Dante's Poison

by Lynne Raimondo

  “I think we’ve already seen enough of that action lately. And now, before I start preaching again, why don’t I take myself off for a while? My mom and sisters haven’t been getting much fresh air recently and Lola could use a potty break. I think I’ll swing round to the cafeteria and we’ll all go for a stroll so you can have some time alone with Hallie.”

  “Thanks, Gerry,” I said, profoundly grateful for his forgiving attitude. Maybe it was time I stopped always anticipating the worst. And trusted that Hallie, when she knew everything, would forgive me too.

  When we were finally ready to present our evidence to O’Leary, he was appropriately impressed.

  “So you’re saying he’s been poisoning people for years?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “Or you could call him the anti-poisoner.”

  We—Josh, Bjorn, O’Leary, and I—were gathered in a booth in the sticky recesses of the Double L, where I had just treated everyone to a round of drinks. I’d figured it was safer to meet there than in my office. If we were going to catch Gallagher’s murderer, it was important that he be kept unawares, and though I had no idea what O’Leary actually looked like, he oozed cop like a squid oozes ink. When he wasn’t needed at the bar, Jesus was also hovering in the background, hanging on our every word.

  “And right under everyone’s noses?”

  I nodded a yes. I’d realized almost immediately how my pills had been switched but hadn’t been prepared for the full truth. I let Bjorn explain.

  “It all goes back to a murder trial you may remember. A geriatrics physician named Donald Tesma who was arrested and convicted for having engineered the deaths of scores of elderly patients in and around Chicago. The trial was sensational—front-page news here and nationally.”

  “I do remember this,” O’Leary said. “Didn’t they call him the ‘Nursing Home Killer’?”

  “That’s right. His methods were ingenious and usually mimicked natural death in the old folks he preyed upon. Most often, he injected their IV bags with potassium chloride—salt, that is—but he sometimes used epinephrine and digitalis. In almost all cases, his victims were already frail, and it was just assumed they’d expired of previously existing conditions. He was only caught because a patient observed Tesma using a syringe on his IV bag and managed to press the call button before passing out. The authorities then began to look into other deaths at the facilities where Tesma had privileges and noticed a pattern. Eventually they exhumed the bodies of two dozen other patients whose deaths could be linked circumstantially to Tesma.”

  “But not directly?” O’Leary asked.

  Bjorn said, “No, and that’s an important point. In many cases the decomposed state of the bodies they dug up precluded saying exactly how they’d died, especially when Tesma used sodium, which is found naturally in body tissue. It was easier to identify the cause of death when he used other drugs, but the pathologists testifying for the state had to really push the science. The prosecution credited one in particular, whose name I’ll save for later, as being instrumental in getting Tesma convicted.”

  “So he never confessed?” O’Leary again.

  “No, and that’s also important. Tesma insisted all along that he was innocent and kept on insisting even after his conviction was upheld on appeal. The families of the victims thought otherwise and successfully sued Tesma for all he was worth.”

  “Christ,” O’Leary said. “And I thought doctors entered the profession to save people, not strangle them in their beds.”

  “Actually,” Josh said through a mouthful of nuts, “it’s thought that the health professions are riddled with serial killers who enter the field either because they have a pathological interest in life and death, or believe they’re doing patients a favor by ending their suffering. The tragedy is these killers’ crimes often get overlooked or can’t be proved. Even when they leave one hospital under a cloud, with all the shortages in trained personnel it’s easy for them to find work elsewhere. Sometimes they go on claiming victims for years.”

