She laughed slightly. “I know it sounds crazy. He was in the news about five years ago because one of his autopsies showed a man had killed his mother using toxic black mold. It was in Luray, a tiny town in the middle of the state . . . well, never mind all those details. The lady’s death was called an accident, but a neighbor insisted the son had murdered his mother—he was in financial trouble, and he would inherit the farm when she died.

“The local sheriff decided to ask the state to perform an autopsy. It was like an episode out of CSI or NCIS—Dr. Roque discovered that the dead woman’s lungs were filled with black mold. He sent KBI investigators to the home, and they discovered that the son had been coating her mattress with it. All the TV stations covered the story. Dr. Roque even was on 60 Minutes.

“After that, people wrote him from all over the world. They wanted him to prove that this or that person had been poisoned. Sometimes they sent him horrible things, pieces of skin or jars with blood or sputum in them. Rhoda would return everything with a cover letter saying the doctor was a state employee who did not do private work. After a while the letters and things stopped coming.”

“Doris McKinnon had collected soil samples, I think from land that had been declared contaminated by radiation. I don’t know what happened to the samples, but I wonder if she thought Dr. Roque’s mold experience would qualify him to test soil for radiation.”

“Yes,” Malik agreed, “but I do not know why she wrote him at home, which she must have done, since Rhoda did not see the letter. Or she e-mailed him. I suppose she could have done that—I can look at his e-mail account.”

“Do you have a key to Dr. Roque’s house?” I asked. “Could we go there, do you think, and see if we can find anything from McKinnon, maybe even her soil samples?”

Malik had a key—when the doctor traveled, as he often had, she looked after his houseplants and his cat. She said she’d go over and search. “It will give me something to do, something concrete. Otherwise I will sit here playing what Dr. Roque always said was a loser’s game: ‘should have, would have, could have, did not.’”

38
Upscale Housing

When we’d said our good-byes, I took a minute to look up the mold story and found the 60 Minutes clip. Dr. Roque did well on television—he’d been a Marcus Welby kind of doctor, square-built, with a soothing professional manner that works well with juries. He would have made a good internist, too—his kind, calm manner was wasted on the dead. Or maybe not. The dead deserve kindness as well as the living.