Val felt her pulse pick up a few paces. The theory of taking the drug willingly just went out the window. And she was happy about that. “Then what does it do?”

“It doesn’t affect consciousness and causes complete paralysis of muscles—motor function only, not sensory. So, she would have been fully awake, unable to move and still feel everything. This should have freaked her out.”

Val’s thoughts spun rapidly. “How long would it have taken from the time she was injected until she became paralyzed?”

“A couple of minutes.”

A needle wasn’t found in the house. Samantha couldn’t have disposed of it herself. Someone got rid of it. Samantha definitely wasn’t alone. After all of this information though, there was no proof that she was murdered and no way to link her to the other women. This was still death by allergy. The manner couldn’t be changed from accident to homicide without more to go on.

Val thought for a minute. “Too bad it’s impossible to see if all of the victims had this drug in their system. Then it would prove Samantha’s death was connected to them.”

“It may not be impossible,” Zoe said bluntly as if this was common knowledge.

Val sat upright. Zoe had her full attention. “What do you mean it’s not? We only have skeletal remains from the other victims.”

“You have the skulls from the victims, right? The flat bones are a good source of red bone marrow. Red marrow is highly vascular. It has lots of blood vessels and drugs get into the blood supply. Anywhere there’s a source of blood we might be able to find drugs. That’s the premise of this technique.”

Val liked the idea and pressed Zoe further on it.

“It’s kind of a new procedure but it’s been getting good publicity lately. There’s been success with opioids and some sedatives. No one has tried it, to my knowledge, with muscle relaxants.” Zoe sat forward, excited. “Hey, it might not show anything, but I’ll give it a try. If it works, we could have a pretty nice presentation for the American Academy of Forensic Science meeting next year. Not to mention a good journal article. We could work on this together. It would really jump start your career in this field to do things like this. Getting published gets your name out there.”

“What do we need?” Val said, willing to do anything.

“I’ll need a piece of each of the skulls.”

Val’s optimism flatlined. For her to sneak a piece of the skulls from under Dr. Blythe’s nose, would probably be as difficult as snatching the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. She had no idea how she was going to go about getting this.