Marie-Ange learns about poisons...

[x-tarot.livejournal.com]

What do you do in New Orleans on the Day of the Dead? If you're apprenticing with the Assassin's Guild, you spend the day in the morgue learning about poisons, and investigating a lead into the source of your nightmares about the world ending.



"Of course it leaves traces. Almost all poisons do. But you must know what to look for, or else it simply looks like a sudden heart attack. Which is why you pick your poison to match your target. A young healthy woman like you wouldn't normally drop dead of heart failure, and then... " The young medical examiner waved a gloved hand. "then I have to fake all the extra paperwork, and report a badly done job to the Guild and they probably take my overtime pay out of your fee."

Marie-Ange's frown of concentration at the heart lying in the plastic tray on the table was hidden by the mask over her nose and mouth. "So the damage you pointed out here, it is the poison, but the rest is just that this man ate too many greasy burgers?" She wasn't quite sure she needed the anatomical lesson, but it -was- interesting.

"The best methodology is to use their own traits against them." He tapped the heart with his finger. "If he eats a lot of crap, even if he's a young man, something that is cardiotoxic is usually your best bet. Even trained doctors will tend to see what they expect to see if you tailor it right. Ricin is a very effective one, especially if they have had an illness or have recently returned from somewhere in the third world. The sickness symptoms will often get passed off as a local viral infection, and by the time the lungs start to shut down, it's a tragic case of complications overwhelming the immune system and putting the body in terminal toxic shock."

Marie-Ange nodded, making note of it to herself. "Effective and popular, and there is no antidote, just a treatment, yes? It was used on Georgi Markov during the Cold War, I remember reading about that. I took a political science course in university that focused on activism." She commented, as the medical examiner brought out another body, of a middle-aged woman. "Oh, can I guess this one? Botulism?"

"An old favourite. Even if the dose doesn't work immediately, the toxin builds up in fatty tissues. So, once our target loses some weight, well, it looks like acute poisoning due to a food or environmental source. Anything but assassination." He smiled. "Bon Vivant Soup." Marie-Ange's blank look prompted him to go on. "It was a Baptiste holding in Newark. A useful shell company for moving money around in the East Coast for their Guild. They did sell soups, although it was out of a cheap plant they'd put together. We had a contract for a man in Westchester, oddly enough. Poisoned a can of their soup and five others, making sure that it made it into the grocery basket. Not only got the target, but the recall and publicity destroyed the company and forced the Baptiste's to loss a lot of money in the process. That was Daniel's father's first target. He always was a visionary."

That explained so much about the Boudreaux family, not that Marie-Ange was surprised, but she was quite convinced that a total disregard for the lives of basically everyone was hereditary. "I imagine that the current use in cosmetic surgeries makes it much easier as well, no?" She had to admit that the information was oddly compelling, this use of medical knowledge to do everything medicine was never intended for. "You can expand the possible targets to anyone who ever might have worried about their appearance."

"Poisoning is a very old art, Marie-Ange. My father studied poisons and toxins for over fifty years before he died. He knew more about compounds that harm the body than any man I've ever met, and I have degrees in bio-chemistry and pharmacognosy. He was entirely self-taught." He sat down, casually leaning one arm on the gurney holding the body. "His point was always that poisoning has to be match to the victim. Any idiot can dump a kilo of anthrax into the local reservior. But assassination through poison carries all kinds of messages; each one unique and specific. Which is why even the old school methods are still used."

"Yes, but you had to learn all the generalities before you were taught the specifics. I imagine your father never had to learn what a thalamus is for in the brain, no?" Marie-Ange said, with a laugh. "How does a pharmacognocist find himself working in a morgue?"

"Family business. There are... advantages to being a medical examiner in New Orleans, especially in my real job." He took off his glasses and wiped them clean. "For example, if you have a corpse in a dry, warm environment for a period of, say, 6 months or more, you can encourage the growth of Gliocladium sp on the body, from which a gliotoxin can be extracted and when combined with a pair of agents, cause acute mycotoxicoses. It will cause acute hepatic necrosis and is not detectable via normal AFB1 testing. The Guild likes to keep a couple of farm cooking, and then once they're found, the police bring them to me for autopsy."

"Clever." The science went right over Marie-Ange's head, but she had gotten the gist, and it was useful information to tuck away in the back of her head just in case. "I would think that germs and fungi, that is what you are talking about yes? They require more care with delivery methods? It seems like a waste of people if the assassin catches the same awful disease as the target."

"Gliotoxins are largely harmless unless injested in large quantities prior to being infused with other agents. They are relatively safe." He sat down and crossed his legs. "While this has been a lovely visit, Ms Colbert, I don't think you came down here just for a lecture on unique toxins and poisons the Guild uses day to day. Javier asked that I pull the file for M. Walter Barbour this morning. I'm assuming whatever your here for is connected to his death?"

