The Viper

He kept it to five brief points: The cause of her death appeared to be a major overdose of an anticoagulant. It was likely administered by someone other than the victim. The intention was evidently homicidal. Heparin-containing snake venom may have been the anticoagulant employed. It was probably administered hypodermically or via the fangs of a live snake.

He assumed the first three facts would be obvious to any competent ME. He mentioned them to create a credible path into points four and five, which he hoped the ME would find intriguing enough to pursue. Snakes might not be the ultimate key to unraveling the mysteries of the case, but then again . . .

He reread what he’d written and tapped Send. With a clearer mind, he stripped down to his shorts and tee shirt, got into bed, and soon relaxed into a relatively normal sleep.

Shortly after dawn, he was awakened by a sharp cracking sound, accompanied by the whistling of a gusty wind. He emerged from under the bed’s warm quilt and went to the window. A large ice-covered branch was dangling from a nearby hemlock like a partially severed arm.

The screen on his phone indicated it was a minute past seven. After brushing his teeth and showering, he put on a pair of flannel-lined jeans and a heavy sweater to compensate for the morning chill in the house.

Instead of going directly downstairs, he decided to take a look at Slade’s bedroom, which he recalled from his earlier visit to the lodge was the last in the hallway. He opened the door and switched on the light. The room looked exactly as he remembered it. Like the trophies on the mantel, it had been kept in spotless condition. He turned off the light and headed downstairs, imagining that he’d find Valdez building a fire or making breakfast. Instead, he found a note on the dining room table.

I hope you have slept well. There are many foods in the refrigerator. The temperature in the house is set to rise automatically after 8:00 a.m. I am sorry to be gone, but I have business to attend to. I hope to be back tomorrow morning. Make this your home. It is what Ziko would wish.

There was no signature, no phone number, no indication of where he could be reached.

66

AFTER A BREAKFAST OF SCRAMBLED EGGS, TOAST, AND coffee, Gurney settled down in an armchair next to the hearth with a second coffee.

Although Valdez’s departure and the vague reason he’d given for it seemed odd, it was not unwelcome. It gave Gurney greater freedom to do whatever he wanted, if only to examine the puzzle without interruption in the place where it all began. And to ponder the mystery of Valdez himself.

Perhaps accepting Valdez’s surface appearance of being Slade’s adoring acolyte was a mistake. Was it conceivable that Slade had been victimized by Valdez?

Although unlikely, it was an intriguing possibility. It might explain one of the case’s perplexities—the contradiction between the descriptions in Lerman’s diary of the three phone calls and Slade’s insistence that he’d never received them. Suppose Valdez had answered those calls, passing himself off as Slade. And suppose, when Lerman showed up to collect his extortion money, it was Valdez who killed him and planted the evidence that incriminated Slade.

That scenario would eliminate a major contradiction, but at the cost of creating thorny new questions. Had Valdez known that he was a beneficiary of Slade’s will? If so, how would framing Slade for murder get him closer to his inheritance? Why would he have been answering Slade’s phone on those three occasions? And what would his motive have been for pretending to be Slade?

Gurney’s excitement at the idea began to fade. However, even if Valdez hadn’t killed Lerman, his potential involvement in Slade’s prison murder couldn’t be so easily dismissed.

It was hard to see Emma Martin as a duplicitous string-puller, coolly focused on Slade’s millions, but it was conceivable that Valdez was exactly that. He presented himself as a humble soul, treading a path to Slade-like sainthood. But who was he, really? Where had he come from? And how firm a grip did those roots still have on him?

If Emma was right about Slade’s “suicide” having been a concealed murder, and if Valdez had engineered that murder, he would have needed at least one inside accomplice—not just any criminal acquaintance, but a cold-blooded killer under his personal control. The probability of that depended on the unknown facts of Valdez’s life. One thing was certain. If the seemingly humble Valdez was behind Slade’s hanging, he’d rank as one of the most unnerving sociopaths Gurney had ever encountered.