  “Which is another part of the story we’ll get to,” Bjorn said. “Anyway, you may not remember that Tesma had a son of the same name who was there for his father’s entire trial and was said to be visibly distraught throughout the proceedings. The boy’s mother had disappeared some years earlier—there was speculation that the father had poisoned her too—and Tesma senior was the only family he had. According to court watchers, it was the boy’s testimony during the penalty phase of the case that saved his father’s life. The jury wasn’t prepared to orphan a child and spared Tesma the death sentence despite some serious outcry in the press. They could have spared themselves the criticism. After Tesma was sentenced to life in prison and his appeals were exhausted, he hanged himself. In the meantime, the boy had been sent to live with an aunt in St. Louis, where he finished high school. He was apparently a brilliant student and graduated first in his class, winning an academic scholarship to college. Just before he left home for his freshman year, the aunt passed away in her sleep of an apparent aneurism.”

  “Let me guess,” Josh added, still chewing. “Her remains were cremated.”

  “Right-o,” Bjorn answered. “From that point forward, our killer was on his own. One of the first things he did was get a legal name change, explaining to the judge who signed the order that he wanted to escape the stigma of his father’s crimes and get a fresh start. After that, he completed college in three years, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry. Even got an award of some kind from the American Chemistry Association. From there he went on to medical school at Southern Illinois. It was around that time that he started exhibiting some troubling behavior—or at least the first time it got noticed.”

  “Troubling how?” O’Leary asked.

  “Weird stuff, like spending extra hours cutting up cadavers in anatomy and hanging around the sickbeds of terminally ill patients. And cutting classes so that he could spend most of his time as a volunteer first responder. His grades fell off, and he began failing his courses. At the end of his second year, he was brought up on cheating charges and expelled. He never became a doctor. But as we now know, he eventually discovered an even better way to follow in his father’s footsteps.”

  “I’ll wait for that part of the story. So what first put you on to him?” O’Leary asked me.

  I explained about my experimental eye treatment, my euphoric discovery that I could “see” again, and the hours I’d spent traipsing around the downtown in a walking dream, finishing up with my Perils of Pauline rescue from the South Shore Line. When I was through, everyone was quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” O’Leary said at last, breaking the silence. “I wish it had worked out for you—the drug, I mean. I’m also ready to kill the asshole who did it to you. It’s amazing you weren’t run over, and not just by that train.”

  I pretended not to notice the sympathy. “I think that’s what he intended. We already know he has a good sense of humor. Take the new name he chose for himself—Graham Young. I looked it up online. The original Young was a notorious English serial killer who poisoned more than seventy victims before he was finally put away for life. Like our friend, he was a whiz at chemistry and could concoct almost any type of poison from commonly available substances. It’s believed he poisoned his stepmother, although they were never able to prove it because her body was cremated. See the connection? At various times, the first Young also tried to poison his father, sister, and a school buddy, which earned him a stint in Broadmoor, the British hospital for the criminally insane. He was released as ‘fully recovered’ nine years later and went on to get a job at a chemical laboratory, where he proceeded to lace his coworkers’ tea with thallium and antimony. During his trial, the British press dubbed him the Teacup Poisoner.”

  “Ugh,” Bjorn shivered. “I’ll remember that the next time I go for a cuppa.”

  I continued, “The original Graham Young was a diagnosed psychopath, and given all the evide
nce, I bet our Graham would fly off the scales, too. The fact that his father exhibited psychopathic tendencies lends even more support to the diagnosis. As I explained once to Hallie, the syndrome tends to run in families, with a heritability rate as high as eighty percent. There are also physiological effects associated with the condition. MRIs done on adult psychopaths have shown what appear to be significant anatomical abnormalities in the paralimbic system, the region of the brain associated with empathy and remorse. Oftentimes the trait shows up early, in childhood, in callous and unemotional behavior, and in extreme cases, in a fascination with inflicting pain. You’ve probably seen it on TV—the kid who pushes a sibling down the stairs or tries to skin the family cat.”

  O’Leary said, “You’re giving me goose bumps, but I know what you’re saying because I’ve run across the type. You can see it in their eyes—ice cold, no feeling whatsoever. I know cops who are afraid to be in the same room with them. But they can also be incredibly charming, which is what makes them so dangerous. So you think he was modeling himself on his father and this English guy?”

