There was an awkward pause, and then Lloyd said, 'Pretty damning, Drew.'
'You thought I was going away for it?'
'I couldn't imagine a jury convicting you with a brain tumor in a jar, but the evidence…' His long fingers gripped the mouth of his glass, tilting the dark liquid beneath. He contemplated the rum mix. I knew how that silent conversation went.
I said, 'Your report showed that Genevieve had no defensive wounds, no skin beneath her nails.'
'Katherine Harriman argued that's because she knew you.'
'But Katherine Harriman, unlike me, didn't know Genevieve. Genevieve was tough to surprise, especially if she was up out of bed with an intruder in her bedroom. She wouldn't be one to embrace the knife. If she'd seen the blade, she'd have gone down clawing and biting.'
'It was a forceful thrust. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous.'
'Prints on the knife?'
'Besides Genevieve's and her kid sister's? Just yours.'
'Suspect profile?'
'You know, the usual. Left-handed male, hundred eighty-five pounds, diabolical gleam in the eyes.'
'Left-handed from the angle?'
He glanced at the watch on my right wrist. 'Uh-huh. Slight slant.'
'Male?'
'Power behind the stab.'
'Body moved?'
'Yeah. A bunch.' Another awkward pause. 'By you. Your seizure started as a complex partial. Not the thrashing kind, more of a break in consciousness with automatisms lip smacking, repetitive finger movement. People can walk around, even. Complex partial seizures have been used as a defense in shoplifting cases, though that's pushing it. But you would've been functional enough to manipulate Genevieve Bertrand's body. Until your seizure generalized into a grand mal.'
'Would I have been able to stab her in that state? The complex partial?'
'Not likely. I agree with Harriman that your break probably occurred after the murder.' He studied my face, then said softly, 'I'm sorry, Drew.'
I sat back, rubbed at the soreness in my eyes with the heels of my hands. 'I had a dream my first night home. I was driving over to her house that night. In a frenzy. She kept a key under a plant pot on her porch. I cracked the clay saucer getting to it. When I woke up, I drove over to her place.' Would I tell him the rest? Could I? Lloyd's house was so still I thought I could make out the faint sigh of hospital equipment from the other end. 'The saucer was cracked. It wasn't cracked the last time I remember seeing it. I think I dreamed a piece of memory. I think I'm starting to put together fragments of what happened that night.'
He frowned severely, taking this in. 'What do you mean when you say you were in a frenzy?'
'I was sweating a lot. Feeling panicky.'
'Do you recall any unusual smell?'
The band of skin at the back of my neck went cold. My voice tangled in my throat, so I nodded.
'Bitter? Like burning rubber?' Lloyd didn't have to wait for an answer; he could read my face. 'It's called an olfactory aura. They often occur just before seizures.'
I remembered hearing about auras, but I hadn't put the information together with my dream. 'Can I ask you about something else?'
'The question is, can I answer?'
'I want to know about sevoflurane,' I said.
Lloyd pulled on his glasses, as if they helped him think better, and said cautiously, 'What about it?'
'You found traces in Kasey Broach's bloodstream.'
'Kaden and Delveckio revealed that to you?'
I couldn't tell if he was shocked or angry. 'The night of the dream, when I woke up, I was really groggy and I had blurred vision. I also had a cut on my foot I think someone might have knocked me out and stolen blood to frame me.'
Lloyd let out an unamused cough of a laugh. 'Drew '
'Just hear me out, Lloyd. I did some research on sevoflurane today. It's a perfect drug for that. Easy to inhale, quickly induces anesthesia, nonpungent odor. It leaves the bloodstream quickly, so it's hard to test for. No strong aftereffects, so I wouldn't know I'd been drugged.'
'Did you know?'
'Well, the killer had a running start, because I mostly figured I was insane to begin with. But here's the thing sevoflurane also produces amnesia.'
'So you're thinking…'
'I'm thinking the gas dumped me back into the same memory wasteland of brainspace as my tumor did. It helped me retrieve part of that night.' My voice was loud, excited. Lloyd started to say something, but I held up my hand. 'I found out sevoflurane also gives a 'good duration of action,' but I think I woke up early. I might have seen the intruder in the street in front of my house, which means I came to sooner than he wanted. I'm wondering why. Maybe I have a higher tolerance from my checkered past.'
'It would be the opposite, actually. If there's liver damage, it would make you more sensitive to sevoflurane. But you're stacking an awful lot of assumptions here. Even your memory loss, to begin with you can't know what caused it. The tumor? The surgery? The anesthesia?'
I mused on this a moment. But there were too many moving parts to get a handle on now. 'How's it administered? Sevoflurane?'
Lloyd shifted on the sofa, swirled his drink around. 'Face mask.'
'I figured. So maybe I woke up because it was imperfectly administered. Maybe at my house the killer wore an oxygen mask and let the gas loose in my bedroom, near my face, while I slept.' I snapped my fingers, leaning forward. 'Remember, there were signs of a struggle in Kasey Broach's bedroom.'
'Kaden and Delveckio told you that, too?'
'Broach would've woken up when the killer pressed the mask over her face, but he figured he was strong enough to hold her down until the gas took effect. She's a petite woman, looks what? a buck ten?'
'A hundred and thirteen pounds,' Lloyd said quietly.
'Right. But I doubt he'd want to take his chances waking me up by pressing a mask over my face. So he released the gas into the air while I was sleeping.'
'Do you have any proof you can hang this theory on?'
'Not a scrap. Maybe this points to someone with medical expertise. Is it hard to get? Sevoflurane?'
'It's controlled, but not like an opiate.'
'Can you tell from Kasey Broach's blood level how long she was kept unconscious?'
'Nearly impossible to determine.'
'Can you tell when my DNA got on her body? Or the plastic drop cloth?'
'There's no way to put an age on DNA. Only that it was there during analysis.' Lloyd held up his hands, thin fingers spread. 'Let's hold on a minute. Slow down. You're not working off facts '
'How else did my DNA get on Kasey Broach's body?'
'For the record, we didn't get you on DNA. This isn't a TV show we need at least forty-eight hours to DNA type. We did a traditional ABO. You're AB negative, which puts you with less than one percent of the population.'
'They SWAT-raided me off that?'
He rooted in his knapsack and came out with a report, which he tossed at me irritably. 'The hair follicle. I matched the cuticle and medulla with a known sample we had for you.'
'How about these?' I pointed at four samples farther down the page. 'These don't match.'
'That's because one's mine and two are from Ted McGraw, who helped me examine the body.' He studied my expression and shook his head. 'A simple contamination during processing, happens all the time. Don't go putting poor Ted in the conservatory with the candlestick.'
'How about the fourth hair?'
'Unidentified. No match in the databases. We're holding it, but it's probably nothing. Frankly, I'm surprised we
