The Fatal Touch by Conor Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

had half a mind to scale it. “This looks like a side door into the Botanical Gardens,” he said. “Did Treacy live in a flower bed or something? We need to go around to the other side.”
    The guard in the white box watched carefully as they came through the main entrance. Blume took a few steps to the right, but he could already see there was nothing there but wall.
    “Hey!”
    Blume stopped and put down his bag which was beginning to weigh. He waited for Caterina to flash a police ID card and send the guard reluctantly back to his post.
    Together they stepped over a red-and-white plastic chain that looped around a square of manicured lawn bordered by outsized yellow daisies.
    Caterina looked at the wall, then back at Blume, and shrugged. He went over to the wall, folded back a deep curtain of ivy, slapped the dusky ocher wall behind, then clapped the dust off his hands. “This is the perimeter wall,” he said. “The green door on the other side was more or less at this point here, which means there must be two walls and a narrow passageway between them. And they must lead to that garden lodge there.” He pointed to a small two-story house with a red tile roof to their left. “We could get in from this side, or go back and enter through that green door. I have some picklocks in the tactical bag.”
    A few minutes later, Blume was working at the tumbler lock on the door. “Almost have it,” he said after five minutes. “I’m a bit out of practice.”
    Eventually, he pulled out a crowbar from the same bag, stuck it into the wood frame next to the strike plate, and hurled his body against the door. The wood of the door jamb was so damp and spongy that the only noise it made as it gave way was a squeak and a sigh.
    Directly in front of them was the wall they had been looking at from inside the Botanical Gardens. Blume pushed the door half closed against its splintered frame, and turned right into a passageway that was not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Both sides were covered in ivy and wet moss. The passage was about ten yards long and led up to another door, this one a little sturdier. No longer keen to hone his lock-picking skills, Blume slammed the crowbar under the lock mechanism, jerked it around roughly till he felt it reach deeper in, then started wrenching it back and forth. After several attempts he motioned Caterina over.
    “On the count of three,” he said, steadying his hands on the bar in preparation. When he reached three, they pushed against the door, but their timing was slightly off. They did it again, and the door burst open so easily that they almost fell over each other.
    The sudden brightness in the room into which they now entered was disorientating. They stood there blinking for a few moments, Caterina trying to understand how the inside of a house could have so much light. As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were standing below a sloping glass roof. Ficus, bamboo, dracena plants, and small trees she could not identify grew from wide-bodied blue glazed urns sitting on a terracotta floor. “We’ve just broken into one of the botanical hothouses.”
    “No,” said Blume. “This is part of the house. A sort of add-on greenhouse used as a workroom. Hot in here.”
    He bent down, rummaged in his bag, and came up with a box of latex gloves, and wiggled his fingers like an important surgeon as he put them on.
    The glass room contained wickerwork chairs with yellow cushions, a ceramic-topped table with a demitasse coffee cup on it. Blume noticed some bookshelves and, in the far left corner, a high, long work desk, like he remembered from science lessons in school, except this was made from mahogany. A leather-bound folio-size volume lay beneath three quarto volumes, also leather bound. Beside them sat an ebony box, open to reveal five rows of silver-topped jars, filled with colored powders. Three crystal jars held dozens of paintbrushes.
    Blume peered at the top book, but