Page 112 of King’s Ransom

We stood in a chilly freezer room looking at the body of Sergei Kazan lying on a roll-out steel tray.

‘Oh, Sergei, Sergei . . .’ Olga Kazan fell to her knees, weeping at the sight of her dead husband.

Kazan had been a thin man, bony and gawky, with black hair that receded in a widow’s peak. His fingers were long.

Two gunshot wounds were visible on his left chest.

Garrett had shot him right in the heart.

While the Grandmaster’s body may not have been able to tell the authorities anything more than they already knew, it might tell me something.

‘Have you got the autopsy report?’ I asked the technician accompanying us.

‘I can’t let you take that—’ he began.

‘But we are entitled to read it,’ Georgy said in his best lawyer’s voice.

The technician handed over a file tucked into a pigeonhole beside the steel tray.

I scanned the report with Heidi looking over my shoulder.

‘What are you looking for?’ Heidi asked.

‘Two specific things,’ I said. ‘In the bloodwork. Them.’

I pointed at two lines in the report:

GC-MS, LC-MS/MS: Morphine sulfate 66 ng/mL

LC-MS/MS (Blood plasma): Naloxone <1 mg

These were the gas chromatography–mass spectrometry and the liquid chromatography tandem–mass spectrometry labs.

(The coroner here in Sleepy Hollow was very good.

Naloxone is absorbed into the bloodstream rapidly. If the coroner hadn’t done these tests quite soon after the shootout, the naloxone probably wouldn’t have been detectable. Even working this promptly, the coroner had only found trace quantities of it in Sergei Kazan’s blood.)

‘Morphine sulfate and traces of naloxone,’ I said aloud.

‘What does that mean?’ Heidi asked.

‘The anaesthetic drug Duramorph is morphine sulfate. It was used to knock out all the victim-hostages at 59West. They were also woken up with doses of naloxone. Looks like the Grandmaster was also knocked out and woken up with the same pair of drugs.’

I checked the autopsy reports of the two Russian goons who had also been killed in the shootout with Merritt Garrett.

Same thing.

Morphine sulfate and naloxone in their blood.

They’d also been drugged and woken up.

Georgy, Heidi and I left Mrs Kazan to handle the transportation of the bodies as we returned to Georgy’s little car in the parking lot.

‘So, Roman Oberov was right?’ Georgy said. ‘The Grandmaster was set up?’

‘It certainly seems so,’ I said.

‘This is all too weird,’ Heidi said.