Chapter Thirty-Three
Dec
My mind was in overdrive.
I was still sitting in Ellen’s office chair, William the parrot chirping in my ear as I tried to sort through the jumbled mess in my mind. I felt like I was going crazy, but at the same time I was sure I was on to something here.
I rubbed my temples and tried laying out the facts I knew on a scrap piece of paper I found on the desk.
1) Ellen wants me to adopt Liv as my legal daughter in a few months.
2) After Callum’s death two years ago, Liv will inherit ninety percent of a huge fortune. However, Ellen and I would very likely have full access to all that money if Liv died - if I adopt her, that is.
3) Liv has been sick on and off for a few weeks now, much like Callum was before he died.
4) Liv has been diagnosed as suffering from triclosan overdosing, and I just found hand sanitizer and a syringe in Ellen’s desk.
As much as I kept trying to convince myself that I was wrong, and that there had to be an innocent, rational explanation for all of this, I simply couldn’t shake the awful feeling that I’d stumbled upon something truly heinous.
Somehow managing to keep a steady hand, I picked up the phone again and dialed my friend Ricardo’s number. He was the guy who owned the boutique hotel in New York that I always stayed at when I was in town—the same guy who Liv accused me of making up when she didn’t trust me a couple of months ago.
After building a massive software development company, Ricardo had started investing his fortune in real estate, and the hotel was one of those ventures. However, due to the software development stuff, I knew he was also an absolute genius when it came to computers. That genius could come in handy right about now.
“Hello?” He answered on the fifth ring.
“Ric, it’s me. Dec.”
“Hey, man! Long time no see. When are you back in town?”
“I’m not in the country at the moment. I’m—”
He cut me off with a chuckle. “Wait, wait. I know where you are. The wife loves trash TV, and she’s been watching Wed At First Sight a lot lately. I almost forgot. She’s been telling me all about it. You’re living it up on some paradise island right now, aren’t you?”
I grinned. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Laugh it up. But listen, I need your help with something.”
“What?”
“With all your computer stuff…you can kinda hack websites, right?”
He laughed again. “What most people see as ‘hacking’ is very different from what the actual process is, but yeah, I can find backdoors into most sites. Depends on the site, of course. I could never get onto anything like the FBI or the NSA.”
“Well, that’s good, because I don’t need you to hack the NSA,” I replied. “Just…erm…a county coroner’s office. Like where they keep all their records.”
I couldn’t see him, but I could practically hear the shock registering on Ricardo’s face. “What? Why the hell would you need me to do that? I don’t even know if I can. It’s all stored on government sites, I assume. Heavy encryption.”
“Long story short—there’s a woman I’m involved with. It’s because of that.”
“What, your wife on that shitty show?” Ricardo snorted with laughter.
“Not her. Another woman.”
“Jeez, you sure get around. Anyway, go on, man.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t give him the full story. That would take ages. But I still needed a valid reason to make him hack into country records for me, if he could even pull that off.
“She had a son,” I finally began, going for the sympathy tactic. “He died a couple of years back. She’s obviously still pretty messed up about it, but she never talks about it, and so far I’ve gotten the impression that there’s something really dark about it that she just doesn’t want to talk about in particular. I don’t know how to support her if I don’t know what happened. I’m wondering if perhaps her son was murdered, and I was hoping you could help me find out by looking up death records and such.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally Ricardo spoke up again. “I’ll try for you, Dec. But it could take a while. Call me back in about twenty minutes and I’ll let you know how it’s going.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Which county is it?”
“Monterey in California.”
“All right. I’ll talk to you soon.”
The next few minutes dragged by like thick molasses being poured out of a tin. I finally couldn’t wait any longer and called Ricardo back at the nineteen minute mark.
“Got anything?” I asked.
“Yeah. I actually tried calling you back, but your cell is off.”
“We aren’t allowed phones or laptops on the show,” I explained. “Anyway, you’re saying you got in?”
“Yep,” he said proudly. “I can see death records, autopsy results, the lot. What’s the name of the kid?”
“Callum Esposito.”
