Split Second

Her friend finally shrugged. "Embalming fluid gets into all major vessels, cavities, solid organs, so it's tough to be accurate. But under the circumstances the medical examiner took a sampling of the middle brain, where typically the embalming fluid doesn't penetrate, and she found a spike of methanol."

"Methanol! But that's a compound of embalming fluid, isn't it? What if the embalming fluid did get in there?"

"That's a concern. And in case you didn't know, there are differences in embalming fluids. High-budget embalming fluids have less methanol but more formaldehyde. Low-budget ones, like Martin's, have higher levels of pure methanol. Added to that is that methanol is found in lots of things, like wine and liquor. Martin was reportedly a heavy drinker. That might account for the spike, the M.E. couldn't be sure. Bottom line, though, for a man as terminally ill as Bill Martin it wouldn't have taken a large dose of methanol to kill him."

She took out a file and flipped through it. "The autopsy also found organ damage, shrunken mucous membranes, stomach lining torn, all markers for methanol poisoning. And yet he had cancer throughout his body and had undergone radiation and chemotherapy. All inall the M.E. had a mess on her hands. The probable cause of death was circulatory failure, but there are lots of reasons a very elderly man with a terminal illness would have died from circulatory failure."

"Yet killing someone with methanol, knowing he'd probably be embalmed without an autopsy, that's pretty ingenious," said Michelle.

"Actually that's pretty damn scary."

"But he must have been murdered," said Michelle. "They couldn't just wait around hoping Martin would die on his own and then have his body at the funeral home precisely when Bruno was passing through." She paused. "List of suspects?"

"I really can't say. It's an ongoing investigation, and I've already told you more than I should have. I might have to pass a polygraph on this, you know."

When the check came, Michelle was quick to grab it. As they walked out together, her friend said, "So what are you going to do? Lie low? Look for another position?"

"The ‘lying low' part, yes; the ‘looking for another job,' not yet."

"So what, then?"

"I'm not ready to give up my career at the Service without a fight."

Her friend eyed her warily. "I know that look. What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking you're FBI, and it's better that you don't know. Like you said, you might have to pass a polygraph."

10

The worst day of Sean King's life had been September 26, 1996, the day Clyde Ritter died while then Secret Service agent King was focusing on something else. Unfortunately the second worst day of his life happened to be right now. His office had been filled with police, federal agents and technical crews asking lots of questions and not getting lots of answers. Amid all this forensic foraging they'd taken fingerprint samples from King, Phil Baxter and their secretary; for elimination purposes, they said. That could cut both ways, King well knew.

The local press had arrived too. Fortunately he knew them personally and gave vague answers that they accepted with little comment. The national press would be coming very soon, because there was something extremely newsworthy about the murdered man. King had suspected it, and those suspicions were confirmed when a contingent of folks from the U.S. Marshals Service showed up on his doorstep.

The dead man, Howard Jennings, had been employed at King's law practice as a title searcher, proofreader, overseer of trust account records and a gofer, sort of a jack-of-all-trades. His office was on the lower level of the law building. He was quiet, hardworking, and kept to himself. There was nothing whatsoever remarkable about what the man did for a living. However, he was very special in one respect.

Jennings was a member of WITSEC, the program more popularlyknown as witness protection. Forty-eight years old with a degree in accounting, Jennings (that, of course, wasn't his real name) had once been gainfully employed as a bean counter for a criminal organization operating in the Midwest. These folks specialized in racketeering, extortion and money laundering and used arson, beatings, disfigurements and the occasional homicide to get their point across. The matter had attracted great national attention because of the lethality of the organization's methods and the complexities of the case.

Jennings had quickly seen the light and helped send a slew of very dangerous folks to penitentiaries. Yet some of the most deadly had escaped the federal net; hence his enrollment in WITSEC.