Belladonna Dreams Page 4

  “How were tips that night?” Marshal Cain asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Billy looked at her for the first time.

  “How were tips? Do the female servers make good tips on Ladies’ Night?”

  “Actually, it’s one of my best nights,” Amber said. “The ladies tip better than the men, especially if we can keep the drinks coming without pestering them with requests for phone numbers. I have a system. I take the drinks, point out the guy, and if they refuse them, I take all the drinks and set them in front of the guy who ordered them. It helps the ladies figure out who is on the prowl and who isn’t. They seem to get a kick out of it. Also, if guys are requesting the ladies’ phone numbers when I send drinks, I keep a stack of fake numbers they can hand out.”

  “So, part of the enjoyment of Ladies’ Night is knowing that if they get you as a server, they have some protection from unwanted attention,” Marshal Cain said.

  “Yeah, I guess. I hadn’t really thought of it,” Amber said.

  “These girls, did they request you or request to sit in your area?” Marshal Cain asked.

  “They did, but I didn’t know them.” Amber felt defensive. “It happens a lot.”

  “I am sure it does,” Marshal Cain said. “Do any of the men not buying drinks stick out?”

  “Now that you mention it, there was one guy. I remember him because he wasn’t hitting on anyone and he was really tall. I mean we get tall dudes in here, but this guy was seven feet or so. He ordered whiskey.”

  “Remember what he looked like?” Marshal Henders asked.

  “Not really, he was white, older, brownish hair, I think. I mostly remember that he was really tall. He was at a table next to the girls.”

  “I don’t suppose he paid with a credit card,” Marshal Henders asked.

  “Cash, he left more than necessary for his bill and just disappeared,” Amber said.

  “Thanks,” Marshal Hendricks stood up. Marshal Cain, who had never sat down, gave an odd little wave and followed him out the door. Amber and Billy were both silent while the two Marshals left.

  “She was different,” Billy said. “Did you add sugar to the tea? It’s terrible.”

  “No, I thought you went overboard on it.” Amber puckered up as she took another drink. It was sickly sweet with a slight after taste. “I wonder if Melanie has been using her artificial crap in it again.”

  “That’s possible. Last time she did it, it tasted a lot like this,” Billy got up and started getting the bar ready. “You really think those girls died because of something here?”

  “It’s not likely. The police took everything at the bar and didn’t find anything. I bet they stopped off for food or something afterwards. They weren’t away from their drinks long enough for them to be tampered with.” Amber sighed and decided that since she was there, she was going to make the best of it. She began helping Billy behind the bar; it was easier with two anyway.

  Five

  “We are looking for The Tall Man,” I said to Gabriel as he drove us back to the US Marshals building. It was located near the local police department headquarters and was a little more inviting.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Gabriel informed me.

  “It is a movie character from Phantasm.”

  “Really? I was sure I was about to get a lecture on the historical significance of The Tall Man as some sort of boogeyman.”

  “Not everything is rooted in history. There was also a movie, starring Jessica something, where she is kidnapping children and taking them to safety using an urban legend called The Tall Man. And there might be a true crime book with the same title.”

  “Might be?”

  “I have not read it, but the name sounds familiar.”

  “Sometimes, I seriously worry about you.”

  “Perhaps you should worry about whoever made the tea they were drinking. Did you see their faces when they took their first sip? It was priceless.”

  “It was whiskey. They made a whiskey face,” Gabriel corrected. “I saw them pull and pour from the bottle. Almost everyone needs something to calm their nerves when talking with us.”

  “It might have come from a whiskey bottle, but it smelled like tea.”

  “You didn’t even get close to them.”

  “I did not have to, the bar smelled like alcohol, to be sure, but they were drinking tea.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Remember, I once smelled semi-frozen feet hung from a power line in socks.”

  “Trust me, that is not an event I will forget any time in the future.”

  “Then you should trust me when I say they were drinking tea.”

  “Think the tall guy spiked the drinks with whatever killed them?” He changed the subject.

  “I do not know. Nevertheless, seriously, how many guys around seven feet tall can there be in a city of one hundred and forty thousand people? A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, unless people are just unusually tall in South Dakota. We know he is older, because she did not feel the need to card him and he is white. That cuts it down even further.”

  “You want me to have Fiona check DMV records for men over thirty-five who are white and very tall, don’t you?”

  “That would be awesome,” I told him.

  “What if he isn’t from around here?”

  “Then we talk to the twenty or thirty guys that are from around here, eliminate them, and find other avenues to explore.” I thought for a moment. “Xavier could go along to see if they have Marfan’s Syndrome, might save a few lives that way. They did a genetic test on Malachi once to check for it, but he doesn’t have it, which is good, given his line of work.”

  Gabriel shook his head and parked. Sometimes it was just better not to follow along with my thought process. It could be a hard path to follow.

  Fiona was hanging up pictures on the whiteboard. Xavier and Lucas were conspicuously absent. Gabriel frowned as we entered the room.

  “Where are the other two?” He asked Fiona as she hung up the fifth victim.

  “Coroner’s office,” Fiona answered.

