She was, Lenox saw, almost a beautiful girl, with dark hair. He put her age at around twenty-five, a good age to marry.

McConnell leaned over her and then, before he touched her, said, “Do I need to worry about fingerprints?”

“I don’t think so,” Lenox said. “The process doesn’t work well on bodies yet; it’s too new. In fact, I think fingerprinting will be lost here-too many prints all over the place. Except for the glass, which was wiped clean. Interesting, that.”

Thomas stood up.

“Do you assume, then, that the poison was what really killed her?”

Lenox thought for a moment. “If it was suicide, which I gravely doubt, it was undoubtedly poison. If it was murder, the murderer would be stupid to masquerade the death as suicide by poisoning and then kill her in another way. There wouldn’t be any benefit to it.”

“Unless he thought that the bottle of poison would go unquestioned.”

“That’s why I brought you. But I imagine you’ll find it’s poison.”

“So do I,” said Thomas. “Even so.”

He pulled a pair of gloves from his breast pocket and put them on. The first part of the body that he examined was the face, which was drained of color.

“We can rule out a few of the common poisons,” he said. “They would have left her blood close to the skin. She would have been flushed.”

Lenox didn’t respond.

Thomas unbuttoned her shirt as low as he decently could, to verify that the chest wasn’t flushed either. He then lifted her shirt and prodded her stomach, without any visible effect. Next he pulled her shirt back down, licked his thumb, and drew it across her neck and her lips.

“No makeup on the neck,” he said. “Or lividity-that is, bruising. She wasn’t strangled. And the lips look normal.”