"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 01 - The Ninja" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

me to take blood samples, one of which was from the aorta, where this type of
poison concentrates; it's flushed from the rest of the bloodstream within
perhaps twenty minutes of death, by what means I have no idea. It's a highly
unusual cardio-vascular poison.'
Florum snapped his fingers. 'Proof! Heart attack.'
'Yes.'
'You sure about this?'
'About the poison, yes. Otherwise you know I wouldn't have come to you. But I've
still got some more tests to run. It appears likely that a sliver of whatever
punctured the man's flesh is still lodged in his sternum." 'There's no exit
wound?'
'No.'
'The fall could have dislodged it. Or the sea -'
'Or it was pulled free after the man fell.'
'What you're saying, Doc...' He paused and, pushing aside the photos, consulted
a filled-out preprinted form. "This guy, Barry Braughm, an account executive at'
- here he named Sam Goldman's advertising agency in New York - 'lived at
three-oh-one East Sixty-third, was murdered. But in this way? For what reason?
He was out here alone. No jealous wife or boyfriend..." He laughed. 'He's got a
sister in Queens whom we've already contacted and interviewed. We checked on his
house on Dune Road. Nada. No sign of it being broken into or even that anything
was taken. His car was where he had driven it up and parked it in front of the
house as secure as Fort Knox. There's nothing to -'
'There's this,' Doc Deerforth said, knowing that, at last, he had come to the
moment he had been dreading ever since he had discovered the puncture wound and,
subsequently, had pulled the blood from the drowned man's heart. It isn't
possible, he kept telling himself, all the time his hands and eyes were running
the tests that were confirming it; saying it over and over to himself like a
litany against evil. And he felt now rather out of himself, a dreamlike
unreality that allowed him to sit in another part of this room and watch himself
talking to Ray Florum just as if he were an actor in some film.
From outside there came the sound of a child's laughter, harsh and brittle in
the night, transformed by some aural magic into an eerie, other-worldly sound,
the mocking shrillness of the macaws' cries in the Philippine jungle.
'It's the poison,' he continued.- 'It's a very specific type.' He ran his palms
down the sides of his trousers. It had been a long time since he had felt his
hands wet with sweat. 'I came across this particular compound when I was
stationed overseas."
'During the war?' Florum said. 'But, good God, man, that's thirty-six years ago.
Do you mean to tell me -'
'I could not forget this poison, Ray, no matter how many years have passed. A
patrol went out one night. Five men. Only one returned and he just made it to
the perimeter. We'd heard no shots; nothing but the birds and the buzz of the
insects ... It was odd, that kind of stillness, almost creepy; we'd been fired
upon by snipers all through the day and every day for about a week.' Doc
Deerforth took a deep breath before plunging onwards. Anyway, they brought me
the man who'd come back. He was a boy, really. No more than nineteen. He was
still alive and I began to work on him. I did everything I could, everything in
and out of the book, but I was helpless. He literally died before my eyes."
'Dying of this stuff?'