  “It is unusual for Lucas to go there,” I stated. Normally, I got to sit in the morgue with Xavier. Lucas hated the place more than I did. He said it was a constant reminder that when we died, our body was left to be butchered and plundered. I thought that was a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t argue with the group much, at least not about important things.

  “Why did they go there?” Gabriel asked.

  “I was just about to start writing that up there,” Fiona pointed to a picture stuck on a whiteboard of a brunette with dead eyes and mildly blue lips. “The lab found sleeping pills in her system.” She pointed to the next one and the fourth picture, “These two had antidepressants in theirs, and this one had a large dose of a medication called Atarax, along with an antidepressant. Xavier was mumbling about incompetence and he stormed out, so Lucas went with him.”

  Most antidepressants had antianxiety properties, while Atarax was an allergy medication. However, it wasn’t just used for allergies, it stopped panic attacks. Cassie used it as her rescue drug. She had been having anxiety issues since finding herself trapped and cooking in a Brazen Bull. While being medicated for depression or anxiety wasn’t uncommon, especially among women in their twenties, it did give us a little more insight. At least one of them thought she was having a panic attack and like most antihistamines, Atarax had sedative effects.

  All sorts of things could be dangerous when mixed with antidepressants, sleeping pills, and other sedative inducing medications. Most of the time, the victim went to sleep and failed to wake up. There were few indicators of foul play when this happened.

  It was the panic attack that bothered me. Panic attacks had a wide variety of symptoms, some even mimicked heart attacks. It meant that the person could have been experiencing symptoms of something else and thought they were having a panic attack.

  Belladonna came back into the forefront of my mind. The sympto
ms of poisoning mimicked a panic attack. It would also interact with the other drugs the victims had taken. The sedation properties of each would increase the chance of death.

  I couldn’t really think of any other poisons that would do the same thing. Most poisons left visible traces. The victims vomited, had uncontrollable diarrhea, started bleeding from the mucus membranes, or it took a long time and they suffered hair loss, weight loss, sallowness of the skin, malnutrition, and excruciating pain, as they died a slow, miserable death.

  Xavier might think of something else, but it was unlikely. Historically speaking, poisons were as important as wars. They had changed the course of mankind on numerous occasions. There was even some proof that important families had kept professional poisoners on staff, as if they were no different from any other type of hired help. It had been hard to study torture and the Middle Ages without understanding poisoning and about how it changed the world.

  While we officially had five female victims, there were a few others, mostly bones that could also fit this pattern. The previous victims of a serial killer were often more revealing than the most recent ones. They all had unknown causes of death and the time between kills could easily explain why the first ones had been buried and these were not.

  Witness statements of then and now had the victims leaving the bar in a highly intoxicated state. However, the bar tabs had only shown a few drinks and the blood alcohol levels weren’t high enough to justify a highly intoxicated state. Suddenly, I knew exactly why Xavier was yelling at the coroner’s office staff.

  I was also back to believing that belladonna had been administered to our recent victims. Along with sweating, nausea, and death, it caused disorientation and could make people appear intoxicated. History told stories of people ingesting the poisonous berries and then laughing right up until they died.

  “Hey, Fiona, I think we need to rethink our theory about South Dakota lacking a coven of witches,” I said as I wrote the word on the board in bright pink.

  “Belladonna?” Gabriel frowned at the word.

  “Few poisons are less messy,” I shrugged.

  “I just want to point out that I’m a pagan, not a witch, and that I have never been to South Dakota before today.” Fiona held up her hands.

  “I know,” I answered. “If you were going to kill someone it wouldn’t be with belladonna. You may not like getting messy, but you’re still more likely to beat someone’s head in with a rock than poison them.”

  “Thanks, I think.” Fiona smiled.

  “How would I kill someone?” Gabriel asked.

  “Boring stories,” I answered, looking at the early murders. “These were all highly intoxicated when they left the bar as well. It seems even more likely the murders are all related.”

  “Why stop for so many years?” Gabriel asked.

  “It’s a pain in the ass to distill belladonna,” Fiona offered. She was gaining a sense of humor too.

  Six

  There were different theories about poisoning. Some criminologists and psychologists considered it an impersonal form of murder. The killer didn’t really have to get their hands dirty to accomplish the task. Others believed it was very personal. The killer might not have been getting dirty doing the deed, but they were personally responsible for the suffering of their victims.

  Lucas and I agreed that both theories were right. It varied case by case. For some, it was all about the pain and suffering, and for others, it was all about the end the result. To back up our theory, we picked apart a few cases, discussing different elements. There was some evidence that specific poisons were more likely to be used in cases where the poisoning was personal. For example, cyanide was more likely to be used when the killer didn’t really care about the pain and suffering. It was about the deaths. In contrast, arsenic was more likely when it was about the pain and suffering. Ironically, both were terribly messy and the victims suffered a lot of pain.

  There weren’t enough modern day cases of belladonna poisoning to be of much use. We found only five in the last twenty years. Fiona had even been willing to point out her aunt’s case to us. It hadn’t been necessary, from her short description, it was obvious which one was her aunt’s case, because belladonna pie had only occurred once in the database.

