C is for Cookie
A Blind Justice Christmas Tale
"Jim," Karen Bettancourt called across the squad.
Jim let Hank's leash slacken and started to smile over at her, as her footsteps—which he recognized so easily, even when surrounded by twenty or thirty other pairs of feet—brought her closer, out of shouting distance so they could talk without the whole world hearing.
"No time for friendly greetings this morning," Karen said, full of business.
Jim smiled all the more. He loved this side of his new partner. Well, not new so much anymore. They'd been partnered up for over a year. Part of what he respected most about her was this business-like quality. When there was something going on, she got right down to it. Except on the odd occasion, when other things stuck on her mind, but everyone had off days, like that whole business with Nick Dyson and the money laundering. He still couldn't entirely blame her for being peeved. But other than that, she was always there, searching out whatever answer they could grasp at, in any hundreds of different ways. She was so unlike Terry, who'd somehow found a way to meld the personal and the horrific. On the way to crime scenes, Terry Jansen would always have been chatting up a storm about his kid and his wife. They'd be standing over a body, and Terry'd continue regaling Jim with the saga of what color his kid's snot was that morning. But Karen, miraculously, had the ability, like Jim, to compartmentalize the personal from work.
Jim followed her to the elevator without waiting to hear where they were going or any details of the case. He knew she'd fill him in shortly, and until then, he'd be patient. It sounded like she was flipping through a sheaf of papers anyway, boning up on the case before them so she could brief him.
"Your dog know how to do any of that drug sniffing?" she murmured after a minute, just as the doors dinged open.
Jim smirked as he pulled up Hank's harness. "He's not Wonder Dog, you know."
"I'd settle for Benji," she retorted, then thrust something into his chest.
Jim reached up and took the papers, then listened as she rifled through her pockets. He heard a small beep.
"Bettancourt," she said.
Jim stuck by her side, Hank leading the way, starting to get vaguely impatient at this second heel stuff. Sometimes he thought Karen and Hank would be the better team, that Jim himself was extraneous, at least when a case first started. Getting information, getting to the scenes, those were still issues that grated him on occasion.
"Yeah, we're on our way. Don't sweat it, Marty," she said. There was a small beep again, then a rustle of her winter coat, then she tugged the papers back out of his hands. "We're on our way to the ME's office," she supplied.
"Already?" he asked. It sounded like a jump. Normally they scoured the crime scene first.
"I've been here three hours, Jim, I don't know where you've been."
"No one called me."
Silence.
"Go on."
She jumped right back in, as if there was nothing to think about, or no reason to wonder who decided her partner wasn't an important part of the case. "The deceased is one Wicker Park, age ten."
"You're joking, right?"
"Wish I was. If I was a mom, Jim, I wouldn't be calling my kid Candy Cane, even if she was born on Christmas and I was a crack whore."
"One of these days, Karen," he said, pausing at the door of the station, waiting for her to leave first.
Jim and Hank kept pace with her as she continued her briefing. The air outside was chilly, but not terribly cold yet, considering the Christmas season was almost upon them. "Mrs. Park calls an ambulance because her son, Wicker, is unconscious in the hallway. I guess that's not normal. The ambulance comes, carts the kid off, where he dies at five this morning in the ER, which is when they call me. I haven't seen him yet, because they took him straight from the ER to the medical examiner, thanks to a suspicious toxicity reading. Which oddly enough was noticed by the mother, not by the clinicians. She's some brilliant, but twisted, MD, I gather."
"Twisted, how?"
"She named her son Wicker, what other evidence do you need?"
"Gotcha."
"There's a team out at their apartment now, checking for any possible source of the poisoning. Mrs. Park just called to let me know her deduction led her to a little-known drug thing from South America, which is only a drug when it interacts with imitation vanilla. The kind people bake with cookies."
"Cookies?"
"It is almost Christmas." She hit the button on her car alarm that let Jim know exactly which vehicle in the lot was hers.
Jim easily found the door and let Hank into the back of Karen's squad car, using the moment to file away everything she'd said. "An obscure South American "drug thing"?" he asked as he buckled his seatbelt.
"You're talking about the people who rub their arrows on the backs of frogs, Jim."
"But if you cook with real vanilla, there won't be a reaction?"