  “Not only that, but had found a way to do them one better. After he was kicked out of medical school it was all too easy for him to get a job with Atria. The drug companies are always looking for recruits with that kind of background, and his college record was good enough that they were willing to overlook the cheating. It was the perfect cover for what he wanted to do, and his charm enabled him to shoot to the top of the company’s sales force, probably gaining him access to all sorts of confidential information.”

  “OK,” O’Leary said, “But how did you figure out that it was him who slipped you the acid?”

  I took out my phone and showed everyone how the application worked. “It’s a pretty sophisticated tool and picked up that both the color and the printing on the label were different from my ‘White Rabbit.’ There was only one time when that bottle wasn’t in my possession.” I told them about my fall in the corridor and Graham showing up a little later with the pills I’d lost. “He was smart enough to replace only a few of them so that no one would ever be the wiser. I had Tim get the rest of the contents tested. The other tablets were primarily . . . what they were supposed to be.”

  I wouldn’t let Tim tell me what I’d been taking—drug versus placebo—since the knowledge might have gotten me kicked out of Melissa’s study.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to keep the same bottle?” Josh said.

  “I think that was also part of the joke. Not knowing about the technology on my phone, he wanted to lord it over me that I wouldn’t be able to tell what he had done. He also wanted my hoped-for death to appear accidental, which is why he didn’t try to poison me directly. I would just go walking out into traffic or do something else to get myself killed, and everyone would attribute it to the fact that I’m blind. The plan wasn’t foolproof—I might have spent the whole time tripping more or less safely at home—but he’d still have had his fun. That’s the way psychopaths’ minds work. They view other people as test subjects to be manipulated like puppets. In his worst-case scenario I’d survive, but he’d still have had the pleasure of jerking me around.”

  “All right, I’m buying that he pulled the switcheroo on you,” O’Leary said. “But how do you get from there to his being Gallagher’s killer?”

  “It goes back to the trial of his father. Jane was the lead prosecutor during the trial and, based on what Hallie told me, the main reason the state obtained a conviction in a case that could have gone either way. If I’m right, he was trying to frame her.” I went back over the salient facts: Hallie’s worry that Jane was withholding information from her, what Mrs. Van Wagner saw outside Gallagher’s townhome—I was now thoroughly chagrined by my role in casting doubt on her statement—the erasure of Gallagher’s records, my discovery of Atria’s misdeeds, and Jane’s belated admission that she was trying to shield both herself and her client from a public-relations disaster.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence that Gallagher was about to go public with some pretty damaging information about Atria just before he was killed. I’m guessing Young was the source of the leak. He must have helped himself to a copy of Jane’s report at company headquarters and passed it on to Gallagher, knowing that Gallagher couldn’t resist tipping his hand to Jane. Either she’d react in a way that would make her look guilty, or Young would make sure the police found out about the story Gallagher was planning to publish, thus supplying a motive. He then met with Gallagher himself, which is when he fed him the Lucitrol.”

  “Can you prove it?” O’Leary asked.

  “Not to a fault, but the two of them were seen having drinks together later that night, after Gallagher left Gene and Georgetti’s.” Armed with a photograph of Young, Bjorn had gone back to the tavern where Gallagher had been spotted and gotten a positive ID on the salesman.

  I went on, “Young used Lucitrol to poison Gallagher precisely so that the police would suspect Jane, whose victory for Atria was all over the news. He either surmised that Gallagher had a heart condition from what was widely known about the man’s habits, or he wangled the information from Gallagher’s cardiologist or someone on her staff while he was on his sales rounds. You wouldn’t believe how good this guy is at sniffing out details about people.”

  “I can swear to that,” Josh interjected. “He’s like the CIA, the FBI, and the state troopers all rolled into one. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows which side of the bed I sleep on.”

