The Evolution of a Serial Killer: He’s on the hunt for the perfect killer: himself. (DCI Morton Book 6) by Sean Campbell

Author:Sean Campbell [Campbell, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Minimis
Published: 2017-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22: Scopolamine

‘What about scopolamine?’

Chiswick turned to look at Morton as if he were an idiot. ‘Overrated. I tried it once and woke up three days later in a bush, buck naked, with no recollection of where I’d been.’

‘Very funny, Doc,’ Morton said. ‘But I’m being serious. Doesn’t it cause disinhibition?’

‘Disinhibition, yes. Mind control? No. Nobody dosed Ed Teigan with scopolamine. Even if they had done so, the killer would have had to lift him over a four-foot ledge and roll him off the top of the building. There are much easier, much less physical, ways to kill. And he’d have been bruised from that sort of lift.’

Morton just looked at him. ‘Did you see any bruises?’

Chiswick stared back. ‘I didn’t notice any, no.’

‘The absence of noticing isn’t the same as the absence of bruises,’ Morton said, smiling sweetly.

‘You’re not going anywhere until I get Ed Teigan out of cold storage, are you?’ Chiswick asked. He’d seen Morton play this game before, and Morton was always a pain in the bum.

‘Nope.’ Morton perched himself against the wall as if to emphasise the point.

‘Fine.’

Five minutes later, Chiswick’s assistant, or diener, wheeled Ed Teigan into Autopsy Room One. Chiswick lit the body up with ultraviolet light.

‘Look, no bruises,’ Chiswick said. ‘He wasn’t shoved, pushed, punched, kicked, or otherwise physically forced over the ledge.’

‘So, he did kill himself.’

‘All signs point to yes,’ Chiswick said.

‘Except for the fact that he called to confirm a restaurant booking twenty minutes before he died. Doesn’t that strike you as a weird thing to do right before killing yourself?’

‘I suppose,’ Chiswick said grudgingly as he covered Ed Teigan back up. ‘There’s nothing to suggest he was murdered, though.’

‘Don’t you find it weird that we’ve had three victims all die at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, and two of them are Rafferty’s first cases? Saturday is never a quiet night, but the odds of that must be astronomical.’

Chiswick turned to face him. ‘That is odd. I’d write off two in a row as weird, but if you’re right, three is more than a coincidence. The problem is that getting to three means taking a simple suicide and turning it into a murder. There’s no way to prove that.’

‘Can you at least push for an open verdict?’

‘I can try.’

***

The chief wasn’t in until the next morning. After her Tuesday morning Pilates, she rolled into the office just before lunch and looked very surprised to see Morton waiting for her.

‘David, I don’t believe we have an appointment,’ she said with false sweetness. She stopped dead in the corridor and didn’t invite him into her office.

‘We don’t,’ Morton said. ‘I’m here about a miscarriage of justice. Ed Teigan died on Saturday night. It has been preliminarily ruled a suicide. I think it’s a murder.’

‘You’re not being assigned a case,’ Silverman said bluntly. ‘And this is not a case.’

She walked into her office, leaving a gobsmacked Morton standing in the hallway. For a moment, he stood there slack-jawed, and then he felt the anger begin to build.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.