"Yeah, sure!" everyone hooted.

"-I decided I'd better try to catch him. Now that cat and me, we never did get along too good, and I called till I was purple before he came out from under my car. Then I had to chase him all over the parking lot and when I finally grabbed him, he gave me such a scratch it dripped blood all the way home. But I'm a special agent for the SBI, right? And he was just a dumb old cat, right? So I did eventually throw him in the car and off we set. He stomped back and forth on the backseat and snarled at me the whole way home. Well, we get home and I pull into the driveway and there's the real old fuzzball sound asleep on the roof of my wife's car."

Before he could tell us what he did with the feline doppelganger, a white-coated doctor appeared in the doorway. "Mrs. Knott?" he asked. "Mrs. Herman Knott?"

Instinctively, we fell silent and cl.u.s.tered around Nadine.

"We've confirmed the cause of your husband's condition," he said briskly. "It isn't his heart or a stroke."

"Then what?" asked Nadine.

"Chronic poisoning," said the doctor. "Somehow or other, your husband's ingested a good deal of a.r.s.enic over the past week or so."

CHAPTER 14.

SAFETY RULES.

"The posted or promulgated rules for the safe operation of all power equipment must be strictly followed, unless an unavoidable suspension of a rule is authorized by proper authority. The suspension must end as soon as the necessity for it has pa.s.sed."

"a.r.s.enic?"

The word ran around the room and bounced off the ceiling.

Nadine seemed bewildered. "Where would he get a.r.s.enic?"

The doctor flipped to Herman's admittance chart. "His occupation is listed as an electrician. Is he also engaged in farming where he might handle insecticides or other poisonous chemicals?"

Nadine shook her head. "Sometimes he has to crawl up under old houses where they've put out rat poison. Maybe-"

"No, that's warfarin, an anticoagulant."

"But he's going to be all right, isn't he?" asked Annie Sue. She pushed close to her mother, as if seeking physical comfort and her big blue eyes were frightened. "He's not going to die, is he? Is he?"

"Now hush that kind of talk," said Nadine, but she, too, was shaken. "Doctor?"

He shook his head. "I wish I could give you a cut-and-dried answer, Mrs. Knott, but chronic a.r.s.enic poisoning's a tricky thing. We don't yet know how much neurological damage there is. The lack of paralysis is encouraging, but the anesthesias in his legs and extremities, the liver involvement-"

We stood numbly as all that medical terminology flowed over us. What it boiled down to was that Herman would probably recover, but it was going to be long and slow-six months or longer-and he might never recover full feeling in his fingers and feet. A wheelchair could not be ruled out.

Nor was treatment itself going to be a simple thing. Some doctors advocated doing nothing. Let the body heal itself. If a more aggressive course were taken, the antidote might be as dangerous as the a.r.s.enic itself.

Yet even as we listened, we all kept circling back to the central question: how the devil was he getting a.r.s.enic? Because on that point, the doctor was quite clear: Herman had ingested the stuff more than once in the last ten days.

The doctor finished outlining the treatment they planned to use. As he rose to go, he c.o.c.ked his head and looked around the circle of faces surrounding him. "You live close to one another? See each other every day? Then perhaps I should check. Is everybody healthy? Any stomach cramps or nausea that won't go away? Summer flu? Dizziness, pins and needles in your fingers or toes? Numbness?"

We all shook our heads, although I saw a considering expression cross the face of Nadine's sister. Her robustly healthy body imprisoned the soul of a hypochondriac.

"Great!" He closed Herman's chart with a snap. "Oh, one thing more, Mrs. Knott. Someone from Environmental Health will probably be in contact with Mr. Knott and you to try to trace the source of the a.r.s.enic. They'll want you to think what you two may have eaten or drunk differently, any places where he eats that you and your family don't, maybe a list of all the locations he's worked lately that might have old a.r.s.enic-based paint or wallpaper, things like that. Okay?"

The family milled around as he left, so simultaneously worried and t.i.tillated that no one else seemed to notice the looks Dwight and Terry exchanged before following the doctor from the waiting room. I slipped out, too, and hurried down the hall after them. As they rounded a corner, I heard the doctor say, "Well, yes, I suppose there always is that possibility, Major Bryant."

"What possibility?" I asked, halting them in their tracks.

The doctor turned and frowned, Terry immediately went into his official secrets mode, but Dwight said, "I don't believe you've met Herman's sister. This is Judge Deborah Knott, Doctor."

"Judge?"

"Judicial District Eleven-C," I said. "What possibility?"

"That your brother's poisoning was not accidental," he answered bluntly.

"That someone poisoned Herman? On purpose?"

The three men shuffled their feet and I could have laughed if it hadn't been so outrageous.

