Free Trophy Widow by Michael A. Kahn

America through courier services and passengers on commercial airplanes, the poison control center had logged more than two hundred confirmed “roofie” rapes, with hundreds more suspected. A story in the Legal Times described why Rohypnol was the weapon of choice for rapists:
    Rohypnol tablets dissolve easily and quickly. They are odorless, colorless and tasteless. The victim often blacks out, so she cannot piece together enough details to put a rapist away. “You’ve got a drug that makes your partner less capable of resisting and unable to remember afterwards,” says Mary Hibbard, a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It really is the perfect crime.”
    I stared at that last line, feeling a chill run down my spine.
    I skimmed the rest of the articles, trying to figure out why, with all this publicity, Angela Green’s defense attorney had said nothing about the blood analysis at trial. Nexis had organized the articles in descending chronological order—the most recent first, oldest last. That chronology held at least a partial answer. The media coverage had markedly escalated during the past five years. Indeed, the only articles that mentioned the drug during the three years before Michael Green’s death were financial or business profiles on Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. in which the name Rohypnol would pop up on a list of the pharmaceutical company’s more successful drugs, along with Valium and a heart-attack medicine called Activase.
    All of which might explain why the presence of flunitrazepam had not sent up a red flag in the medical examiner’s office when they got the results of the blood tests on the broken glass.
    But that was then. This was now.
    ***
    My mother didn’t kill him,” Sonya said bluntly. “She was framed.”
    â€œWho framed her?”
    She took a sip of her wine and shrugged. “Probably that blond bimbo.”
    We were in the bar at Harry’s Restaurant on Market Street—Sonya Green and me. She’d been reluctant to meet, even after I explained that I was representing her mother in the Son of Sam case. After some cajoling, I finally got her to agree to give me thirty minutes after work. I’d suggested Harry’s, which was near A. G. Edwards and Sons, where she worked as an analyst in the underwriting department.
    Although Sonya was heavier than her mother and had a complexion closer to her father’s, she’d inherited her mother’s broad facial features. Unlike her mother, though, there was a slightly unkempt quality to Sonya. There were makeup smudges on the collar of her blouse, which was not well pressed. Her straightened hair was a little tousled, her lipstick and eyeliner just a tad off line. I felt a pang in my heart. Although I was probably doing a little projecting, Sonya seemed a big little girl to me, one who still needed a mommy to help her get fixed up, to make sure the blouses were cleaned and ironed and that her the eyeliner was on straight. Unfortunately, the state of Missouri had snatched her mommy and locked her up two hundred miles from home.
    How unfair life must have seemed to Sonya. She’d been just a few weeks from graduation at Northwestern when her father was murdered and her mother arrested and charged with the crime. During the same month her classmates celebrated in Evanston with their parents, Sonya was back in St. Louis burying one and visiting the other in jail. For the first two years after graduation, she lived with her grandmother—Angela’s mother. She now lived alone in a condominium in Clayton.
    â€œWhy Samantha Cummings?” I asked. “Where’s the motive?”
    â€œMotive?” Sonya gave me a scornful look. “Money, of course. Look at the lawsuit. If her kid wins, she’ll be wealthy.”
    I shook my head. “The lawsuit is an afterthought—something dreamed up by a lawyer. If she was really after