Flora stood. “Yes, dear, that’s about it.” She patted my arm. “Don’t judge those young interns too harshly. That awful man didn’t always make sense. He often babbled or talked to himself and could be a tad frightening. I can’t begin to imagine the germs he carried into the office. I encouraged Bentley to get a restraining order against him, but the rest of the agency thought he was harmless, so we never bothered. I guess…we all got used to him. He was a fixture, if a rather odoriferous and unsavory one at that.”
“But no one saw him as a person, just a nuisance. A brief blight on one’s day,” I grumbled. “When in truth, he was more of an odd, flower-bearing writer wannabe.”
Flora’s eyes darkened. “It is terrible that we can become so immersed in our regular tasks that we ignore a person right under our noses.” She blinked, and the hostility in her eyes evaporated. “Perhaps I’ve been unfair to him. I don’t even know his last name. Or if he had a home or a family. I feel terrible.” She hurried back to her office.
Franklin straightened up. “It’s not working. He’s definitely dead.” He brushed his hand over his brow and shrugged. “I did what I could.”
“You were amazing,” I told him. “Don’t blame yourself. I think it was hopeless from the start.”
As Franklin shook his head and disappeared down the hall, Jude touched my arm. “I’ll be in my office if you need anything. Let me know when the police arrive. I want to talk to them. I’m sure Marlette’s death is a result of foul play.”
“Why do you believe that?” I asked.
“Okay.” He looked from left to right, then directly at me. “When I was straightening him on the couch, I noticed a puncture mark on his neck.”
“Like a bee sting?”
Jude shook his head. “Maybe that’s what we were intended to think, but I know what a needle puncture looks like, and that’s definitely what it was.”
I couldn’t keep the shock off my face. Not just at Jude’s insistence that Marlette was murdered, but over his statement about needle marks. “But why…and who?”
“I don’t know, but I have to tell the cops.”
Watching him walk away, I picked up my latte from the coffee table. Just as I took a sip of the unappealingly cooled brew, I heard the heavy tread of several men on the stairs.
A pair of officers from the Dunston Police Department met me at the top. The one in the lead, a stocky, thick-necked man in his late twenties, walked directly over to Marlette. A couple of paramedics carrying a stretcher pushed past me and followed him. The second policeman, an all-American-looking blond with blue eyes in his early fifties, held out his hand. “Officer Griffiths. Are you all right, ma’am?”
I was charmed by the fact that he asked how I was faring before peppering me with questions. I told him I’d had a heck of a first day on the job and explained how I’d found Marlette dead on the sofa.
Officer Griffiths wrote down every word I said, and his bright blue eyes and professional, courteous manner were a balm.
“That’s some first day,” he commented when I was finished. “Would you like to sit down?”
I shook my head, feeling more unnerved than I let on. My mother’s gloomy premonition kept repeating in my mind. Every now and then, her foresight was accurate, but the circumstances were usually positive. She’d stop a young couple in the grocery store and predict that they would soon be married or tell an expectant mother the gender of her baby. Sometimes, she knew the location of a lost pet or a missing object, but she’d never known about a death before it happened. I rubbed my arms, feeling chilled as I recalled her certainty that someone would die in this office.
The medical examiner arrived and quickly moved toward his patient. After inspecting Marlette’s lifeless body, he conferred with the paramedics and the stocky police officer. I tried to listen in on their conversation but only caught snippets, words and phrases that put my senses on high alert and caused my brain to start whirring. “Fresh needle puncture,” I heard the ME say. “Doubt it was self-administered because there was no…”
I wished I could have heard the whole conversation, but I did catch part of the cop’s response: “Possible homicide.”
Jude’s suspicions were right! Someone had murdered Marlette. Even the police thought so. At that moment, I decided I would do everything I could to discover who had harmed a man who just wanted to have his query letter read.
“Do they know what happened to him?” I asked Griffiths as the two paramedics began to unfold the legs of the gurney.
Griffiths made a noncommittal shrug. “Nothing definitive until an autopsy is done. Results could take anywhere from six to twelve weeks.”
“And that’s it? He just goes…in some refrigerated drawer until the autopsy?” I felt as though someone should be concerned on Marlette’s behalf.
“We’ll search for next of kin.” Griffiths looked over his notes. “So he came here every day carrying flowers? I should probably talk to someone who’s been here a bit longer than you about his past behavior.” He said this with a smile. “Would you take me to your boss?”
I shifted on my feet. “She left to catch a flight to New York.”