Pretty Poison

She nodded. “I’ll give Steve a call and go with you. Does the position pay?”

He scratched his chin. “I’m sure we can get you a small stipend. And you’ll have the satisfaction of finding out if you were right or wrong.”

“That sounds appealing. Where do I sign up?”

THE CRIME LAB FOUND TRACES of anemonin in the rest of the capsules at Dwayne Johnson’s home. Most of them were mutilated and only contained traces of the poison. The quest for the perfect capsule to give Mark seemed to be the only reason Dwayne was alive.

Peggy went with Al to search the Warner house. The judge issued the warrant on the strength of Johnson’s bedside affidavit that he picked up the capsules from the Warner trash can. Julie’s lawyer argued anyone could’ve put them there. But since the bank video showed Julie bringing in a pharmacy bag and the poisoned capsules matched the medication she brought Mark, the judge allowed the search.

Julie stayed in the house. Her eyes promised retribution when she saw Peggy.

Peggy shivered, but she straightened her spine and went ahead with the officers. The warrant allowed them to look for anything that could have been used in the commission of Mark Warner’s murder.

“There’s so much in here,” Peggy said to Al. “How are we going to go through it all?”

“Just remember, I only want you to look for the kind of paraphernalia that could be used to create the poison. Let us take care of the rest.”

With the Warner children crying in the kitchen, Peggy looked everywhere else first. There was no sign of anything she recognized as useful. Al asked Julie to wait upstairs with the children so they could search the kitchen. Peggy was grateful for his intervention but still couldn’t find anything.

“I think she had too much of a lead, Al,” she told him. “If there was anything here, she got rid of it. Maybe we should search the dump.”

“Great.” He glanced around the kitchen. “We’ll never get another warrant for this. They found a long dark wig upstairs in Mrs. Warner’s closet. That could help us make the case for the police in Columbia.”

“But not if we can’t find a beaker or anything that the poison was in.” Peggy thought about the cat being poisoned. If it was an accident, Julie had to be out in the open somewhere in the house. If not in the kitchen . . . “What about the basement? This house must have a basement.”

Al looked for a door, enlisting the aid of the officers as they finished searching the rest of the house. “If there’s a basement, she must have to climb in through an outside window.”

“Some of these older houses had cellars instead of basements.” Peggy began stomping her foot on the floor in the kitchen. “If there’s a door cut in the floor, it should sound different.”

Al and the officers joined her in stamping their feet across the floor. Peggy took a moment to smile at the sight, then she stomped down hard on a spot near the pantry. “I think I found something.”

The door cut into the oak tongue-and-groove floor was hard to see. They didn’t need a rug to hide it. The carpenter who’d created it did an excellent job. The lines between the different cuts in the wood were so thin as to appear almost invisible. Peggy found a spatula and used it to pry up one end of the door. It opened smoothly and quietly. She pushed back a new steel support brace that held the door open.

Al instructed two of the officers to stay upstairs with the Warner family. “We’re so close. I don’t want to have to look for Mrs. Warner like I’ve had to look for Ms. Prinz.”

“Have you found Keeley yet?” Peggy asked as she started down the narrow stairs.

“No. But I expect you knew that.”

The space under the house was more a cellar than a basement. It was crudely wired. One naked lightbulb hung over a rough workbench. A large Bunsen burner was pushed back from the edge. Various sizes of glass beakers and bottles stood on shelves.

“Holy smoke.” Al couldn’t believe his eyes. “Richards, get down here with that camera. Nobody touch anything until CSI gets here.”

Peggy poked around in the shadowed corners. Close to the workbench was a smaller table. It was covered by yellow scarves. Five jars of honey, five small pumpkins, and five oranges adorned it. On the wall behind it was a small picture of a beautiful black woman dressed in yellow scarves. She appeared to be dancing.

“What is that?” Al asked.

“Oshun,” Peggy told him. “That explains the yellow scarf around the cat. She’s part of the Santeria religion. And from what I hear, she can get very angry.”

“The what?”

Peggy left the cellar as she heard Emma come in the back door. The housekeeper put her bags of groceries on the table and rushed toward Julie as the officers were putting handcuffs on her. Her children were crying and clinging to her.

“No, no,” Emma was muttering. “Oshun wouldn’t let this happen.”

“It was you,” Peggy said in amazement. “It wasn’t Julie, was it? You killed Mark. You did it out of love for Julie and the children, of course. You killed Molly because she had the nerve to come here, face Julie, and threaten her. You tried to kill me because I was asking too many questions.”

Julie stared at Peggy, then swept her tearful gaze toward her housekeeper. “Emma? Is that true? You wouldn’t, would you?”

“You’re better off without him,” Emma told her. “And his disrespectful whore deserved to die, too.”

Jonas and Al glanced at each other. Al shrugged his hefty shoulders. “Don’t ask me.”

“Are you saying Mrs. Warner didn’t kill her husband?” Jonas asked Peggy.