"I almost forgot. Yeah. Her husband was treated here, wasn't he? Well, you can push that notion right out of your heads," I said hotly. "Nadine Knott is no Blanche Taylor Moore. Come on, Dwight! Terry? You guys have known Nadine forever. Can't you see how upset and worried she is?"

"The Reverend Moore was never my patient," the doctor said carefully, "but I'm told Mrs. Moore was a loving wife right up to the minute they arrested her. And they say she was real attentive to the boyfriend who did die. Brought him potato soup when he was in Baptist Hospital, even spoon fed him. Held the straw for him to sip iced tea. The nurses thought she was a real sweetie."

"I know, I know," I said impatiently. "And later they found out that there was a.r.s.enic in the soup and a.r.s.enic in the tea." I turned to Dwight and Terry. "But this is Nadine!"

"Wives aren't the only ones who do things like that," Terry said soothingly. "Besides, it'll probably turn out to be a contaminated well or something at some old house that's being renovated."

"We're just touching all the bases," Dwight chimed in. "Laying the groundwork for the public health guy."

"Long as you don't forget this is Herman, for G.o.d's sake."

The doctor had his hand on a door marked STAFF ONLY, but I asked, "While we're laying groundwork, Doctor, can you give us any idea of when he first got the a.r.s.enic? Didn't I read somewhere that you could tell by the hair or fingernails?"

He looked amused. "Well, yes, but the simplest way, if the patient is still alive, is just to ask him when he first started feeling rotten. Mr. Knott said he went to a party or something about ten days ago-the second of July? -and that night he experienced stomach cramps. At the time, he thought he might've eaten too many cuc.u.mber sandwiches or drunk too much lime punch."

Cuc.u.mber sandwiches? Lime punch?

"Wasn't your swearing-in reception on the second?" asked Dwight.

We were allowed to go in and see Herman, a few of us at a time; first Nadine and her four children, then his brothers and me. He was groggy still and pasty-faced and looked so vulnerable lying there in a hospital gown that I had to go straight over and hug him.

"Now, now," he said with a ghost of his old gruffness. "I'm gonna be fine. You don't need to cry over me yet."

Technically, I was no longer Herman's attorney, but neither Dwight nor Terry said anything about my being there when they came in to question Herman about Tuesday night. Nadine had insisted that he not be told about Bannerman's attack on Annie Sue until he was stronger, and she wasn't real happy that he even had to know that Bannerman had died there that night.

She needn't have worried. Herman was too exhausted to wonder why we wound up asking him about a county inspector he'd barely known. Far as he was concerned, Dwight and Terry were just a couple of good old friends come to see how he was faring. As for Tuesday night, he could barely remember anything specific.

"I was feeling so terrible bad I guess I was ugly to you and Annie Sue," he told me in sideways apology.

I just patted his calloused, work-worn hand. "Did you stay long after I left?"

"Naw. I was right in behind you and her girlfriends. She was mad as fire at me for telling her what she did wrong, and I have to tell you, Deb'rah, my stomach hurt so bad I was almost to the point I didn't care. I figured one of the inspectors would catch anything too dangerous about it before it got covered up."

"The inspector came by that night," I said. "Did you see him?"

Herman shook his head.

"Some young guy," I pressed him gently. "Carver Bannerman. You ever meet him?"

"Bannerman?" He frowned. "No, can't say as I have. Not to know the name. He pa.s.s Annie Sue's work all right?"

Terry rescued me. "Well, old son, you sure gave everybody a good scare."

"Weird, idn it?" he said sleepily. "a.r.s.enic. Wonder where in the world I got it?"

"The wonder's how you were able to keep moving," said Dwight.

"Daddy'd never let us give in to being sick," Herman said and fell asleep with a smile on his lips.

CHAPTER 15.

SURFACE PREPARATION.

"Proper surface preparation is an essential part of any paint job; paint will not adhere well, provide the required surface protection, or present a good appearance unless the surface has been properly treated."

The investigator from Environmental Health, an environmental epidemiologist to give him his official t.i.tle, was named Gordon O'Connor. Thirtyish, going bald early. Despite laid-back sneakers and jeans, there was an edginess about his wiry build that made me think he'd probably been a nerd in grade school. An intelligent nerd with something of a terrier's nervous intensity just before he picks up the rabbit's trail.

He wore rimless round gla.s.ses perched on a long thin nose. The lens were thinner than fine crystal and polished to a shining gloss that rivaled the gloss of his bald dome. Behind those gla.s.ses, his eyes gleamed like two large black coffee beans; yet, they couldn't have needed much correction because the lens didn't distort their appearance any more than ordinary window gla.s.s.

