CHAPTER 48

Seizures

I walked up to North Avenue, where I caught a crosstown bus to my office. The street is an important conduit between the city and the expressway, which is why I suppose the big national chains have stuffed it full of outlets. The traffic is so heavy on North these days that it took half an hour for the bus to trundle the three miles across town. Delays like that usually leave me gnawing my nails in annoyance. Today I welcomed the chance to rest.

When I finally got off at Western, I didn’t bother to check for tails. I was tired, I didn’t care and, anyway, it didn’t matter if people followed me to my office-if they were tapping me, they’d know I was in there:

It was close to lunch time. I walked down to La Llorona for a fish taco. The lunchtime crowd was heavy, so I didn’t chat with Mrs. Aguilar but ate my taco at one of the high tables in the corner while I finished glancing through the papers.

The taco was so good, and I was feeling so sorry for myself, that I took a second one back with me to eat at my desk. At Division Street, where Milwaukee changed abruptly from a neighborhood street to an extension of Yuppie Town, I stopped in one of the coffee bars for a cappuccino. Either protein or caffeine would revive me, or at least that was my theory.

While I was out, Freeman’s secretary had messengered over the toxicology report. Tessa had signed for it and taped it to my office door. I took it

in with me and laid it on my desk. I almost couldn’t bear to read it: I’d moved heaven and earth, or at least medical examiners in two counties, to get this document. If it told me nothing, I might he down and never get up again.

I finally took the report from the envelope and began reading. Callie had sent a photocopy of a ten-page fax, so it was blurry in places. The text bristled with “epithelial cells of the distal part of the renal tubules” and “immunocytochemical electron microscopy of the hepatocytes.” Fascinating, if you knew what it meant.

I slowly went through the whole ten pages. The analysis of Marc’s last meal (skinless chicken, broccoli, baked potato and a lettuce-tomato salad, consumed three hours before death, with a statistical variation of so much based on digestive whatever) was so detailed that I abruptly tossed the second taco into the trash.

The lab had found no trace of cocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam, hydrocodone, cocaethylene, benzoy-lecgonine, heroin ‘hydrochloride or marijuana metabolites in Marc’s urine. He had alcohol in the vitreous humor and phenobarbital in the blood plasma, discovered with “high-performance liquid chromatography.” The report gave the drugs in milligrams per liter, with the information that Marc had weighed eighty kilos, so I couldn’t tell how much Marc had drunk on top of the drug, but Vishnikov had provided a summary at the end: “… a six hundred milligram dose of phenobarbital taken with approximately two shots of bourbon would have depressed respiration and most likely killed him if he hadn’t first died of drowning.”