Chapter 6 — Dr. Thomas Kerr

The name appeared six times across fourteen months of emails, between January of the year prior and the previous March — once with a subject line about "alkaloid extraction viability," twice with calendar invitations to meetings at locations that were not the gallery, and three times in personal emails that were brief and slightly different in register from Elise's professional correspondence. Warmer. The warmth of history.Dr. Thomas Kerr. Forty-nine. Associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Columbia University. Researcher in plant-derived compounds with particular focus on cardiac-active alkaloids.Priya looked at this sentence in his faculty profile for a long time.Cardiac-active alkaloids.She pulled his publication history. Forty-three papers over twenty years, a third of them involving compounds in the veratrum family. He had written specifically about veratramine's dermal absorption properties in a 2019 paper. She read the abstract. He had been interested in the compound as a potential pharmaceutical agent — the gap between lethal dose and therapeutic dose was, he'd written, a research challenge.He had spent twenty years becoming the person who knew exactly how to kill someone with a plant compound absorbed through skin.She looked at the personal emails.They were the emails of a relationship that had ended without resolving — the shorthand was still there, the ease, but underneath it the specific tension of two people who had unfinished business and were being careful about it. The most recent one was from fourteen months ago. After that: nothing. Whatever the relationship had been, it had stopped.Or it had moved to a channel she didn't have access to.She and Webb drove to Columbia on a Wednesday morning.Thomas Kerr's office was in the Hammer Health Sciences Building, on a floor that smelled of labs and the specific industrial cleanliness of serious scientific spaces. He was a tall man, lean, with the slightly distracted quality of someone whose mind was generally somewhere else. He looked at their badges with the expression of a person encountering something outside their usual field."I don't know how I can help with an investigation into Conrad Vane's death," he said. His voice was careful in the way of a person who has thought about what they might say if this moment arrived."We're following up on all contacts of individuals connected to the gallery," Webb said. The vague opening. Let him talk."I had a personal connection to Elise Hartwell some time ago. That's presumably why I'm on your list." He paused. "We haven't been in contact for over a year.""Over a year," Priya said. She let the repetition sit."Correct.""Email? Phone?""No.""In person?"A fraction of a pause. "No."Priya looked at him. She looked at his office — the papers, the lab notebooks on the shelf, the plant specimens in sealed containers on the windowsill. Botanical. Dried. Several she didn't recognize; one she did, from the research she'd done the night before: the long, narrow leaves of Veratrum californicum.She did not look at it too long."Your research," she said. "Your 2019 paper on veratramine — you described the dermal absorption rate as being influenced by the carrier medium. You found that certain paper treatments could act as time-release vehicles."He went very still."That's correct," he said, after a moment."Interesting research," she said. She stood. "Thank you for your time, Dr. Kerr. We'll be in touch."In the elevator, Webb looked at her. "You didn't push.""Not yet." She watched the floor numbers descend. "He's afraid. He knows what the research means in this context. I want him to sit with the fear for a few days and then I want to talk to him again." She paused. "And I want his phone records."