Every attorney is something of a pop psychologist and I decided that he'd probably been shy in his youth and maybe didn't realize he'd outgrown the need to hide behind gla.s.s. (Let the record show that edgy shyness can be oddly s.e.xy at times.) Not that there was anything shy about the way Mr. O'Connor delved into Herman's life. He interviewed Herman and Nadine separately and together, his terrier face darting back and forth between them in the hospital. When Nadine came back to work on Friday, O'Connor was right behind her, ready to start digging up every mole run in the county.

Nadine has a touching faith in modern medicine. Now that Herman was diagnosed and on the mend, she felt it was possible to leave him in the hospital's efficient hands while she came home to keep the business going.

So far, it had not occurred to her that Herman's poisoning was anything but accidental. The Raleigh News and Observer had covered Blanche Taylor Moore's trial in exhaustive detail from first suspicion till when she was sentenced to death for first-degree murder. Yet, even though the paper emphasized that most a.r.s.enic killers tended to be southern women, and most victims tended to be the man in their lives, Nadine was joking that at least Herman didn't have to worry that she'd poisoned his tea.

Along with the other two electricians Herman employed, Reese and Annie Sue could keep up with most of the routine field work, but only Nadine fully understood all the paperwork involved in running the business, and she didn't want to get too far behind. "Especially since we haven't got us a new accountant yet," she told me. "Thank goodness Ralph McGee got us through tax season before he died."

She looked abashed. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Poor Gladys."

It was a little past one on a blistering hot Friday. I had adjourned court for the weekend and stopped in to see how Nadine was getting along. The humidity was so high that just walking from my air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned office was like wading through tall gra.s.s, and I grabbed a drink from the water cooler as soon as I got inside.

Nadine was seated at her desk, going through the worksheets. As she called out all the places Herman had worked over the last ten days, Mr. O'Connor sat with his legal pad at a nearby table and wrote down the addresses.

He picked up on my name immediately. "I was hoping to see you today, Judge Knott. I'll need to know the name of your caterer. And did anyone else get sick that evening?"

I must have looked combative because he said, "We don't know that's where he first ingested it, but it's a place to start."

He took off his gla.s.ses, polished them carefully, hooked the wire frames back over his ears, then looked at me with such alert expectation in those shiny black eyes that I gave him Julia Lee's name and phone number.

"She arranged everything, but the food was prepared by the Martha Circle at the First Methodist Church, and afterwards, Lu Bingham, of WomenAid, took all the leftovers to her day care center. I'm sure if there was anything in the food or punch, we'd have heard about it by now"

"Probably," he agreed. "But-"

The tickler bell jingled over the street door. Dwight Bryant. He'd evidently met O'Connor earlier in the day and had come looking for him specifically.

"It's the darnedest thing, but I thought you ought to know."

"Yes?" O'Connor's eyegla.s.ses gleamed like twin moons under the fluorescent lights overhead.

"They just called in the autopsy report on a man who was killed here in Dobbs Tuesday night. Carver Bannerman. His head was bashed in and that's what killed him, but they found a trace of a.r.s.enic in his gastrointestinal tract."

O'Connor's smooth round head came up like a young dog that's caught the scent.

"Nice," he said happily. "Very nice indeed!"

Two men with a.r.s.enic in their system were going to make it three times as easy to locate the source of the poison, Gordon O'Connor said. His coffee bean eyes gleamed brighter than those eggsh.e.l.l-thin gla.s.ses the whole time Dwight was telling him who Carver Bannerman was.

"This Bannerman inspect any of Mr. Knott's jobs?"

"Half the time we aren't there when inspectors come around, so there's no way of us knowing," Nadine replied. "You'd have to compare the worksheets I gave you with whatever records the county inspector keeps. And like I told you before, we take a lot of piddling jobs that don't require inspection."

"That's what I mean about two victims cutting the possibilities so drastically," said O'Connor. "For now I can forget about all the jobs this Bannerman didn't inspect and just poke around at places where they overlapped."

"One place you could start is right next door." I glanced at my watch. "It's one-fifty though, and they'll be closing in a few minutes."

Nadine frowned. "The Coffee Pot?"

"Sure. Herman stops in every morning and Tink Dupree-he's the owner" -I explained to O'Connor-"Tink told me Wednesday morning that Carver Bannerman ate lunch there two or three times a week."

"But I have a gla.s.s of tea in there almost every morning myself," Nadine protested.

"Both of 'em, hmm?" Gordon O'Connor gathered up his lists, aligned the edges in neat economical movements and stashed them in a crisp manila folder. "You never know. Maybe they both ordered something exotic."

Dwight grinned. "The most exotic thing you can order in the Coffee Pot is a side dish of chili peppers with your scrambled eggs."