mellow, I understood, for the first time in my life, what motivated hypochondriacs. I smiled. My puffy eye closed into a wink.

  This might be the perfect time to find out how much he knew about Harry. “Meredith told me Harry Thorne went home sick on Tuesday.”

  “That’s right. One of the men I stationed at the health club told me about it.”

  I hoped he wasn’t referring to the police officer I sweet talked into letting me invade Harry’s office. If Sam found out about that little episode, he’d be furious.

  “The officer said Thorne had a stomach bug,” he said.

  What had compelled Harry to rise from his sick bed Tuesday night and follow Grace and me to Las Tapitas?

  “Thorne came back Wednesday morning but left again the same day.”

  Harry must have been desperate to get into Holly’s apartment. Sam let go of my hand and shifted around to study my contusion.

  “Around midnight on Wednesday,” he said, “Harry’s neighbor had to drive him to the hospital.”

  He leaned back to view my lump from a different angle. “They finally got his stomach settled down, but he was so dehydrated, they had to replace his fluids. He’s back at home resting. Do you know Harry Thorne?”

  “I went to see him after Holly’s pool fiasco.”

  He frowned at me. He probably thought I should have told him about t
he incident. I made light of it. “Harry was positive the event was an accident. I think he hates to be wrong. He must have been devastated when Holly was murdered. Plus, think what the publicity could do to the club. Membership could be decimated.”

  It was difficult for me, the recent victim of a murder attempt, to be flippant, but I didn’t want Sam to dwell on poor Holly and her baby. And I didn’t want him considering the possibility that somebody had tried to kill me because of my link to Holly. To protect my past and to preserve Sam’s interest, I had to solve this crime fast.

  I failed to mention how Harry had glowered at me after I left his office, and I wasn’t about to disclose that I’d spotted him near Holly’s apartment. No way could I mention the little matter of my lying to the police officer to get into Harry’s office and swipe the photograph. I was debating whether to tell him what I’d surmised about Harry and Holly’s relationship when he stood and eyed me suspiciously.

  “What else do you know about Harry Thorne?”

  “Nothing much.” I shrugged. “The day I went to his office, I glimpsed a photo of two guys boxing. A little girl among the spectators reminded me of Holly.”

  “Holly Holmgreen? Harry has a picture of her as a child? What’s the connection between them?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe the child wasn’t Holly.”

  “Sounds like I need to pay Thorne another visit.”

  “Maybe so.” I shrugged again. It was one shrug too many. Sam backed away and studied me. His eyes narrowed, causing a shock of peppered hair to flop onto his brow. I was afraid his considerable intelligence had kicked in.

  “You fell down the steps? Yesterday? At the club? How did that happen?”

  “I left something in my locker and returned Saturday to pick it up. My arms were overloaded and I tripped on the stairs.” I refrained from shrugging.

  “You went to the club Saturday? After being so sick Thursday night at Sheldon’s house? What was so important that you felt compelled to retrieve it?”