Zoe pulled out a chair so that Val could sit and then smiled as she explained her findings, “Samantha Ritcher had the curariform drug pancuronium bromide in her system,” she announced triumphantly. “That’s what she was allergic to. It took some digging but I found it. There were traces of it in her urine sample. Not much though, the drug was essentially wearing off. It doesn’t last long after injection, typically only about a half hour. I compared pancuronium to her post-mortem serum and got a hit on the drug sensitivity.”

Val was confused. She was aware of curare-type drugs and had a rough idea of their effects and uses. One fact stood out: people don’t use them to get high. “Why on earth would she be taking something like this?”

“Beats the hell out of me. It’s a pretty powerful muscle relaxer. Actually, muscle paralyzer would be a better description. These drugs are used during surgical procedures. It’s risky to take it outside of a hospital setting. You need some means of artificial respiration available. It freezes all skeletal muscles including the diaphragm, in the right dosages. Once the diaphragm is inactivated, the person can’t breathe on their own anymore.”

“Wouldn’t her breathing have stopped right away, then? Wouldn’t she have died by asphyxiation and not anaphylaxis if that were the case?” Val said, the words tumbling out. She wondered if Blythe got the cause of death wrong. But then she remembered that Zoe confirmed that it was anaphylaxis. Samantha’s enzymes and antibodies were telltale for it.

Zoe pulled off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “The diaphragm is the last muscle to become paralyzed, so dosage is tricky. An amount that inactivates the muscles of the hands leaves the patient’s breathing reduced by about twenty-five percent. So, if she didn’t have a high enough dose, she still would have been able to breathe. And we know that she was breathing up until she had the allergic reaction.”

So, she had just enough to incapacitate her.

Though Val wanted to believe that Samantha was murdered, and looked for anything to point in this direction, she maintained an open mind for the moment and searched for a plausible, simple explanation for all of this. She needed to cover all the bases and not jump to conclusions because if Samantha took the drug willingly, then her death was an accident. Val needed to rule this out.

Working with Thomas and Jack was certainly helping her learn her job. She was becoming good at asking the right questions. “Samantha had a history of a bad back. Any possibility this might have helped with it?”

“God no. This wouldn’t be the drug for that. It has no effect on pain.”