waiting.
“The vic’s name is George Bengosian. Health-care bigwig,” Paul Chin explained as he led me into the penthouse suite. “Prepare yourself. I’m not kidding.”
I looked at the body, propped upright against the leg of a conference table in the lavishly appointed room.
The color of Bengosian’s skin had turned a hypoxic green-yellow, the consistency of jelly. His eyes were wrenched open like mangled gear sockets. Mucus, or some sort of viscous orange fluid, ran out of his nose and had caked grotesquely on his chin.
“What the hell did he do,” I muttered to the med tech leaning over him, “get into a life-sucking contest with an alien?”
The tech looked totally mystified. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“You’re sure this is a homicide?” I turned to Chin.
“Front desk got a call, two forty-five A.M.,” he said with a shrug, “from outside the hotel. Said there was some garbage that needed to be picked up in the penthouse.”
“Works for me.” I sniffled.
“That, and this,” Chin said, producing a balled-up piece of paper that he picked up with latex gloves. “Found it in his mouth.”
It looked like some kind of crumpled business form.
A white embossed logo: Hopewell Health Care.
It was a statement of benefits. Some text filled in. As I started to read, my blood ran cold.
We have declared war on the agents of greed and corruption in our society. No longer can we sit back and tolerate the powered class, whose only birthright is arrogance, as they enrich themselves on the oppressed, the weak, and the poor. The era of economic apartheid is over. We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers. We are inside your homes, your workplaces. We announce to you, your war is not beyond, but here. It is with us.
Oh fuck. I looked at Chin. This wasn’t a homicide. It was an execution. A declaration of war. And he was right, the Lightower bombing did just get a lot more complicated.
The note was signed, August Spies.
Part Two
Chapter 26
My first call was to Claire.
We had about an hour. That was all we had before this grotesque, seemingly random murder became headlines around the world as the second killing in a vicious terror spree. I needed to know how Bengosian had died, and fast.
The second call was to Tracchio. It was still before five
A.M. The night duty officer patched me through. “It’s Lindsay Boxer,” I said. “You said to make sure you knew the minute something went on.” “Yeah,” I heard him grunt, fumbling around with the phone. “I’m at the Clift Hotel. I think we just found the motive for the Lightower bombing.”
I could visualize him bolting upright in his pajamas, knocking his glasses onto the floor. “One of those X/L partners finally come clean? It was money, wasn’t it?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “war.”
After I hung up with the Chief, I looked around Bengo-sian’s hotel room. No blood, no sign of a struggle. A half-filled champagne glass rested on the conference table. Another shattered, at Bengosian’s feet. His suit jacket was thrown onto the couch. An open bottle of Roederer.
“Get a description of who he came up with,” I told Lorraine Stafford, one of my Homicide inspectors. “They might have security cameras in the lobby if we’re lucky. And let’s try and track down how Bengosian spent the early part of his night.”
We have declared war, the note read, on the agents of greed and corruption…
A chill went right through me. It was going to happen again.
I knew that in the next few hours I had to find out everything I could about Bengosian and Hopewell Health Care. I had no idea what he had done to be murdered like this.
I picked up the crumpled note.
We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers. We are inside your homes, your workplaces… Your war is not beyond, but here. It is with us.
Who the hell are you, August Spies?
Chapter 27
By the time most people were turning on the morning news, we had descriptions of a “cute brunette in a suit” (the night doorman) who “looked like she was totally into him” (their waiter at Masa’s) and had accompanied Bengosian back to his room last night.
She was either the killer or an accomplice who had let the killer in. A different girl from the one we were seeking as the au pair.
I looked up from the papers on my desk and saw Claire. “Got a second, Lindsay?”
Claire always maintained an upbeat side, even in the grimmest of cases, but it was clear from her expression that she didn’t like what she had found. “I owe you a couple of hours sleep,” I said.
Her worried eyes said, No, you don’t.
“I’ve been doing this work ten years.” Claire sank into the chair across my desk and shook her head. “I’ve never seen the inside of a body that looked like that.”
“I’m listening,” I said, leaning forward.
“I don’t even know what to call it,” she said. “It was like jelly in there. Total vascular and pulmonary collapse. Hemorrhaging all through the gastrointestinal tract. Massive splenetic and renal necrosis … Degradation, Lindsay,” she said, seeing my eyes glaze.
I shrugged. “We talking some kind of poison, Claire?”
“Yeah, but with a toxicity that’s way beyond anything I’ve seen before. I skimmed through a few journals. I once worked on this child who had a similar vascular collapse and edema; we tied it to a rare adverse reaction to, of all things, castor oil. So I’m thinking castor beans. Not the case. It’s ricin, Lindsay! Relatively easy to make in large quantities. Protein derived from the castor plant.”
“Obviously, it’s poisonous, right?”
“Highly toxic. A couple of thousand times more powerful than cyanide,” Claire said, nodding. “Easily secreted. A pinprick would stop your heart. It can also be released into the air, Lindsay. But I was thinking ricin alone wouldn’t leave someone looking like that, unless it was delivered …”
“Unless it was delivered how?”
“Unless it was delivered in such massive amounts that it accelerated the destructive cycle by a factor of ten … fifty, Lindsay. This Bengosian, he was dead before the champagne glass fell. Ricin kills over a period of hours, even a day. You get severe, flu like warnings, gastrointestinal pains; your lungs fill up with fluid. This guy came back at eleven-thirty and they were calling it in by three o’clock. Three o’clock.”
“We found a champagne glass shattered on the floor. We sent it to the lab. They can test for this stuff, right?”
