“I want Samantha to get her appetite back. Look, her taste buds are waking up. She got depressed after we drained her pool by mistake. If the pools drain too quickly, they panic. It’s a reflex from the wild. Most crocs who die prematurely do so because their water holes have dried up, so they’re hardwired to panic at the first sign of drought. There, did you think we were going to let you die of exposure? Poor, poor thing. Now let’s see if she’s found something to live for.” Trakit undoes the rope, which passes through a pulley suspended from the ceiling, releasing Samantha’s upper jaw. Jones takes two steps back until she is standing in the corridor. Very very slowly, Samantha begins to munch on the chicken. “There,” Trakit says. “Everything comes down to food in the end.”

She leads us from the room down the corridor to a stainless steel cupboard with trays of different sizes. “Here they are,” the doctor says, pulling out one of the trays. Cobra corpses. Some of them have been neatly dissected, others are whole except for the bullet holes. “They all died of gunshot wounds, of course.” She glares at me. “And as I told you over the telephone, they had all been poisoned with methamphetamine-yaa baa.” She gives the FBI a look of the utmost sincerity. “Very few reptiles are naturally aggressive, except when hungry or protecting their young. The whole of the animal and reptile kingdom has learned to fear us, they will never attack humans unless panicked, or in this case drugged.”

“What kind of yaa baa?” I ask, trying not to sound too knowledgeable. “Was it laced?”

“With fertilizer.” Trakit shudders. “I can’t think of anything more cruel.”

“No,” I agree.

“Of course, that only means that whoever did it bought the cheapest yaa baa on the black market. The problem is-how was it administered? How do you give a cobra a yaa baa fix? There are techniques for injecting snakes, of course. We usually inject through the anus.”

“A lot of work for the killer,” Jones says. She is standing a pace or so back from the cupboard, but the color has returned to her cheeks. These snakes are unequivocally dead, after all.

“Exactly. And anyway, it could not have been done that way. This is a problem for a detective, I’m afraid, one with which I simply cannot help. It is this: every snake contained a different quantity of the drug, a quantity which exactly corresponded to its body weight.”

“Powdered and put in food?”

“I thought of that, of course. But then you really do have a problem-the drug would have started to work very quickly on the smaller snakes-the perpetrator would have had a severe logistical problem of handling dozens of drug-crazed snakes. And even then, it doesn’t really explain how each snake contained exactly the right proportion of the drug for its body weight. If you sprinkle yaa baa powder over food, you don’t normally get an exact proportion for each piece of food consumed-not unless you are operating in laboratory conditions.” Trakit shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all I can tell you. A mystery, the most vicious I’ve ever come across.” She slides the drawer back, then opens another bigger one further down. This drawer is huge, very deep and runs on wheels with a rumble. The python is curled up in several elongated spirals, one third of its head missing. “He was a beauty, about ten years old, a reticulated python five meters twenty-one centimeters long.” A glance at Jones. “That’s just over seventeen feet. See the splotchy way he’s camouflaged? He’s native to most of Southeast Asia. Funnily enough, he lives in cities as often as the jungle. He loves riverbanks. They’re an endangered species, mostly because of the illegal skin trade with China, and also for food-the Chinese love them in soup. Feel the power that must have been in those muscles.” I heft the python’s iron tail and gesture to Jones, who leans forward from the hips and gives it a single tentative poke with an index finger. “Baffling, truly baffling. You have exactly the same phenomenon: precisely the appropriate amount of yaa baa found in his blood corresponding to body weight. Appropriate, that is to say, for the purpose of getting him aggressively stoned. I’ve never seen a reptile on amphetamine, and I hope I never shall. But it must have been quite a sight.”

“Intense shivering,” I confirm, while the doctor looks at me with an air of concentration. “His whole body seemed to go into convulsions-it was hard to say what was natural and what was the effect of the drug.”

“A condition of drug-induced terror causing extreme aggression, I would guess. Compulsive writhing?”

“I would say so.”

Trakit nods. “Poor poor thing. There’s no literature on that kind of drug poisoning in reptiles, but one can imagine. The drug would have induced an intense thirst, and its nerves were all on fire. Similar to being thrown into a vat of acid. What I can’t understand is how anyone could have accomplished such perfect timing. Drugging all the snakes at the same time is a feat in itself, but getting a seventeen-foot python stoned at the same time as twenty or so cobras is beyond anything I could work out for myself, even if I wanted to.” She gives me an empty smile. “But then, I’m not a detective.”

“That’s a very big snake.” I look at Jones, then back to the snake. It takes up the whole of a drawer that could easily fit a human being. “If someone did inject the meth through the anus in the usual way, how long before the drug reaches the brain?”

“With reptiles you cannot answer that question as if they were mammals. Everything depends on the temperature. A cold snake may be in hibernation mode, with almost no heartbeat, and therefore very slow circulation. The drug might take half an hour to reach the brain stem. With a warmer snake, no more than two minutes.”

“Even with half an hour to spare, it’s hard to see the logistics, given what we know of Bradley’s schedule that day. I just can’t see a bunch of guys injecting the snake and waiting for Bradley to conveniently stop the car so they can chuck it in and put those clips over the doors. Not when there are a couple dozen cobras to inject and throw in at the same time. Even if they were pointing guns at him, it’s hard to see how it all panned out.”

“It would take more than a bunch of amateurs to handle the python once the drug took effect. Perhaps two experienced handlers could subdue it in normal circumstances. But under the influence of yaa baa, I think you would need half a dozen experienced snake handlers. Even then… You see, there is nothing that is not muscle, and it can twist in any direction. In a toxic frenzy, it would be virtually uncontrollable.”

“Then we have a virtually insoluble forensic problem,” Jones concludes with a shrug.

I look from her to Trakit to the snake. “Except that the killer solved it.”

On the way back to the city, Jones is experiencing a moment of euphoria caused by relief of tension: “I know what you’re thinking and I agree with you.”

“You do?”

“The python was obviously a drug addict in a previous lifetime, right? I would guess opium or heroin, a man with some connection to the West-maybe he shot up once on Forty-second Street, and was double-crossed by Bradley in that lifetime? But what’s the connection with the Mercedes? Maybe he was a used car salesman?”

“The python?”

“Yep, had that Nixon look around what was left of his mouth, don’t you think? That sloping outward from the top down?”

Apparently Jones has scored a point. I endure her triumphant leer without protest for the rest of the journey. When we hit the first of the Krung Thep traffic jams I say: “Did you get the rest of the transcripts?”

“Of the tapes of the conversations between Elijah and William Bradley? Yes, I got them, but I haven’t read them all. There’s a ton of stuff, and as far as I can see, extremely dull and unhelpful.”