“Gimme a minute.”
I heard him put the phone down with a clatter, and I could hear furious typing in the background. “Got it,” he said, picking up the phone again a minute later. “Kid was fifteen, yeah? Died in 2015?”
“Yep, that’s the one.”
“He died at home. It was sudden, and he was very young, so an autopsy was conducted. Concluded to be natural causes.”
“You sure?”
“Says it right here. Nothing suspicious was found on or around the body. No bullet holes, knife wounds, needle punctures, and so on. Nothing like that. He died of heart failure.”
I sighed. “I suppose there’s no way to fake that, is there? Like some sort of poison that could stop the heart?”
“What, are you writing a fucking crime novel or something?” Ricardo asked with another snort. “No, I don’t think so. You can’t fool a coroner easily. They check every inch of the body, inside and out. The only poisons that can give a false ‘natural causes’ result need to be injected, and that would leave a needle puncture mark, which the coroner would find. Kinda like that crazy dude back in the 90’s. That’s how I know about this shit; from watching a documentary about him once. He nearly got away with it, too.”
“Which crazy dude?”
“He was a nurse at a hospital. Killed a bunch of patients with something. Er…fuck, I can’t remember the name of the stuff he injected into them. But it’s used in anesthetics in hospitals.”
My own damn heart nearly failed when I heard that. “Did you say anesthetics?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason. Thanks for your help, Ric. I’ve gotta go.”
“No worries.”
I hung up the phone, my heart pounding. None of this could just be a coincidence anymore. When he was alive, Ellen’s ex-husband owned a private hospital where he worked as an anesthesiologist (on top of running the other family businesses). I knew that because Liv told me on our filmed restaurant date. So Ellen could’ve probably had sneaky access to certain drugs if she wanted.
I moved her computer mouse on the desk so her computer would wake up. She hadn’t bothered password-protecting it, since she usually locked her office door anyway, so I was easily able to get on and open a browser tab. As soon as I had Google up, I did some searches for the case Ricardo had just mentioned.
It wasn’t long till I found it. The nurse he’d spoken of had apparently killed five patients back in the 1990’s using a drug called suxamethonium chloride, or ‘sux’ for short. Apparently it was usually used in anesthetics in small doses to cause temporary paralysis, but in large doses it would kill someone within a few minutes. The reason a few killers had used it in the past was because the drug was untraceable, leading a coroner to rule it as a natural death via heart failure or something similar. Theoretically untraceable, anyway. The drug was metabolized so quickly that by the time an autopsy was conducted, the drug had broken down and was unable to be found on a tox screen.
However, there was one way it could be found, and that’s how they caught the crazy nurse back in the 90’s. Because recent needle marks were found on the dead patients’ bodies, the doctor performing the autopsy knew they must’ve been injected with something, and he began to suspect suxamethonium chloride poisoning. He obviously couldn’t test for sux, for the aforementioned ‘untraceable’ reasons, but he could test for the metabolites of sux in urine left in the kidneys—something called choline and succinic acid. He found those two metabolites in the dead patients, and thus the deaths were ruled as murders and the nurse subsequently caught when a police investigation was opened.
This could seriously be how Callum died. It all added up, given everything else I knew about Ellen and her motivations…except for the fact that there were no needle marks on his body, according to the autopsy report Ricardo had read out to me. That was the only thing stopping me from calling the damn cops right now and shouting at them to exhume his body and open a case against Ellen before she tried to do the same shit to Liv.
There had to be some way to inject something into a body without it being visible to a coroner. Surely.
I tried doing a few more searches, but they all told me the same thing: no. It was impossible. During an autopsy, the doctor would check every inch of the corpse, even between the toes. Any needle marks would be found and documented.
Shit.
William began to squawk from his cage again. “Hello! Freckle!”
“William, can you please—” I was about to reprimand the loud bird and tell him to be quiet when something flashed in my mind, ever so briefly. “Oh, shit…” As my voice trailed off, my gaze slowly turned back to the family photo perched on Ellen’s desk.
The answer had been staring me in the face this entire time.