  All other cases of belladonna poisoning were misidentification. Xavier managed to drag them out of the CDC’s files and Poison Control Center’s cases. The berries, which were indeed sweet, were a very dark bluish-purple and were occasionally mistaken for blueberries and things. One case even reported that the eater had thought they were blackberries. This was odd since belladonna was a single berry and not a drupe, but maybe the eater had never seen a blackberry. Anything was possible.

  “You both think it’s belladonna?” Gabriel asked for the third time. I understood his frustration. Poisoners were strange, even by serial killer standards. They definitely didn’t conform to the old standards. It was hard to imagine there was a sexual release in watching someone vomit up blood. Newer thinking was that poisoners had something to gain by poisoning certain victims, particularly this type of poisoning. This killer hadn’t waited around to watch as the victims died. They’d done the deed and moved on. The only immediate thing we could see being gained was the reopening of the old cases. If that was the only motivation, there were easier and flashier ways to get the attention of everyone. The killer could have written a letter or dropped off a belladonna pie at the bar.

  As a general rule, I had trouble figuring out killers that didn’t want to be part of the kill. My experiences as both predator and prey made me understand the inner workings of wanting to get a little bloody for the heck of it. Those that were hands off made about as much sense as a baker who didn’t want to touch flour. There was no point or purpose to a kill if you couldn’t revel in the gory glory.

  “Yes,” Xavier answered, “and as much as I would love to pin the serial killer label on the paperwork monkey that faked the test results, I don’t think he did it. The most we can charge him with is incompetence, which I’m fairly certain isn’t actually a crime.”

  “He faked lab results,” I offered.

  “Yes, he did, but only because he’s an incompetent paperwork monkey. It would be just as easy for him to point his finger up the food chain and say he wasn’t properly trained. In a town such as this, he is just as likely to get struck by lightning as he is to have to order tests to see if someone died as the result of poison.” Xavier sighed again. He had done that a lot in the last two hours.

  As frustrated as he was, there was a lot of truth in what he was saying. Sioux Falls, South Dakota had fewer murders per year than snowfalls in Florida. The few they had were not serial killers and certainly didn’t use poison. Most of them appeared to be armed robberies gone wrong. Now, armed robbery and sexual assaults were both high, but I blamed that statistic on the lack of serial killers. In cities where serial killers were prolific, like Kansas City, most crime rates had dropped. The exception was Detroit, but Detroit was most likely always going to be an exception unless they declared it a war zone and started enforcing marshal law.

  It seemed morally wrong to charge a paperwork monkey with criminal negligence when it was a matter of piss-poor training. I could figure that out without consulting my personal Jiminy Cricket, which was good since she was still in the Caribbean.

  “Are they going to run samples for belladonna?” Gabriel asked.

  “Yeah, but they may or may not find it at this point.” Xavier sighed again. “Of course, they may not have found it in the first place. I’m not sure anyone has ever distilled belladonna and then used it. It’s potent stuff. Five or six berries are enough to kill an adult. Transplanting it can cause death if a person isn’t wearing gloves. The juice from the stem or leaves gets into a cut and that’s the end unless you can get to a hospital really fast. This is one of the few instances when the nickname is earned.”

  “Deadly nightshade,” Fiona commented.

  “Yeah,
and deadly it is,” Xavier said. “It can cause all sorts of side effects and in varying degrees. Our current obsession with sedatives and mood altering drugs makes it work that much faster and better. If the killer is distilling the toxin from the stem, it might take only a fraction of the normal dosage to cause death.”

  “The question is who would know this?” Lucas asked. “In med school, we learned about atropine, but they weren’t taking us out into the forest to show us the plant and it isn’t a native species.”

  “Well, poisoning is normally a woman’s game, so we could start with botanists and greenhouses, and see if we turn up something there,” Fiona offered.

  “When women poison, there’s a reason for it,” Lucas countered.

  “Also, it does not fit with the earlier bodies. Why kill four women back then with poison, and five now?” I asked. “Unless we can connect someone within the first four with someone in the more recent five, probably through money, it seems unlikely to be a woman. A woman that poisons someone else is doing it out of greed or jealousy. Both seem like a stretch at this point.”

  “So, a male poisoner?” Xavier asked. “Those are rarer than female psychopaths.”

  “It’s gotta be a woman,” Lucas contradicted himself. “Only women are dying. When men poison, it’s on a larger scale.”

  “Like the Tylenol Murders,” Gabriel suggested.

  “That was probably a guy,” Lucas agreed. “Sending letters through the mail dipped in distilled belladonna would be a guy thing. This is too targeted for a man.”

  “There are exceptions to every rule. Would you like me to start listing them?” I asked.

  “No,” everyone said in unison.

  “Fine, if it’s a woman, what is she gaining?”

  “If I knew that, I’d know who did it,” Lucas said.

  “What about the Tall Man?” Fiona asked.

  “It is unlikely he is directly involved,” I said. “He is more likely an unknowing witness. Amber, the waitress, is more suspicious than he is.”