“Do you have the number for the coroner who did the autopsy? I think you said the pathologist was still old Dr.
Saunders. That right?”
“Yeah. It’s Roger Saunders,” Garcia said. “Just a minute and I’ll dig out his number for you.” Leaphorn dialed it, identified himself to a secretary, was put on hold, was told by another older-sounding woman that Dr. Saunders wanted to talk to him and could he hold another minute or two? He held. He switched the phone from right ear to left to allow his aching arm to dangle for a while. He looked around for a shady place to stand out of the warm autumn sun, found one that also allowed him the comfort of leaning on a car fender. He heard a voice saying hello and shifted the phone back to his better ear.
“Dr. Saunders,” he said, “this is Joe Leaphorn. I wondered—”
“Great,” Saunders said. “Aren’t you the cop Garcia 160
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told me about? The one who had suspicions about that Bork death? I’ve got some questions for you.”
“It’s mutual then,” Leaphorn said. “You want to go first?”
“What made you suspicious? That’s the big question.
It sure as hell looked like just another guy driving too fast, skidding down into the ditch. The crash would have killed him even if he hadn’t been poisoned.”
“Mel was investigating an arson fire. Well, it had been ruled not arson, but it was suspicious-looking, a man burned in it, and just a bit before this wreck happened, a death threat turned up on his answering machine.”
“Death threat,” said Saunders, sounding both pleased and sort of excited. “Really? Tell me about that. Who was doing the threatening? I know he had been up in the San Francisco Peaks area talking with somebody up there just before it happened. Was that who was making the death threats?”
Leaphorn sighed. “A lot of this we don’t know yet,” he said. “When we find out, I’ll fill you in. But what I need to know is how the poison got into him, and how fast it might have worked. Things like that.”
“This is likely to sound odd,” Saunders said, “but it appears that Mr. Bork managed to eat, or possibly drink, something we used to call ‘rat zapper’ back in the days when it was legal to use the stuff. You know anything about toxicology?”
“Not much,” Leaphorn said. “I know arsenic is bad for you, and cyanide is worse.”
Saunders laughed. “That’s what most people know, and I guess that’s why the books on the subject are full THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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of cases using those, and a few others about as popular.
The stuff that killed Bork is sodium monofluoroacetate.
People have trouble pronouncing that, so toxicologists just call it compound ten-eighty. Back when it was on the public market it was called Fussol, or Fluorakil, or Mega-rox, or Yancock. For the past thirty years or so, owning it has been illegal except by licensed varmint-control people. We’ve never run into it here before, and none of the people I know in this business have either. You know, I think this case may get me invited to do a paper on it at the next meeting of our national association of folks who poke into corpses.”
“This has me wondering how the poisoner got his hands on it,” Leaphorn said. “Any suggestion?”
“Wouldn’t be too hard out in this part of the world,” Saunders said. “Lots of ranchers and farmers and so forth used it routinely to keep down the rat, mice, and gopher populations. They even used it in coyote bait in some places. Easy to use. It’s based on a extremely toxic substance called . . .” Saunders paused, “—you ready for some more impossible words? Called dichapetalum cy-mosum, which they get out of a South African plant. If you found it in a drawer in an old barn, it would probably be in a box, or mason jar, and it would look a lot like regular wheat flour. Very easy to use. Just a tiny amount would be lethal.”
“How tiny?” Leaphorn asked, thinking of Tommy Vang and the fruitcake cherries.
“Well, say you had about the volume equal to the amount of sulphur on the tip of a kitchen match. I’d say that would be enough to kill about ten or twelve men the size of Mr. Bork. But look, Lieutenant, if you want to know 162
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more, you could call the absolute national expert on it, a Dr. John Harris Trestrail. Lives in Michigan. I could give you his telephone number. Or you can get it out of one of his books. Best one I know about is called
“I’ll look for it,” Leaphorn said. “But you have any thoughts about how that poison got into Bork?”
“Something he ate, probably. Maybe something he drank.”
“You could mix it into a cake batter? Something like that? Put it in coffee?”
“You could put it in, I’m sure, because it’s water soluble. Maybe not coffee. It’s odorless, but it might give the coffee a wee bit of an acidic taste. Cake? I don’t know if the baking heat would have any effect.”
“How about one of those fat maraschino cherries like people drop into their cocktails,” Leaphorn asked. “Or stick on top of little cakes. Could you inject a little shot of that stuff into one of those?”
“Sure,” Saunders said. “Perfect. In a cherry the victim would never taste it. Or not until it was too late. Soon as it hits the bloodstream it starts screwing up the nervous system, shutting down the heart. Victim goes into a coma in a hurry.”
“From what I know about this case, the poison must have acted awfully fast. He left the house of a man he’d been questioning outside of Flagstaff and was driving home. He’d been given a lunch bag there while he was
