“I suspect we won’t,” Gideon said. “My guess is the Colombian police aren’t going to waste their time doing a full-scale investigation. Why should they get involved in a case involving all US nationals? Besides, Maggie’s dead, Scofield’s dead, Cisco’s dead. There’s no one to prosecute. It’s all pretty much taken care of itself. I think they’ll just write it up, stamp it ‘Case closed,’ and file it away.”
“You said she was alone for only ten minutes?” Marti Lau said. “That was one fast-acting poison.”
“It was quick,” Gideon agreed, “but you have to remember she’d boiled or dried most of the plants down to very concentrated extracts and, besides, she had stuff in there that—” He barely stopped himself from saying, “that science doesn’t begin to understand,” and finished instead with “that we’ve never heard of. Whatever it was, it promptly sent her into anaphylactic shock. She was probably dead in
“Yes, we do!” Marti said.
“No, we don’t,” Julie said firmly. “John, I think your pizza’s ready.”
“Good, I’m starving.”
They had arrived at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport within two hours of each other, Julie and Marti fresh off a five- and-a-half-hour trip from Los Cabos, Gideon, John, and Phil not so fresh off a flight that was even more grueling than the one down: Leticia to Bogota to Mexico City to Houston to Seattle—thirty hours, including the stopovers. Phil had left Sea-Tac almost immediately to catch an Airporter bus home to Anacortes, but the others had gone to Pacific Marketplace, the terminal’s dramatic, new, upscale food court—fronted by a forty-foottall, 350-foot-long, curving window that looked out onto the runways—where each could indulge his or her own desires for a late- evening dinner. Marti had gotten a sushi plate from Maki of Japan, and Gideon and Julie had both gotten chowder and fish and chips from Ivar’s Seafood Bar. John, after giving serious thought to a couple of Wendy’s hamburgers, had ordered a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza
from an Italian bistro, despite their warning that it would take fifteen minutes. (For John, a week was a long time to go without a pizza.)
“I don’t really understand why she would kill herself,” Julie was saying when John returned with his pizza. “Dr. Scofield’s body was never found, was it? There’s no real proof that he’s dead, so how could she be convicted of murder?”
“That doesn’t matter under Colombian law any more than it does under ours,” John said around his first ecstatic, closed-eyed bite. “There would have been more than enough circumstantial evidence to convict her two times over. Especially the blood from upstairs. She knew it’d turn out to be hers. And then there are the lies she told, and the motive.”
“What motive?” asked Marti. “Didn’t they get along? I thought he was helping her out, getting her a job down in Peru.”
“He was,” Gideon said, “but she wanted to stay in Iowa City.”
“Why, in God’s name?” Marti muttered.
“Iowa City’s nice,” Gideon said, laughing. “But the thing is, with Arden Scofield in the running, her chances of getting the one remaining ethnobotany position were zip. But with Arden out of the picture, everything changes. It’s already June, way too late for the department to try to recruit somebody from the outside, so the job would almost certainly fall to her. And with the Great Man no longer overshadowing everything she did, her future there—so she must have thought— was going to be a lot brighter. Her whole life would be different.”
“So she came on the trip planning to kill him,” Julie murmured.
“I doubt it,” Gideon said. “If she had killing him in mind, I don’t think she’d have been so free in telling us about the Iowa situation— practically handing us a motive. No, I think the opportunity simply presented itself, and she took it.”
“What about you?” Gideon asked. “How was Cabo?”
“Great. We slept in the morning, we did a lot of swimming and snorkeling, we ate like horses, we got a few massages. Or at least I did.”
“But mostly,” Julie said, “we just relaxed, and read junky novels, and sat on the beach, and baked the Northwest chill out of our bones.
“Yeah, it was,” said John, pushing back from his now-empty pizza tray and clasping his hands on his belly, a man well contented, happy to be back in a world where pizza could be had for the asking. “To tell you the truth, though, next time something like this comes around...no offense to you, Doc...but I think I’ll opt for the crushed turnip wrap.”