"I guess the drug stays in the system for up to a week, in miniscule particles, and if imitation vanilla is ingested in that time, death can still occur, but it's got to be a large dose of imitation vanilla if it's administered after the fact. And who wants to drink a bottle of vanilla?"
Jim tossed her a smile, but didn't wait to see if she'd received it as she wove in and out of traffic on the way to the hospital. "You got all this from that little phone call?"
"Actually, I'm reading the specifics in the text message she's sending me." Karen laughed. "You give me too much credit, Jim."
"In the holiday spirit, I give credit where it's due."
"Don't get sappy," she said and cut a hard right. "You should have heard Tom blubbering. Ho ho ho, merry Christmas, Deck the Halls… The guy may be black, but he can't carry a tune."
"He's… black?" Jim tried to look shocked.
"Very funny." She tossed the stack of papers in his lap. "Keep an eye on these for me, will you?"
"Very funny," he replied, but gathered the papers and stuck them in the inner pocket of his trench coat.
Karen stopped in the hallway somewhere near the ME's office of the hospital. "Jim, this is Marty. Marty, this is my partner, Jim Dunbar."
Jim pursed his lips and scowled. "Very funny, Karen," he said.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, too," a woman said sarcastically.
Jim did a double-take as Karen laughed.
"Martha Park. She goes by Marty, I spent all morning on the phone with her," Karen finally explained. "And coming up with that brilliant little scheme to toy with you." She poked Jim's shoulder.
Jim brushed her away. "Mrs. Park?"
"You can call me Marty."
"I'd rather not." His scowl was getting dangerously close to resurfacing.
"Pray tell, why not, Detective Dunbar?"
"I'm very chivalrous, ma'am," he said snidely. He faced her as closely as possible. "Imitation vanilla?"
"It's Christmas time. Wicker could have come into contact with it anywhere." She sounded much more defeated once pushed back into the death of her son, but still not entirely emotionally distraught like Jim would have figured. But then again, some brilliant people didn't react the way normal people tended to.
"And the odd poison?"
"It's speculation. But the lab work came back with a pattern very similar, though I'd need to look at a culture of blood work to be sure. The next closest drug with a similar pattern is Viagra. Which he doesn't need, nor have access to."
Jim's brow wrinkled. "Is it more likely for him to come into contact with a rare primitive poison than with a common drug like Viagra?"
"He's always been a very sheltered boy, Detective Dunbar," Mrs. Park said. "I'll wait here while you go talk to Dr. Taylor."
Jim left Hank by the door and took Karen's arm without a word. "Could we shut the door?" he asked once they were inside. He kept his voice low. "I want to feel free to ask questions without a family member listening."
Karen disappeared and a moment later he heard the door shut, which considerably cut down on the noise from the hospital ventilation system, and that strange whooshing hiss that seemed to be inherent in long hallways.
"Is she a suspect?" Jim asked when Karen returned.
"Everyone's a suspect, why do you ask?"
"I'm just wondering at her behavior toward her child. This was her only child, right?"
"Mhmm." A sheet rustled, like Karen was taking a peek before Dr. Elizabeth Taylor joined them to give them the tour of the autopsy. "But you should know, Marty has a form of Asperger's Syndrome, which is like autism."
Jim frowned.
"That means that, while she's just as smart, if not moreso, as everyone else, she might have trouble understanding emotion, or showing emotion. She's not a people person."
"Here I thought you were talking about our Marty," he said sourly.
"You hoped."
It certainly would explain Marty Russo's lack of people skills, Jim pondered.
After Dr. Taylor had listed a few of her findings for them, Jim asked, "What's your take on Mrs. Park?"
"I don't make deductions about living people, Detective," Dr. Taylor said. "It's safer that way." She moved around the table in her normal clinical manner. "But I will tell you Dr. Park has an extraordinary knowledge of poisons and antidotes. It's always been a pet project of hers, which helps a lot in her work in epidemiology and infection control."
The woman was beginning to sound like one part of the Count of Monte Cristo, after his long stay in prison, after years of studying anything he could absorb into his mind. His only question was, like Edmond Dantes, had Dr. Martha Park snapped and started using her poison knowledge on people, or was this just a coincidence?
"Jim," Karen said quietly, stopping him just before they reached the door. She lowered her voice. "I can see what you're thinking, and I just want to remind you to think about what it's like to live with a handicap. Even though Marty may seem perfectly normal, there are some things she can't do."
