Chapter 4 - The Evidence Pointed Home
By morning, Ellis had obtained the restaurant’s order and payment records.
The soup had been ordered through Harlow Shipping’s corporate account using Derek’s card and login. The timestamp was 11:58 the previous night.
The instructions named me and my fourth-floor office. They specified direct delivery rather than leaving the food at reception.
Nothing in that record supported Paige’s claim that I had arranged where the thermos went.
Then the toxicology results arrived.
Dr. Angela Mercer, a forensic toxicologist at Fairview Memorial, identified the substance responsible for Constance’s collapse.
Deborah asked whether it could have come from accidental contamination.
“No,” the doctor said. “The findings don’t support that.”
I listened without interrupting. For once, I didn’t want to understand more than was necessary.
The soup hadn’t simply made Constance sick. Someone had deliberately added something dangerous to it.
Her existing heart condition and treatment helped explain aspects of her survival. The doctor was clear that she had been critically ill.
I was glad she was alive. I also couldn’t stop thinking about the untouched lunch that had carried my name.
Investigators traced an online purchase made three weeks earlier.
The payment led to a company opened four months before, funded from DH Holdings Reserve. The account I had questioned at dinner now connected to the purchase under investigation.
I had saved the statements because the transfers didn’t make sense.
They made sense now, in a way I wished they never would.
Deborah and Ellis could place the financial records beside the messages, the order, and the medical evidence. A fact that might have been explained away alone became harder to dismiss beside the others.
Derek hadn’t known I was keeping a private file.
He had known my job. Apparently, he hadn’t thought I would apply it to him.
By the following evening, Ellis no longer considered me a suspect. The evidence had shifted the investigation toward the person who ordered the delivery.
That didn’t restore what had happened in the bullpen.
It did mean I could stop answering the accusation as if it were the most reasonable explanation in the room.
Constance woke Thursday.
The first thing she asked was whether Derek had visited.
He hadn’t.
Ellis went to the hospital, and Deborah arranged for me to wait in the corridor. Through the narrow window, I watched Constance listen to what the detective had found.
Without her pearls and carefully arranged clothes, she looked smaller. Then her expression changed as Ellis described the messages and payment trail.
She asked to see me.
I went in and stood beside her bed. Her voice was rough from the breathing tube.
“He called two nights before,” she said. “Asked whether I’d be at the office Tuesday.”
I waited.
“He said he wanted to send something for your anniversary. He thought I’d enjoy seeing your face.”
There was a monitor beside her, keeping its own steady record.
“I thought he was trying to fix things between us,” she said. “All three of us.”
“You ate it to spite me.”
She didn’t argue.
“I was there because my son asked me to be.”
Her eyes filled.
“I kept believing if I loved him properly, he couldn’t be the kind of man who would do this. I made you the villain because it was easier.”
That was the first explanation she had ever given me that didn’t require me to apologize.
She reached toward my hand.
I let her take it. Whatever else she had done, she had eaten poison intended for me, and I didn’t want her to be alone with what she now understood.
“I’m sorry, Renee.”
I didn’t tell her everything was forgiven. It wasn’t.
“He knew about the baby,” I said. “He let it slip.”
I told her about the insurance form and the accounts. I believed Derek had wanted to avoid the consequences of a separation and leave behind a story in which my death looked like my own doing.
Constance closed her eyes.
“Get him,” she said. “I don’t care whose mother I am.”
Derek was arrested that afternoon at the office.
He went past the same desks I had passed in handcuffs. A small part of me wanted to watch, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
I wasn’t there.
I was in Deborah’s conference room discussing the civil action we would bring when it wouldn’t interfere with the criminal case.
We needed to protect my interests as carefully as we protected the evidence. I had survived; I wasn’t going to let Derek keep control of everything I needed to live.
The charges included attempted murder and aggravated assault, with the case recognizing that I had been the intended victim even though Constance ate the food.
Prosecutor Colton Reed called the financial trail unusually clear.
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I thought of the eleven minutes in my car after finding the forged signature. I had wanted an innocent explanation then.
Now those records were helping establish that the danger had been real, and that I hadn’t caused it.
