“Or he hired someone,” Walt said.
“Doesn’t fit,” Dottie said.“There were two glasses on that desk.Whoever was in that study with him, he invited them in.He was comfortable enough to sit down and have a drink with them.That’s not a hired killer.That’s someone Henry trusted.”
“Which brings us back to who Henry would have poured a drink for at that hour,” Deidre said.“On a Saturday night.In the middle of a storm.”
Nobody had an answer for that yet.
“There’s one more thing,” I said.“Serena told her father she was pregnant a few weeks after the funeral.”
Dottie and Bea gasped.Deidre’s mouth dropped open.
“Close your mouth, Deidre,” Bea said.“You look like a codfish.”
Deidre closed it.Then opened it again.Then thought better of whatever she was about to say and reached for her tea instead.
Bea turned her glass slowly on the table.
“If Byron Jameson was the killer, that would certainly come back to bite him,” Bea said finally.“He was a surgeon.Cutthroat and calculating when he needed to be.Cold blooded enough to plan the murder of a man he’d known his whole adult life.And then he finds out the man he killed was the father of his own grandchild.”
It was easy to see how Bea had been a top investigative journalist during her prime.
Deidre took her glasses off her head and set them on the table.“That poor girl,” she said.
“She’s not a girl anymore,” I said.“She’s got a good life, a good husband, three boys.But Henry was still there.You could see it when she talked about him.”
“And she never told anyone,” Bea said.
“She was twenty-two with no standing.She was his secret.No one was going to listen to her.”
“Milton certainly wasn’t,” Walt said.
Dash’s phone buzzed on the table.He looked at the screen, then at me.
“Lab,” he said.
He stepped into the hallway and I listened to the shape of the conversation without being able to hear the words.The Silver Sleuths looked at each other and then at me.
Dash came back and sat down.His face had changed.
“The lab confirmed it,” he said.“There was something in that decanter.Benzodiazepines.They can’t nail down the specific compound from what was left, but the class is confirmed.”
Dottie exhaled through her nose.“Benzodiazepines are sedatives.Valium, Xanax, that family of drugs.In a high enough dose, mixed with alcohol, they’d have put Henry out cold within thirty minutes.Maybe less.He wouldn’t have struggled.He might not even have known what was happening to him.”
The table was quiet for a moment.
“Anyone connected to Henry or the foundation could have gotten their hands on that class of drug,” Dash said.“Doctors, nurses, even someone with the right connections.”
“That’s not a short list,” Hank said.“Half the board had medical backgrounds.Noreen Goble worked in a clinic for twenty years.Byron Jameson was a neurosurgeon.”
“Byron Jameson is dead,” Deidre said.
“He was very much alive in October of 2001,” I said.
“The point is,” Walt said, “we can’t narrow the suspect pool on the drug alone.Anyone in Henry’s orbit could have managed it.”
Hank leaned forward on his elbows.“Someone in his orbit who also knew his habits.Who knew about the decanter.Who had reason to want him dead.”He paused.“That description fits more than one person in this case.”
Nobody argued with that.
