Page 62 of A Rose of Steel
And on top of that, I wanted to hurry and get off the phone. I needed to check on Alex. Make sure he was alright and let him know what I’d found out.
I just needed to do a little more research first on the poison that killed Bumper and made him sick to get a better idea of what we were dealing with. That part was going to be easy, though, and I wasn’t going to need the Internet to do it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I took slow, deliberate steps down the stairs and into the kitchen, her usual haunt. I was excited about the information I needed, but if I gave too much away, Auntie would use my energy to feed hers and I’d have to deal with her on overload. I needed her expertise.
My Auntie Zanne was a Voodoo herbalist. In fact, she was the Most High Mambo of the Distinguished Ladies’ Society of Voodoo Herbalists. She had a world-wide-web kind of knowledge about plants, herbs and their toxicity right in her white hair-covered head.
“Auntie,” I said, planting a kiss on her cheek. She was sitting at the kitchen table, empty glass spice jars set in rows alongside bundles of dried flowers and leaves. “You got a minute?” She was grinding something up in the mortar with her pestle.
“Always for you, Sugarplum.” She looked up me at and smiled. “And what you want must be a doozy, you giving me a kiss as a teaser.”
“I just think that you’re really smart, and I don’t know if I ever told you that. Or how much I appreciate you.”
“I’m not cooking up any more brews for Alex, if that’s what you’re wanting,” she said. “I’d have to convene a weeklong ritual to command enough power to straighten out that man.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I got the toxicology report back,” I said, and sat at the table across from her. “I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“You did?” she said excitedly. “What was with all the pretense then?” She stood up and wiped her hands and came over to sit next to me. Folding her hands in her lap she leaned into me. “What did they kill him with?”
“Ricin,” I said.
“Really,” she said. “Oh that’s not good.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That’s not good. I looked it up and it was used to assassinate some dissident and—”
“Georgi Markov of Bulgaria,” she interjected before I could finish my sentence.
“Right,” I said. I tilted my head. “I’d never heard of him. How do you know about him?”
“I must have read it somewhere,” she said dismissively. “What else you got?”
“Just that it had been thought to have been used in chemical warfare.”
“That didn’t work out.” She said it as if she already knew the answer.
“What?” I chuckled. Something was telling me that she was keeping something from me.
“Nothing. Keep going.”
“Nothing else really,” I said. “It isn’t native to here, meaning the U.S., and I found only one place where it grows here and that’s—”
“Griffith Park in L.A.”
I leaned back. “Okay, how do you know that?”
“Why wouldn’t I know that?” she said.
“Pogue didn’t even know what ricin was,” I said. “I’d only heard of it, nothing in-depth. I had to look up everything I’m telling you know.”
“I have a Ph.D. in plants that can kill you,” she said and stood up. She went back to her side of the table.
“There’s no such thing, but I know what you mean.” I paused and thought about Bumper’s cause of death. “Wasn’t he the only one that had been in California?” I asked.
“There’re lots of people in California, darlin’,” she said.
