who.”
“What time do they think it happened?” Peggy wondered.
“Her husband brought her the root beer at work right before closing, about five p.M. Apparently, she didn’t drink it all. She sipped on it until she left the bank at six when he picked her up and they went out for dinner. It was their anniversary.”
Peggy asked, “What bank did she work for?”
Samson looked through his papers. “Bank of America in downtown Columbia.”
Al nodded when she looked at him. “It’s too big a coincidence that both victims worked for Bank of America.”
Samson was astonished. “Do you think there’s a plot against Bank of America employees?”
“I guess I may be here in my official capacity after all,” Al said. “I’m going to have to speak to the Columbia police. Maybe together we can find out what’s going on.”
Al used his cell phone to call the detective in charge of Molly Stone’s case. Peggy and Dr. Samson accompanied him to the downtown precinct, against his better judgment.
“You’ll need us,” Peggy argued. “Besides, I didn’t come all this way to sit in a cafeteria and wait for you.”
“And you wouldn’t know there was a link between these two cases without us,” Samson agreed with her while he looked through the information she brought about Mark Warner.
Detective Bather Ramsey was less than welcoming when they arrived at the precinct. “I think we can probably figure out who killed Ms. Stone without help from Charlotte, Detective McDonald.” His pug face was angry and hostile.
“Look here, Ramsey,” Al started, “I don’t want to solve your homicide for you. I was hoping to get your help solving
Ramsey’s expression changed to astonishment. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He glanced at Peggy. “Pardon my French, ma’am.”
“So you see, we have something in common,” Al continued. “But we didn’t know our vic was poisoned until yesterday. You have a head start on us. Anything you could tell me about your poisoning could help with ours.”
“What did you think happened to your vic if you didn’t think he was poisoned?” Ramsey asked, looking at the information Peggy brought about Warner.
Al explained the circumstances of the bank exec’s death. “A CSI finally brought the information to light for us. Now I find out you had a poisoning on the same day, same kind of poison.”
Ramsey nodded and picked up the phone. “I think I should call in my captain on this. If anyone is going to contact the bank, it should be him.”
While Ramsey was on the phone with the captain, Al called Lieutenant Rimer to let him know what was going on.
Peggy and Dr. Samson sat together and compared notes. Peggy wished she had both sets of police files to look at. What she had wasn’t complete. She couldn’t get the whole picture from partial facts.
“Do you think the poison could be traced?” Samson asked her.
“If there was a random sample to go with,” she replied. “We’d need that to compare to the others.”
“A conspiracy to kill bank employees in two states is a big deal,” Samson considered. “They’ll probably call in the FBI.”
“I don’t think it’s that kind of conspiracy. I hope they don’t jump to conclusions that way.”
But the captain decided to call in a bank liaison who would work with them on the poisonings. The liaison asked them not to call in the FBI until they had more information. He didn’t want to start a panic among the bank’s employees.
They all got in a large black police van and went to look at the bank branch where Molly worked. They walked through the procedure she would’ve used for closing the day she worked. They looked through the surveillance video footage between the time when her husband brought the root beer and when she left the bank with him. Only a handful of customers came into the bank during that time. Molly handled three of them at her window. Two women and one man.
“Unless the husband brought the root beer with the poison in it,” the captain said, “the drink had to be poisoned here by one of these people.”
“What about the people she worked with?” Al asked him.
“We questioned them in depth several times. None of them seem to have any motive to kill her,” Ramsey answered.
“And their psychological profiles don’t add up that way,” the BofA liaison added. “We carefully screen all our employees.”
“Which brought us back to the husband.” Ramsey stuck his hands in his pockets. “But no matter how we looked at this boy, he didn’t fit the pattern for someone who murders his wife. His prints were all over the root beer bottle. There wasn’t a life insurance policy. We all felt he just didn’t have it in him.”
“What about the bottling plant?” Al glanced up from his notes.
“We checked that out. They dumped hundreds of gallons of root beer for us. Not a tainted bottle in them. Except for this one.” The captain answered his cell phone as he finished speaking.
“That leaves us with these three people,” Ramsey finished. “We identified two of them. These two.” He pointed to the man and one woman on the tape. “Neither one of them had any connection to the victim.”
