Page 127 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

have possibly known? There was no seating chart for the farewell
party, and no little name tags by the place settings. I really wanted to
be out of there, back in the late afternoon sunlight. I didn’t tell her
that I had wanted to be on the team, but Dr. Kapil had washed me
out quickly. I remembered my disappointment but refused to dwell
on it. Not now. Not here.
“Looks like they all were drinking beer—except one.”
I snapped back into the present. “Dr. Reath was a teetotaler. I
doubt if she would have taken an alcoholic beverage even at a
celebration like this.”
Labelle picked up a mug. “Then she would have substituted
something else.”
“I can save you a lot of trouble, Lieutenant. We had packed a
special container for this day. All the food was packaged up and
labeled, enough for one year for six people. They must have looked
forward to having some special foods at this party, things they could
choose themselves before the experiment began.”
“Looks somewhat like cocoa.” She sniffed at the dregs. “Where is
that container?”
I wanted to say, how the hell should I know? But I pointed to the
kitchen counter. The plastic tub was marked ‘Day 365.’ She went
through its contents quickly. “A tin of Ovaltine,” Labelle grunted.
“Nobody else drank it.” She put the can into a plastic bag, holding it
carefully by the rim. “I’ve seen all I need to in here, at least for now.
We’ll have some forensic specialists going over the whole area later.
Now let’s have a look at that gardening shed.”
We trooped over to the tool shed, a pall of gloom settling in from
the dome’s hemispheric heavens despite the grow-lights. I could
never learn not to look up. Lt. Gramercy was in and out in less than a
minute. This time it was a grimy dark brown bottle she deftly
dropped into a plastic bag.
“Hardly hidden at all,” she said—to me, I guessed, although her
eyes seemed focused on a spot beyond the confines of the dome.
“But hiding things in here is out of the question, anyway.” Then she
turned to me. “The lab was right. Dr. Reath ingested a fatal dose of
2-4-diethylpropylene, the active ingredient in BugOff.” And that was
the name on the label on the bottle she had just confiscated. I

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