"I don't know," he answered. No one did. That was in part what they'd come to find out more about.
Surprisingly enough, James did as he was told. He laid Tony carefully down on the couch, then pulled up a chair for Pepper to settle in. He wanted to make himself useful, and the suggestion connected with something deep-seated - you pulled out chairs for ladies, even in circumstances like these.
He watched Clem check the body, look for vitals that weren't there. He knew corpses, and Stark? Stark was dead. But he wasn't dead the right way, not dead in the way he should have been. No rigor, no lividity, no smell. It was like he was trapped the second after becoming dead, like Lenin in his glass case.
His gaze slid between the two of them, and he stood close to Pepper. "He disappeared. Stopped answering anyone for days. Took days more to find him. Since he was last seen it's been...six, seven." He didn't like the inexactness of that answer, but it was difficult to know. "He was in a lab under the bay, sitting in a chair."
He reached into one of the many pockets in his body armor and extracted the pill container, an ordinary looking thing, empty. "It was in his hand." He gave it to Clem to inspect, and to hand off to her friend as she saw fit. "Assumed poison, since no sign of trauma." They would fill in the rest, as medical professionals - that the body hadn't changed in hours, possibly days. He'd never seen any poison that could keep a body between death and rot, but if anyone could invent one, Tony Stark seemed like a good candidate.