34: The phone rang.
Clair’s eyes snapped open. The room was sideways. Her head was down on the cold metal of her desk, floating in a pool of her own drool.
“Fuck me,” she muttered, glancing up at the clock. It would be light out soon. After the hospital, Nash had gone to the Davies house to supervise, and she had come back to the war room to work the boards.
She reached for the phone and accepted the call. “Yeah?”
“Detective Norton?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Lindsy Rolfes in the crime lab. I’ve been trying to reach you, but your voice mail is picking up.”
“It does that when I sleep on the job,” Clair told her. “What’s up?”
“I e-mailed our preliminary findings on the Davieses’ house to you and Detective Porter about twenty minutes ago. We found a concentrated dosage of lisinopril in the remaining coffee. There were also some scratches noted at the deadbolt on the door in the mudroom. They were inconsistent with marks made by a key or normal use,” Rolfes said.
“So someone broke in?”
“That is our conclusion. They picked the lock, came in through that door, and most likely poured a liquefied version of the drug into the water tank of the coffeemaker. Even if Davies filled the tank to the top, this dosage was so high it would not dilute to safe levels.” She hesitated for a moment, her voice wavering. “I called the hospital to review the results of Randal Davies’s toxicology screen with his doctor, and I was told Randal Davies passed away at ten thirty-four. He suffered a severe stroke, and they weren’t able to bring him back.”
Clair drew in a deep breath. The two girls, now their fathers.
“There’s more,” Rolfes said from the other end of the line. “We positively identified the clothing Lili Davies was found in as belonging to Ella Reynolds. There were trace elements of skin tissue and hair from both girls in the material. We also found a small amount of vomit on the sleeve, which matched Lili Davies. I included those findings in my e-mail as well.”
“Anything to indicate when the unsub was in the house?”
“Nothing. We found no evidence that the unsub went beyond the kitchen, either. I get the impression he knew exactly what he had planned before entering, got in and out fast.”
“Thanks for tracking me down. Let me know if you find anything else,” Clair told her.
“Get some rest, Detective.”
The call ended, and Clair set the phone down on her desk.
She couldn’t rest, not now.
Standing, she stretched and walked up to the whiteboards. Under LILI DAVIES she wrote—
Found in Ella Reynolds’s clothing
Drowned and resuscitated multiple times—salt water
Then she added a column for Randal Davies, followed by:
Doctor, John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital
Father to Lili Davies
Wife = Grace Davies
Overdosed—lisinopril (blood pressure medication)
She looked at the list of assignments, crossed out the ones that were complete. Not much left. They needed another lead.
Four dead.
She wondered if Kloz had gotten anywhere on the list of saltwater pools, the local suppliers, or the aquariums.
Clair found herself glancing at the coffee machine in the corner of the room, then quickly changed her mind. She’d get something out of the vending machine instead, something in a sealed, lisinopril-proof package would do nicely.