The Maker by Chris Taylor

Author:Chris Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chris Taylor
Published: 2015-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bryce tried to make sense of the rosters spread out across the large tables in the major incident room at the station. A couple of other officers had done some preliminary groundwork, highlighting the names of staff members who had direct access to all three women during their stay at the hospital. Thankfully, none of the deceased had been a patient for longer than a fortnight prior to their deaths.

It had been three days since the autopsy. He was still waiting to hear from Samantha, but his gut was telling him the deaths were related. As if on cue, his phone rang. The Caller ID of the city morgue came up on his screen. His gut clenched.

“Detective Sutcliffe,” he announced.

“Detective, it’s Samantha Wolfe. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. The labs are more backed up than I expected.”

“That’s fine, I understand. What do you have?”

“Eileen Green was poisoned with ricin. We also found large traces of it in Amelia Arncliffe and Robyn Evan. It looks like you have a serial killer on the loose in Sydney Harbour Hospital.”

“Fuck.” Bryce whispered the expletive in deference to the forensic pathologist, but she heard him just the same.

“That’s one way of putting it. Do you know what ricin is?”

“Yeah, it comes from castor beans, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. It’s extracted from inside the castor bean by a process of filtration. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Anyone with half a brain could do it in their kitchen.”

“Are castor beans readily available?”

“It’s illegal to import castor bean seeds into Australia, but there are plenty of nurseries around Sydney where you can buy the plants. An easy search on the Internet would point you in the right direction.”

“I take it this poison was ingested by the women?”

“Yes, although even inhaling it can be fatal. It was found in both the blood and tissues of our victims, which leads me to believe it was swallowed.”

“So someone tampered with their food?”

“That would be my guess. If the ricin’s been reduced to a powder form, it would be simple enough for someone to mix it in with the yoghurt or mashed potato.”

Bryce’s jaw clenched. This was even more difficult than he imagined. When he’d included the kitchen staff in the people he wanted to look at, it was more from the point of view of being thorough, rather than any real belief they were involved. What could a member of the kitchen staff have against the women, unless the victims selected at random? The endless thoughts chased themselves around his head until he gritted his teeth in frustration. A sound escaped his tightly clenched jaws.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

He was snapped back to reality by the doctor’s question and he hurriedly focused his thoughts once more on their conversation.

“What time frame are we talking between ingestion and death, Doctor Wolfe?”

“It depends on a number of factors. Usually, we’d say it takes between one to three days for a person to die once they’ve been

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