"Well, not only for the lecture, no." Marie-Ange said, with an unusually chipper tone. It was just that it was actually fascinating. "There were attacks on a person the Guild is watching, and I am... call it investigating the target to see why he might be so valuable." She was never quite sure how far ahead of her the rumor mill in the Guild had gotten. Some people seemed to know why she was there and where she had come from, and others either did not know - or wanted to hear the story from her directly.

"Interesting." He flipped open the folder. "Walter Barbour died of respitory failure as his lungs seized up for unknown reasons. Forty-eight years old, relatively healthy for a man his age. Obviously something to do with his job as a phys-ed coach at Saint Francias High. According to the illiterate hack passing himself off as a coronor at the time, he believed there was an allergy or reaction of some type that stopped him from breathing, although he couldn't isolate a specific agent. There's a few compounds that I can think of that could create this reaction, although they are expensive and isoteric. Better suited to remove a head of state as opposed to a football coach."

Poison had not featured in any of her readings, not related to anything to do with the events she had foreseen. "Saint Francias is where the some of the smaller Guilds send their children for a 'good Catholic education'." Marie-Ange explained, very dryly. It was funny how many 'good Catholics' were anything but. But the education was far better than the laughable one that many of the public schools in New Orleans offered, and a private school afforded luxuries the public ones did not - like background checks on the other students and their families.

"I believe so. That's the only reason we even looked into his death years ago." He shrugged. "But the man himself had no ties to the Guilds, other than the odd meeting with parents, and he was a widower, left a small estate to one daughter in Charlestown. Hardly worth a murder for the inheritance. Unless Barbour was abusing one of his students in the change rooms, there's no motive for his assassination."

"Unless it was an accident." Marie-Ange offered. "One of his former students, the target that the guild is watching? This man was his coach, and it is not the first time that there have been odd incidents surrounding the target. But this is the only death. I believe... very strongly that this is related. But I have no proof, all of the other incidents were minor. A college roommate leaving school suddenly, a few other strange incidents."

"If it was an accident, it means it's outside of my area, Ms Colbert. There's nothing that I can see Barbour accidentially injesting that would produce these effects without any residual. Unless it was intentional, he wasn't poisoned."

"Could you do a... what is the term, a screen for toxins? Could there be something that would cause someone to act strangely?" Marie-Ange asked. "Is that possible to look for, this long after the death?" Of course, she was out of luck entirely if the body had been cremated.

"Toxin screen was clean although... he was found to have greater than normal hormone levels during the autopsy. There's any number of possible reasons why, but it's a little odd in these circumstances."

"Hormones? Like testosterone?" Marie-Ange asked. "I know he was not on steroids. one of the Guilds would have known, someone would have. It is too excellent of blackmail material, and it presents too much of a risk."

"Usually, we get this kind of reading when the toxic screen turns up anti-depressants or painkillers in the deceased's system, but his is clear. If he was on some kind of experimental steroid, it still doesn't explain the random cause of death. And it wouldn't have had any effect on his breathing."

Marie-Ange frowned, thinking back to Manuel, and the drugs he had been on when he first arrived at the mansion. Drugs meant to keep him docile and harmless, drugs that were used on people with mental illnesses. "That hormone, it show on your tests when people take medication? What if someone just ... gave it to him?"

"You can't just inject hormones into someone's arm and get this effect. Something effected his brain in a way that triggered it to produce endophins. If it's a chemical cause, whatever it was doesn't show up on our tests, and that eliminates pretty much all the available drugs I can think of that could cause this."

"If he had been injected, that would have shown on the autopsy, although perhaps not if your predecessor was as incompetent as you said." Marie-Ange said. "It could not be long term, correct? That would have made side effects that would have shown. What would a very short term dose of very strong endorphins do to someone?"

"Euphoria, prehaps. Endorphins modify brain functions so that certain stimuli is basically ignored. It means that you can't feel pain, become more suggestable; the critical higher cognitive functions become suppressed, judgement gets impaired. But, the thing is that you can't really artifical jump them up, or at least, not without brain surgery and complex shunts. Certain drugs will stimulate the brain and trigger an endorphin rush, but there's no sign of them in his bloodstream." He adjusted his glasses, peering again at the toxicology reports. "Medically, there's nothing I can think of that explains the chemical activity in his brain."

"If I blame mutant powers..." Marie-Ange started, tentatively. "Are you going to throw your arms up and say that it is not scientific to blame every single thing that does not make sense on mutant powers? I had a ... an acquaintance once, who could make someone feel almost anything he wanted, happiness, sadness, anger, but I do not know how his powers worked. I know a young lady who can cause someone to have their heart race or to feel hunger pains but not to feel scared or angry. These endorphins, they sound related to both of those."

"Mutant powers are a possible explaination, but medically, I can't endorse it being the case any more than I could if it was magic." He rubbed his forehead. "Something affected this man's brain that is medically inexplicable. That being the case, I wouldn't rule out mutant powers being involved."

"If it helps, magic is also on my list of possibilities to check." This was New Orleans. Marie-Ange had to rule out voudoun just to be on the safe side.