Nine bodies had been exhumed. Each of them had a puncture mark on their upper buttocks that no one had seen before they were buried. Michael had examined each of them when they died—they were his patients, and he had signed the death certificates. The cause of death was listed as heart attack in all nine cases. And the coroner said that the puncture wound with a tiny needle was consistent with succinylcholine, a muscle-relaxing drug used to paralyze the respiratory muscles either in surgery or to insert a breathing tube. Only a competent anesthesiologist would know how to dose it, and Michael had been one in the early days of his career, before he joined his father in his practice in Ware. In overdoses of the drug, death results as the patient suffocates, but the cause of death presents as a heart attack. The drug was virtually untraceable, while the patient was alive, but the telltale giveaway was the injection site, which each of these bodies had in precisely the same location. And the drug the coroner tested for was present in the tissue of all nine victims.
