Free Lethal Lily (A Peggy Lee Garden Mystery) by Joyce Lavene, Jim Lavene Page B

full-time teaching at the school, but she liked to go back for short sessions. It gave her plenty of time to run The Potting Shed and keep up with her own projects—and still draw a paycheck from them.
    The university was expecting a large crowd of law enforcement officials for the lecture on poisons that had been linked to murders. They had used her forensic credentials, and her time at the university, liberally.
    She’d been hoping to use Ann Fletcher’s case for the lecture. A twenty-year-old murder case that had been ruled accidental death, but proven botanical poisoning, would be a hit with the law enforcement crowd. But she didn’t have enough information to use it. It seemed unlikely that she ever would, unless Ann’s death was somehow linked to Harry’s, and she could prove it.
    “There you are!” Dr. Dorothy Beck got up from behind her crowded desk. She was much taller than Peggy, and gaunt as a scarecrow. “I almost wish there were more cases of poisoning so you could be here all the time. It’s always a pleasure working with you.”
    Her tone made Peggy’s sun-pink face turn red. “Thank you. I enjoy working here too. But I don’t think a bumper crop of deaths by poison would make anyone happy.”
    Dorothy laughed as she caught her reading glasses that fell off the end of her nose. Her brown eyes gleamed. “Well, we have you here now. Let’s make the best of it.”
    Peggy walked alongside Dorothy toward the area where autopsies were performed and bodies kept in cold storage.
    “So how is Mai doing? We miss her a lot. She must be due any minute.” Dorothy smiled at her.
    “Yes. We had a false alarm early this morning. I think she’s ready to get this over.”
    “Aren’t we all when that time comes?”
    Peggy laughed. “I think so. The body can only take so much stress.”
    “Thank God I only put myself through that once!” Dorothy said.
    “I feel the same way!”
    “I understand the victim was a friend of yours.” Dorothy put her glasses back on the end of her nose. “We’ve already been working on him. If you’d rather not go in, I’ll understand. I’m sorry for your loss.”
    Peggy tried to decide if she should tell her the truth. They’d become good friends since Dorothy had moved here to take on the job of chief medical examiner for the city. But she was still part of the system. Peggy didn’t want her efforts hampered toward finding the information she wanted about John.
    “He wasn’t exactly a friend.” Peggy decided on a partial truth. “We were working together. He believed his wife was poisoned twenty years ago. I was helping him with that.”
    Dorothy frowned. “Was he thinking about exhuming the body?”
    “I think he was. First we were going to take a look at her autopsy files and see what the report actually said.”
    “What was listed as cause of death?”
    “Harry told me it was listed as accidental death.”
    “But he had reason to consider it was murder? And murder by poison—as we were just saying—a rare beast.” Dorothy stared down at her. “You know I love a good puzzle. Give me her name. It seems a little coincidental that he may have been poisoned too. Or are you basing your supposition about what happened to him because of his wife?”
    “No. I was the one who found him this morning.” She explained what he’d looked like. “There was no sign of trauma. I hope they were able to find the bottle the scotch came from.”
    Dorothy looked at her tablet as they reached the first autopsy room door. “I don’t see anything about that here, but we did send in a sample of the liquid the police obtained from a broken glass. Is that accurate?”
    “Yes. It wasn’t much of a sample. We should probably nudge the police to see if they recovered the bottle.”
    “We should have something on his stomach contents too. If his death occurred quickly, all the better for us so the poison didn’t have time to disperse.” Dorothy handed Peggy a facemask and