I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed the commissioner’s cell.
“Scully.”
“Mike and I just found the link between Francie Fain and Zachary Palmer,” I said, telling him what we had put together.
“Who else knows?” the commissioner asked.
“No one. We’re alone in my office.”
“Keep it that way,” he said. “I’ve called a conference for noon. The story will be about the use of a nerve agent on a citizen in this city, and the fact that the victim is recovering and cooperating with us on the investigation.”
“I understand.”
“Do you still have a meeting with Palmer?” he asked.
“I’ve asked for one at two P.M., Midtown.”
“You’re not going without backup, Alexandra,” the commissioner said.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “You’re right.”
“We know how the nerve agent got into the country,” Scully said. “Again, this is for you and Chapman, but no one else. If it turns out to have anything to do with Palmer and be useful to you, I want you to have it from me.”
“I’m ready for you.”
“There was a bottle of perfume on Francie’s desk,” Scully said. “The nerve agent solution was in the perfume, so when she applied it, she essentially killed herself.”
“A perfume bottle?” I asked. “How can that be? How did she walk out of her office and get three or four blocks away?”
“The quick answer is that this Kiss of Death poison can work in a couple of different ways. You need to understand this, Alexandra, so you don’t go off the rails before we know the whole story.”
“I’m listening.”
“Basically, if Francie—or anyone else—inhaled the nerve agent, it would take effect in her lungs at once, causing them to stop working by interfering with the nerve function in all her major organs. She’d have suffered cardiac arrest, and if she had just collapsed at her desk, there’s a chance no one would find the death suspicious.”
“But she walked, Commissioner,” I said. “She seemed fine in those videotapes.”
“Because it’s most likely that the perfume was applied to her skin—to the pressure points on her wrist and her throat. The agent operates more slowly that way, which allowed for Francie to be out on the street, almost reaching your party, by the time it was absorbed through her skin, yet no one else would be contaminated.”
“Who gave her the perfume?” I asked, trying to control the anger in my voice. “Major Case took the Legal Aid visitors’ log and we have no idea who got in to see Francie that day.”
“Calm down,” Scully said. “There was an empty bag in Francie’s wastebasket. It had the box from the perfume bottle—the fragrance brand is a new one, called Duchess, if I’m not mistaken. We can’t find the receipt, but it’s possible that Francie bought it at the duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport when she was leaving England a few weeks ago. It’s a brand that isn’t sold in the States.”
“Oh, Keith,” I said, slipping into the familiar as I lost my patience with him. “Don’t tell me you think Francie poisoned herself? That’s absurd.”
“The first uses of Kiss of Death as a murder weapon, like Novichok before it, have been on British soil,” he said. “In the case of Novichok, some of it was sprayed on door handles to penetrate the skin of an unwitting man and his daughter.”
“Yes, I know. The double agent who’d defected.”
“But more recently, Alexandra, the nerve agent killed a couple of friends—not former spies, just ordinary citizens—who had picked up a bottle of cologne in a park and taken it home. They died days later, after applying it to themselves.”
“So you can send out a recall of all the bottles of Duchess that have been manufactured,” I said, “on the chance that you’ve got a madman working in a perfume factory. Or you can tell Mike and me that we should go on looking for our killer. It’s your call, Commissioner Scully. Your call.”