She handed him the plastic sack with the plants in it. “You told me that some kind of plant toxin showed up in Pierre Cantone’s autopsy tests. I’m wondering if this might be it.”
He glanced into the bag.
“They’re completely crispy now, but when I first found them they seemed the same shade of green as that stuff that I found inside his house. Zoe tells me this stuff is poisonous.”
He pulled out one of the stems and held it up. “Looks like deathcamas. She’s right. Livestock eats this stuff and it’s a horrible death. Never heard of a person eating it though. Why would they?”
“It was growing near Cantone’s house. There were smears of something much like this in his kitchen. The man dies. The nephew inherits a fortune in paintings. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Sam wanted to say ‘aha!’ She’d not liked that nephew much anyway.
“But—” He held up an index finger. “But, to make any kind of accusation, much less a court case, we have to have some kind of proof.”
“Lab tests. Can’t they tell if this is the plant toxin that was in Cantone’s body?”
“We can have it tested and find out. And that’s a good start. But it’s still a far cry from proving that the nephew administered this. Or that he didn’t eat it accidentally.”
“A poisonous plant like this—accidental?”
“You’d be surprised how many people experiment with plants in their yards, Sam. Some of them are tasty and harmless, like dandelion greens. They’ll pick a bunch of unknown greens and make up a salad. Never put it together that they got really sick the next day.”
“But day after day? Zoe said it would take quite a bit to kill a person.”
“Hey, it kills horses and sheep.”
Sam still couldn’t see it happening accidentally to a person. “There are other people who had grudges against the man. Have you questioned Mr. Trujillo, the neighbor with the lawsuit against Anderson?”
“Haven’t had time. Padilla has me on another case that just came up this morning. He’s pushing hard to close the whole Anderson-Cantone file and get on to other things.”
“But—” She pointed at the bag.
“I’ll try. The first step would be to tie this to the victim. If I can get Padilla to agree, I’ll have it tested against the toxin the lab found in Cantone. See if that tox level was high enough to be fatal. Don’t count on getting a conclusive answer, though. Things like this really deteriorate with time. But we can see what happens and take it from there.” He gave her a quick kiss. “I gotta get back on the job.”
She walked him out to the cruiser. “Thanks for what you’re doing for Kelly. The job is a big favor.”
“Hey, it’s a bigger favor to me. I hope she likes being with Mama. I really was getting to my wits end about a solution to the problem. I’m glad Kelly is willing to do it.”
She watched him drive away, then rummaged in the garage for a For Sale sign that she’d used years ago. Filled in the phone number and a couple of details about the truck and taped it to the window. She would miss the Silverado’s capacity for stuff that she had to haul away from the properties she tended, but it was time for a change.
The day had warmed up considerably, as usually happened this time of year, and Sam suddenly realized she was way too hot in her sweats. She showered and looked for something else to put on. The handiest thing was the pair of slacks and blouse she’d worn yesterday. As she pulled the pants on something crinkled in the pocket.
The envelope she’d taken from Bart Killington’s house.
Chapter 22
Sam pulled the envelope from her pocket and stared at it. So much had happened in the hours since she’d been there, she’d completely forgotten to mention it to Beau. Of course, telling him about it would open another set of questions about how she’d gotten it. Maybe better to wait.
Beau’s comments about both tying the plant residue to the nephew and verifying it as the cause of Cantone’s death made her realize that simply finding evidence did not prove a crime. She would have to find some kind of proof that the one-page will she’d located was not the real one. Something more than her own simple intuition.
She laid the envelope on her dresser.
Back at her computer, Sam saw that she’d received a reply to one of her emails about a van for sale. It turned out that one was in Albuquerque and while she didn’t relish a five-hour round trip drive to go see it, she didn’t want to rule out anything either. She sent a reply thanking them for the info and saying she’d consider it.
Movement in the front yard caught her eye and she saw a man circling her truck. She stepped outside to talk to him and he readily offered about half of what it was worth. When she showed him the printout she’d gotten online with the values, he went away a little grumpy. Feeling somewhat discouraged she went back inside to find that she’d missed a call from Rupert.
When she called him back he said that he’d heard from Carolyn Hildebrandt, the art rep in Santa Fe, wondering whether Mrs. Knightly was still interested in Cantone’s work. Although the painting they’d looked at was going out to New York today, she could show them some other pieces.
“I’d say, considering what we spotted in Bart Killington’s house,” Sam said. She didn’t tell Rupert about her little breaking and entering caper the other day. You never knew what would end up in one of his books.
“So, would you like to become Mrs. Knightly again and run to Santa Fe for the day?” he asked.
She considered it for about half a second. The drive down to the capital was getting old. Plus, what would they really learn? She already knew that Hildebrandt and Bart were close, and she was pretty certain that Bart’s stash of Cantone paintings were the real thing, art that he’d taken from the artist’s Taos residence. She begged off, using her caretaker job as an excuse.
Rupert grumbled a little and she suspected that he’d secretly wanted to take the day off from his writing. But like most professionals, he was pretty good about disciplining himself to devote a certain number of hours a day to his craft, and like it or not he sometimes needed for his friends to not enable his lazy streak. He said as much before ending the call.
Well, thought Sam, I guess I could say the same for myself. Can’t very well nag Rupert about not working if I don’t do the same. As she placed her gold hoop earrings into the lumpy wooden box she had a thought. If the box seemed to give her an energy boost, why not use that to her advantage?
She picked it up and held it in her arms, close to her body. Again, warmth surged from the wood and the yellowish surface began to radiate golden light. The stones glowed more brightly than she’d ever seen them. She quickly set the box back on her dresser, her heart pumping. The power of the thing unnerved her.
She stared at it for a couple of minutes.
You might be playing with fire, Sam.
Shaking her hands to dispel the tingly feeling in them, she began to back out of the bedroom. Then something green caught her eye.
The envelope containing the purported will.
The entire surface of the envelope was covered in smears of the greenish, powdery substance. The same thing Sam had seen in Cantone’s kitchen, the stuff Rupert swore he couldn’t see.
She picked it up and gingerly opened the flap. Inside, the single sheet of paper also had green marks on it.
Bart Killington was definitely connected to the green dust now.
She dropped the envelope on the dresser and grabbed up the telephone.
“Beau, there’s something weird going on here.”
While he went through a whole bunch of “are you okay?” kind of stuff, she gathered her thoughts. Working at sounding rational, she told him about taking the envelope from Killington’s house and how she’d found powdery green marks on it, just like those at the house that she suspected to be deathcamas.
