Something occurred to me. I looked at Shay. “Could Arlette have taken it as a suicide drug? Along the lines of Romeo and Juliet? She drinks the poison because she can’t be with her true love?”
He leaned back in his chair. “It might be plausible… except for the fact that somebody drove a stake through her heart.”
Male chuckles sounded around the table.
Ooh. Smackdown. But I wasn’t about to be deterred. “Or maybe she tried to kill herself and was wandering around aimlessly, confused, with the toxin in her system, and-”
“Some random guy saw her, picked her up, stripped her, and staked her? I don’t think so,” Turnbull retorted.
“Fine. But don’t you agree that the murderer seems to have a sense of irony with that stake, given Arlette’s love of vampire tales? Wouldn’t feeding her poison before he killed her play a part? The guy didn’t rape her,” I reminded him. “And he had her for a couple of days before she turned up dead. So maybe this sicko played with her. She’d be easy to lug around if she was drugged up. But he’d still get to kill her, she just wouldn’t fight him.”
“Good point, Agent Gunderson,” Shenker said. “Do we know what form she took the drug in?”
“Nope. But the best guess at this point was she consumed it in liquid form.” Turnbull sighed. “And here’s another bizarre twist. The comfrey plant is used in teas and herbal remedies, and the leaves are so close in appearance to the leaves of the foxglove plant that sometimes foxglove is mistaken for comfrey. There’ve been several cases of accidental poisoning.”
“So the poisoning could have been accidental and unrelated to her murder,” I said.
“We cannot rule out that theory entirely.”
Somewhat vindicated, I pushed my next point. “With the absence of defensive wounds, it would appear Arlette knew her attacker.”
“Yes, but remember, we’re dealing with a small pool of people on the rez, so chances are just as likely it wasn’t a male she knew intimately, but a male she knew in passing.”
“We’re assuming it’s a male?” Agent Mested asked.
“Isn’t it always?” Agent Flack shot back.
Strained laughter.
“Director Shenker?”
His gaze bored into me. “Yes?”
“It’s come to my attention that there have been quite a few young women found dead on the reservation in the last couple of years.”
Agent Flack snapped his gum and whipped around to face me. “You talking about that Good Shield woman? Victim found gut shot out in the middle of nowhere?”
I hadn’t seen that obituary, and it bothered me there was one or more I’d missed in my small bit of research. “Was the FBI called in on that one?”