She gave a shaky smile. “Okay, Vic. I’ll see if I can help you.”

I went to the dining room and pulled a bottle of Barolo from the liquor cupboard. Caroline rarely drank, but the heavy wine helped steady her. We talked for a while, not about our current problems, but general things—whether Caroline really wanted a law degree if she didn’t have to play catch-up with me. After a glass or two we both felt able to return to the discussion at hand.

I told her about Pankowski and Ferraro and the conflicting reports on their suit against Humboldt Chemical. “I don’t know what that has to do with Nancy’s death. Or with the attack on me. But it was when I found out about it and started questioning people about them that someone threatened me.”

She listened to a detailed report on my encounters with Dr. Chigwell and his sister, but she couldn’t shed any light on the blood work he’d kept on Xerxes employees.

“This is the first I ever heard about it. You know the kind of person Ma is—if they sent her in for a medical exam every year, she did it without thinking about it. A lot of things people told her to do on the job didn’t make any sense to her, and this would be one of them. I can’t believe it has anything to do with Nancy’s death.”

“Okay. Let’s try another one. Why did Xerxes buy their insurance through Art? Is Jurshak still the fiduciary on their life-health stuff? Why was it important enough to Nancy that she was carrying it around?”

Caroline shrugged. “Art keeps a pretty tight grip on a number of the businesses down there. He might have gotten their insurance in exchange for a tax break or something. Of course when Washington was elected Art didn’t have as many favors to hand out, but he still can do a lot for a company if they do something for him.”

I pulled Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest from Mozart’s Concert Arias and handed it to Caroline. She frowned over it for several minutes.

“I don’t know anything about insurance,” she finally said. “All I can tell you is that Ma’s benefits have been first-class. I don’t know about any of these other companies.”

Her words triggered an elusive memory. Something someone had said to me in the last few weeks about Xerxes and insurance. I frowned, trying to drag it the surface, but I couldn’t get hold of it.

“It meant something to Nancy,” I said impatiently. “What? Did she collect data on health and mortality rates for any of these companies? Maybe she had some way of checking the accuracy of this report.” Maybe the report didn’t mean anything. But then why had Nancy been carrying it around?

“Yes. She did track all these health statistics—she was the director of Health and Environmental Services.”

“So let’s go down to SCRAP and check her files.” I got up and started hunting for my boots.