Page 150 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

was a shocker. Could he have been carrying on with both of them?
With three other men as potential competitors? It boggled the mind.
I stood up and rolled the pen back across the table.
“Thanks. As I was saying, Batrakian provided me with the last
thing I needed to know. Discounting the possibility of suicide—
nobody would describe the victim as suicidal—I was left with finding
a murderer. The means were at hand, known to at least two of the
team. Motives abounded, as you no doubt discovered in the heated
discussions in this room over the course of the afternoon. But unless
Batrakian or Wahl committed the crime, I had to explain the
fingerprints. A logical alternative was that the culprit had wiped his or
her own prints off the bottle and had left it to be handled by others,
perhaps someone the murderer wanted to frame.”
“Interesting. You do have to explore all these avenues, no matter
how remote.” I looked at my cup. Still a bit hot to drink. Liquor was
never too hot to drink.
“Yes. The problem with that theory is that Waldo Wahl took the
BugOff out of his supply box and secreted it in the tool shed at the
beginning of the trials. If he is to be believed, he never touched it
again. Batrakian, who it seems would inevitably discover the bottle,
handled it after Wahl; his prints are on top. Thus, to follow this line
of reasoning, whoever wiped the bottle did so before the dome was
sealed. It may be that Dr. Reath’s fate was also sealed at the same
time.”
She picked up the cup, blew on it to cool it, but didn’t drink. “That
meant the killer poisoned the Ovaltine more than twelve months ago.
The fact that the insecticide was locked in the dome with them was
not accidental, however. It was part of an attempt to throw the police
off the trail. But if Waldo Wahl were an innocent party, then the
killer must have known he was going to smuggle a bottle of BugOff
into the dome, and used it to poison Dr. Reath’s Ovaltine in advance.
This could have been done by anyone with access to the supplies in
the days preceding the start of the experiment. It had to be someone
familiar with the habits of the personnel as well as the procedures
which would be followed inside the Ecodome and Anthropod.”
“You mean like Ben?”
“He did have a lot of explaining to do. His actions were suspicious
after the crime, and the financial implications of it took some time to

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