"Are you trying to tell me to stop barking up the wrong tree?"
"I'm just saying…"
"I should be the last person you need to remind about how people are different."
"Yet that's not the way it works." She laughed. "You should be the last person, but you always seem to forget you have a handicap yourself, Jim. If someone doesn't remind you, you're going to get yourself into trouble one of these days."
"Isn't everyone a suspect?" he asked, trying to change the subject.
"As always," she grudgingly agreed and opened the door to the wispy sound of the hallway.
"This may be a strange question," Marty said, "but is he still dead?"
"Er…" Jim started.
"I'm asking," she said rationally, "because some poisons can paralyze the body to the point where it seems dead, but isn't quite. I don't want to rule anything out."
Christie was baking again. Jim rolled over on the couch where he'd fallen after a long day at the squad and tried to pick out the different smells. Sweetness mixed with a slight tang. It wasn't just chocolate chip, his favorite; he even liked it when she put in a dash of cayenne pepper to bring out the sweetness of the chocolate. It wasn't just oatmeal. There was cinnamon and orange and something slightly fishy.
Jim had to admit, bad as it may have sounded to most people, part of the reason he'd married her was because of her ability to cook. She had a fervor for it, really. Not only this passion for the aesthetic, a joy she found in fashion, and this innate ability to make things taste good. Even though he didn't entirely understand her, he loved the way she tasted.
It was the fishy smell that saved the moment, as the very thought of cookies, even chocolate chip, sent him into a reverie that was anything but pleasant. Cookies had become the main suspect in their case. Everything about them grated on him. Walking past a bakery made him want to heave. Hearing his wife humming while baking made him want to walk out of the apartment and not come back until every cookie had disappeared.
"You awake?" Christie asked quietly from the kitchen, the soft voice she used when she didn't want to wake him.
"Yeah," he said miserably, frustrated, disgusted thoughts swirling through his head. If that poison Dr. Park had talked about managed to get out into the population somehow, a harmless cookie could kill everyone. Talk about joy and good cheer. He needed a beer, so he heaved himself off the sofa.
"Taste?"
"No thanks." He turned his head away in case she thrust a spoon in his direction.
"Bad day at work?"
"Are you using real vanilla?" he asked.
"Yeah…"
"Then maybe I'll try a cookie later."
"You make it sound like you hate cookies all of the sudden."
"No…" He pulled himself onto one of their kitchen stools. "Just wondering if you're trying to poison me." He tried to smile, but knew he failed.
"Right," she said without humor, but let it go. That was one good thing about them, on occasion. They'd been together long enough they could both tell when the other didn't mean to be hurtful. At least, sometimes they could tell, and sometimes they could even forgive.
Jim rubbed his hands over his face and suppressed a yawn. Suddenly he had images of a boiled South American tree frog, one of the poison dart frogs, cooking on his wife's stove. She could have poisoned him at any time if she wanted to. So why wait? If she was going to do it—
If Mrs. Park was going to kill her son, why wait? Had there been a fight? Not completely premeditated, something that just happened, thanks to her disability making it difficult for her to relate to people and understand them.
But then again, why not just let them think Wicker Park had died of an overdose of Viagra? Why show them the real poison method?
Unless she was proud of it? Or unless she wanted to make sure no one else died the same way? Or unless she knew who'd poisoned the child, but couldn't come straight out and say it?
After a full day of searching, they hadn't gotten very far. But one thing was for sure, if the mother had poisoned her son, there had to have been some change in their relationship. He just wondered if Marty was capable of showing remorse.
Actually, he wondered that about both of the Marty's currently in his life. Could either of them even feel remorse? Karen had told him to keep in mind that Marty Park's AS made it difficult for her to feel emotions and understand the emotions of others. Although that could mean her emotions might be heightened, as well as suppressed. Then there was Marty Russo, who didn't seem to have a disability making him act like an ass.
"Hey, Dunbar," Christie said, "get some Christmas cheer. 'Tis the season."
'Twas the season of forgiveness. Maybe tomorrow when he got to the squad, he'd give Marty a poinsettia. Mildly poisonous, but Marty would have to eat about twelve of them to get sick; it was the thought that counted.