A Wedding to Die For by Xavier Mayne

Author:Xavier Mayne [Mayne, Xavier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2014-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

THE COVERAGE of the wedding disaster geared up early Sunday morning. The city’s daily newspaper had held its front section for photos from the ceremony, but that had to be put to bed well before the reception got underway. By dawn, social media and Internet boards were crackling with photos of the city’s elite barfing spectacularly.

Brandt browsed on his tablet while brushing his teeth. After viewing what seemed like the hundredth candid video, he pulled the toothbrush and spat into the sink. “Who would have thought that someone could be throwing up and still hold a camera to capture other people throwing up?” he called to Donnelly through the clouds of steam emanating from the shower.

“Hmm…,” Donnelly called back, still in the loopy aftermath of Brandt’s special wake-up maneuvers.

“Hey, you’re in this one!” Brandt exclaimed, and thrust the tablet toward the shower.

“Ugh, I remember him,” Donnelly replied. “Guy must have had curry for lunch.” He turned back to the shower to begin scrubbing again.

“Wrap it up in there, buddy,” Brandt said with a chuckle. “We gotta get moving if we’re going to be there at eight.”

Donnelly muttered something into the water that he would probably prefer Brandt not hear clearly anyway.

Just before eight they rolled into the mostly empty parking lot at the metro building. Brandt called Dr. Neill, and she met them at the side door near the compressed gas tanks and emergency generators.

“Good morning, Officers,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for coming this early. The city’s homeland security protocol sets tight deadlines for us to report on cases in which so many people are affected, and I’d rather have more periods than question marks when I meet with the task force tomorrow morning.”

Brandt handed her the heavy bottle. “This is what flavored the filling.”

She regarded the bejeweled crystal vessel with a raised eyebrow. “Not much for subtlety, are they? Well, you can come up if you like—it will take just a couple of minutes to run the assay and see if we get the same alkaloid profile as we did last night on the cake filling.”

Brandt and Donnelly accompanied Dr. Neill in the elevator up to her lab, and within ten minutes, she brandished a test tube triumphantly at them.

“Looks like we found the source of the ipecac,” she said, holding up a test tube full of clouded liquid to the light.

Brandt peered at the glass cylinder. “What are the odds that this very expensive and rare liqueur happened to be tainted with a very strong dose of ipecac?”

Neill narrowed her eyes in thought. “Thing is, if someone were to drink this straight, or even mixed in a cocktail, this concentration of ipecac would likely be deadly. An overdose of ipecac syrup is rarely fatal, because it’s vomited up before it can reach toxic levels in the body. But this is far, far more concentrated than the syrup. This kind of contamination would be disastrous for the distiller, besides the fact that accidental ipecac contamination has never

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