Lethal Dose

Christopher held up a tan-colored file folder. “Your police report,” he said.

“You’re good,” Gordon said, smiling as he took the report. “What’s in here?”

“You want me to tell you or you want to read about it?”

“Why don’t you fill me in while I read?”

“Okay, boss. Your friend was taking a tour of the island near the Edmond Forest Reserve down near Soufriere. They had passed through a twisty part of the road we call The Gap, just south of Piton Canarie. They went off the road on the Enbas Saut Trail. It’s really steep and slippery there.”

“Let’s go have a look,” Gordon said, his eyes glued on the police file. “A picture paints a whole lotta words.”

Christopher nodded and shoved the car into gear. He navigated the tight streets of the island capital, flashing by brightly painted houses and small children with white, toothy smiles. Shacks with corrugated metal roofs bordered the road and unneutered dogs lounged in the shade or strolled next to the drainage ditches, irritated at best by the traffic rushing past inches from their scrawny bodies. Bridge Street began to rise as Christopher reached the southern edge of Castries, and he geared down for the uphill series of switchbacks that dominated the road between the capital city and Soufriere. Gordon knew the road well, and he watched the city tenements slowly dissipate and lush fields of banana and mango rise from the jungle clearings. The road, a two-lane goat path that Gordon swore was the training ground for New York cabbies, weaved its way through steep Lucian valleys. Occasionally, as he glanced out the right side of the van, he caught a quick glimpse of the ocean, far below them with tiny whitecaps as the waves approached shore. As they drove south, the Pitons came into view.

Petit Piton and Gros Piton were the primary memories most tourists took home from St. Lucia. Towering above the adjacent jungle-clad hills, the cone-shaped volcanic rocks graced the cover of almost every St. Lucia publication. Gordon took a passing interest in them as the road turned inland and the jungle thickened. The interior of St. Lucia is in places a true rain forest, and the best example is in the Edmond Forest Reserve. They followed the West Coast Road to St. Jacques Road, then headed due east into the forest. The road was thinner now, at times almost impassible by a single vehicle. Encountering another car driving the opposite direction was scary in many places, as someone had to back up. They reached The Gap without incident, and Christopher drove three kilometers onto the Enbas Saut Trail and stopped. Ahead of them was a switchback, the road dropping off into an abyss. There was no guardrail.

“This is the place,” Christopher said. “I read the police report after I picked it up last night. I know this corner. Lots of people go over this cliff. They should put up a concrete barrier or something. It would save lives.”

Gordon stepped from the van into the jungle heat and humidity. There had been no rain over the past twenty-four hours, but the dirt surface was slick with moisture just from the mist settling out from the surrounding air. Gordon had read the police report on the drive up and knew that the vehicle in which Kenga had been the passenger had been traveling toward the switchback from the opposite direction. He walked up to the corner and glanced up the hill. A hundred feet farther, there was another sharp corner the vehicle would have had to navigate prior to reaching the switchback. That severely limited the speed at which the driver would have been approaching this curve. That and the fact that he should know the road would suggest he had been traveling extremely slowly. Yet the police report stated that the vehicle had left the road at an estimated thirty kilometers an hour.

He glanced over at Christopher. “No one in their right mind would attempt this corner at thirty kilometers an hour. Not even in a Ferrari with dry roads.”

“Is that what the police report says?” Christopher asked. “Thirty kilometers an hour?”

Gordon nodded. “Seems excessive.”

“Seems stupid.”

Gordon walked to the edge and looked over. It was an almost sheer drop, punctuated by ridges jutting out from the wall. The first ridge was about forty feet down and stuck out six or seven feet. It was covered with trees and shrubs, their roots clinging to the rocky outcrop. Gordon stared at the foliage for a few minutes, then motioned Christopher to join him.

“See that tree?” he said, pointing to a palm angling out from the wall. “It has a huge gash in it, almost at the roots.”

“I see it,” Christopher said. “And a couple of shrubs are broken as well.”

Gordon looked back up the road. “Imagine a vehicle coming down this road at thirty kilometers an hour. It goes over the edge but somehow manages to hit the tree next to its roots. How is that possible? The trajectory of the vehicle would send it flying out into open space, not tumbling over the edge. A vehicle moving at that speed would probably clear that tree, or at best shear it off near the fronds. But not this. This is all wrong.”

“Maybe the car did clear the tree. Maybe that’s an old cut mark on the bark.”

“You know that’s not true, Christopher. In this heat, that mark will be overgrown in another week. No, that’s where her vehicle hit. Which means it was just barely moving when it went over.”

“Pushed?” Christopher asked.

“Pushed,” Gordon said, gazing out over the St. Lucia rain forest canopy. “Which would explain why the driver wasn’t in the vehicle when it went over the cliff.” He brushed his hair back off his forehead and slipped a toothpick from his pocket and between his teeth. “I think someone murdered Kenga Bakcsi.”

25

The estate was invisible from the main road, obscured by a border of thirty-foot butternut and black birch, trees indigenous to the central Virginia area. Numerous flower and shrub beds ran parallel to the highway asphalt and offered a warm touch, almost inviting. But the wrought-iron gate and eight-foot fence told a different story. So did the guard dog signs posted every hundred feet on the fence. Bruce Andrews took the issue of home security very seriously.

Inside the gates was a true country estate. The drive was long and winding, through groves of trees, trimmed grass fields punctuated with equestrian hurdles and numerous ponds, some complete with ducks and geese lazing on the still, summer waters. The main house was set almost in the center of the forty-six-acre package. Its facade was two-story, Southern plantation style, with Ionic pillars on volutes. A wide second-floor balcony ran the length of the house with four separate sets of French doors opening to it. The mixture of Grecian columnar architecture and Palladian-style house worked beautifully, and off-white shutters framed all the windows.

Bruce Andrews was perusing a copy of the Financial Times on the rear deck. He often wondered if the land he viewed from where he sat was that which Grant and Beauregard had fought over during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. Many a brave man on both sides of the skirmish had died on this quiet tract of land south of the Appomattox. Occasionally, he wished that time would slip and he could see the historic battle firsthand: trench warfare in its infancy, breastworks shielding the soldiers as they reloaded their Springfield muskets. But the field remained quiet, and it appeared that he was destined to replay the siege in theory only.

He sipped on freshly squeezed Florida orange juice and scanned the article the Financial Times had written on his company. When he finished, he set the magazine on the table and smiled. They had taken the bait and swallowed it whole. And that was all he needed. With such a glowing review by one of the premier financial publications, it would be months before anyone took another serious look at Veritas’s books. And by that time, the danger of his house of cards collapsing would be history. The smile just didn’t want to leave his face. He had done it. He had taken a huge risk and succeeded.

Haldion, the FDA recall that had threatened to empty the company’s coffers, was behind them. The lawsuits were finished, the cash flow stemmed. Triaxcion, Veritas’s antibalding drug, could hurt them, but with the new projections, they could now weather a full-blown tort suit. That had yet to materialize, but the possibility was ever-present and real. The most active legal challenge they had to date on Triaxcion was from some irritating ambulance chaser in Butte, Montana. Christine Stevens kept threatening a substantial tort action unless Veritas admitted Triaxcion was responsible for altering blood chemistry in A-positive men and women. They hadn’t mentioned anything financial yet, and when pushed to name a figure that would see them disappear quietly, she had insisted that this issue was not financial. Her client simply wanted them to admit that their drug was