  My mouth was getting dry from all the talking, so I took a sip from my drink. “Young was probably counting on an immediate autopsy, and when that didn’t happen, he tipped Gallagher’s nephew so that the body would be exhumed. Although I doubt he planned it that way initially, it had the bonus of making Jane look even guiltier.”

  “Still, a pretty elaborate plan,” O’Leary observed.

  “Again, that’s how these people’s minds work. Young is obviously highly intelligent. He’d probably score at genius level if you gave him an IQ test. If I had to guess, he’s been stalking Jane for years, waiting for his moment. Killing her wouldn’t have been good enough for him. He’d want her to suffer utter ruin and imprisonment—the same way his father did. And if he could manage it, on largely circumstantial evidence so that Jane would go on protesting her innocence to the bitter end. We know he was there throughout his father’s trial. If he was already a budding psychopath, it would have been immensely galling to him that his father was being punished simply for knocking off a few geriatric patients. Getting back at the prosecutors who put his father away is probably an obsession for him.”

  “Was revenge also behind the attack on Hallie, then?” Josh asked.

  “Maybe. She was a junior staffer during the trial and rarely in the courtroom. At the time, she may have escaped his notice. It’s more likely he went after Hallie and me because he was enraged over the result of the hearing. But it would explain why Hallie knew her attacker. She told me how much sympathy she felt for the junior Tesma and how she’d never forget the look on his face while he was testifying for his father. When she shouted ‘You!’ at our attacker, I think it was him she recognized. And there’s another thing you should know about.”

  I reported on my phone conversation with Di Marco, who supplied the fact that Jimmy O’Hara, the prosecutor who had dropped dead after “forgetting” to take his heart medication, was also at Tesma’s trial, acting as Jane’s second chair. “I doubt there’s any way to prove it after all these years, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Young got to him, too. Which brings us to the last piece of evidence. Bjorn, why don’t you tell him the name of the pathologist who testified for the state at Tesma’s trial?”

  “Sidney Levin.”

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” O’Leary said. “Though now that I think about it, I may have known him. Friend of my stepfather. Family lived down the block from us. But the old man must have died years ago. You’re not saying Young had a hand in that as
well?”

  “Not him, but I think Young’s been playing games with his son.” I gave them a brief outline of the case Rusty had recruited me to help him with. “Remember how I said Young was the anti-poisoner? After we discovered his true identity, I became convinced he was using his position to make patients ill, and that the delivery mechanism was the free samples he gave out, which could end up in patient hands without going through a pharmacy. With his background in chemistry and access to the company’s packaging, it would have been easy for him to doctor, so to speak, the samples. The trouble was, why hadn’t anyone noticed? If he was substituting poison for the drugs, surely it would have aroused suspicion at some point, if not among the prescribing doctors, then among the families of the victims. Why hadn’t any of them been autopsied before now? The deaths of Ira Levin’s two young patients gave me the answer.”

  “You mean he was supplying them with placebos?” Josh said excitedly, immediately grasping the implications.

  It seemed like a long shot, but when I first learned about Levin’s father providing crucial testimony during the Tesma case, it triggered a memory of something the psychiatrist had said back when Rusty and I were first interviewing him. The antidepressant Levin prescribed for Danny Carpenter was Atria’s best-selling Placeva. And when Danny’s parents stopped paying for the boy’s treatment, Levin kept up his patient’s supply by giving him free samples.

  “I don’t get it,” O’Leary said. “If it’s a placebo, it’s harmless, right? So how can it hurt people?”

  I allowed Josh to take over for me. “It wouldn’t, unless it was substituted for something the patient couldn’t live without—like a heart medication. Or, depending on various factors, an antidepressant. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why some people are affected more severely than others, except that antidepressants enhance mood-regulating chemicals in the brain. It’s theorized that an abrupt deprivation of those chemicals causes symptoms similar to an addict undergoing withdrawal, though the drugs aren’t habit forming like heroin or cocaine. Whatever the reason, shutting off the supply can mean a rapid return to anxiety and depression.”