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been found at her home, working quietly in her garden. She had been planning to go and see her husband later that night with friends and family. She hadn’t called John Bruno and asked him to come to the funeral home. Her husband had been Bruno’s law supervisor, and they’d been close. If the candidate wanted to come and see her dead husband, he could have; it was simple as that, she told investigators.
    “Yet why did Bruno scramble his schedule and go to see Martin at the funeral home at the last minute?” asked Michelle. “It was just dropped on us out of the blue.”
    “According to his staff, he received a call from Mildred Martin that morning asking him to come and see her husband at the funeral home. And according to Dickers, Bruno’s chief of staff, Bruno was agitated after getting the call.”
    “Well, a close friend of his had died.”
    “But Dickers also says Bruno already knew that Martin was dead.”
    “So you think there’s more to it?”
    “Well, she picked a time when there weren’t that many people at the funeral home. And a few things Bruno said after the call led Dickers to believe there was more to the meeting than simply paying last respects.”
    “So that may be why he pushed me so hard to leave them alone in there?”
    Her friend nodded. “Well, depending on what the widow had to say, I suppose Bruno would want it to be private.”
    “But Mildred Martin said she didn’t call.”
    “Somebody impersonated her, Michelle.”
    “And if Bruno hadn’t come?” She answered her own question. “Then they would have just left. And if I’d gone in with him, they wouldn’t have tried it, and Neal Richards…” Her voice trailed off. “What else do you have?”
    “Our thinking is that this had been planned for some time. I mean, they had to coordinate a lot of different things, and they executed it to perfection.”
    “They must have had inside sources on Bruno’s campaign. How else would they know his schedule?”
    “Well, one way was his campaign’s official Web site. The event he was going to when he took a detour to the funeral home had been scheduled for quite some time.”
    “Damn it, I told them not to post his schedule on the Web. Do you know that a waitress at one of the hotels where we stayed knew more about Bruno’s itinerary than we did, because she’d overheard Bruno and his staff talking about it? They don’t bother to tell us until the last minute.”
    “Frankly, with all that, I don’t know how you do your job.”
    Michelle looked at her sharply. “And having Bruno’s mentor conveniently die? I mean, that started the whole chain of events.”
    The woman was already nodding. “Bill Martin was elderly, had terminal cancer in its late stages and died in bed during the night. Under those circumstances no report was filed with the medical examiner, and no autopsy was conducted. The attendingphysician signed the death certificate. However, after what happened, his body was posted, and toxicology tests were run on the postmortem samples.”
    “And they found what?”
    “Large amounts of Roxanol, liquid morphine, which he was taking for pain, and over a liter of embalming fluid, among other things. No gastric contents because those had been drained during the embalming. No smoking gun really.”
    Michelle eyed her friend closely. “And yet you don’t look convinced.”
    Her friend finally shrugged. “Embalming fluid gets into all major vessels, cavities, solid organs, so it’s tough to be accurate. But under the circumstances the medical examiner took a sampling of the middle brain, where typically the embalming fluid doesn’t penetrate, and she found a spike of methanol.”
    “Methanol! But that’s a compound of embalming fluid, isn’t it? What if the embalming fluid did get in there?”
    “That’s a concern. And in case you didn’t know, there are differences in embalming fluids. High-budget embalming fluids have less methanol but more formaldehyde.