Killing Weeds by Jim Lavene, Joyce

was here too.
    And she could never resist a peek at the person in John’s old office.
    Peggy went inside the brick building. She knew the sergeant at the front desk. He told her he’d call Sergeant Malcolm.
    While she waited, she took the dead leaves off a heart-leaf philodendron near the small window beside the door. The constant change of cold and hot air had stunted the growth of the plant, leaving the leaves very tiny, but otherwise it was healthy.
    Eve saw her. “Thanks for coming by. Come on back.”
    Peggy glanced around at the busy police officers. She wondered if Paul was being questioned somewhere in the building. Would Al stay on the case, or would he recuse himself because of their relationship?
    “Take a seat, please.” Eve closed the door to the room where she’d led her.
    It wasn’t Eve’s office, as she would have expected on this visit. It was a small interrogation room.
    Peggy’s heart rate went up.  “Is there a problem?”
    Eve sat opposite her at the new metal table complete with a metal bar to lock handcuffs to. “I’m not going to lie to you or sugarcoat the situation. Homicide is looking at your son, Paul, for Ms. Nita Honohan’s murder. It complicates matters for us that the break-in at your shop happened around the same time.”
    “I’m not sure I follow.”
    “I have the list of plants that were destroyed in the break-in at your shop, but there is no mention of the giant hog wart on that list. Isn’t that what killed Ms. Honohan?”
    Peggy smiled. “Giant hogweed. Sorry.”
    Eve nodded. “Our question, Peggy, is whether or not you had the components for this lethal plant mixture at your shop?”
    “Of course not! No one would want to plant hogweed, poison ivy, oak, or sumac in their yards. That would be ridiculous. Garden shops don’t deal in weeds. Besides, you could get the last three ingredients in any forest around here. The hogweed doesn’t grow here yet, but you could get that in Virginia. Why would I have that at The Potting Shed?”
    “Homicide believes Paul may have obtained the poison plants from you. It’s what you’re known for, isn’t it—your specialty. It’s what makes you valuable as a forensic botanist with the ME’s office, right?”
    “It is what I’m known for,” she agreed. “But I have never stored poisonous plants in the shop.”
    Eve tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear as she looked at a list on the desk. “What about hellebore, rhododendron, or lilies? Those are poisonous, aren’t they?”
    “If you want to look at it that way, dozens of plants you grow in your house and yard could be used to make poison. Most people don’t know that and wouldn’t know what to do with the information if they did.”
    “But a man was found dead in your shop several years ago after being poisoned with anemone, right?”
    “Yes, but he wasn’t poisoned with anemone bulbs from my shop. Can you be more specific? What makes you think that I’d help someone, even my own son, poison this woman? I’ve always made it very clear that I won’t help anyone when they ask about poison plants.”
    Peggy knew, at least partially, that this line of questioning came from the police looking for answers about the murder. She didn’t like it, but she had to remain calm and answer as precisely as she could.
    She wasn’t sure who’d given Eve the plant names. She could tell by the way she read the list that she had no idea what she was talking about. She could’ve simply looked it up on Google. Maybe she was being paranoid, thinking another plant authority could be involved.
    But after the day she’d had, Peggy felt entitled to be a bit paranoid.
    “The nature of this crime, and your son being involved, makes this difficult for me. We all thought at first that this was a simple, though devastating, vandalism at your shop. Now Captain Hager has taken over the homicide investigation. He believes this break-in is probably personal—that it’s likely that