Chapter 4 - Tracing the Venom
The police interrogation didn't happen in a sterile room; it happened right there in the vet clinic’s private family consultation office, while the faint sound of medical alarms beeped in the background.
I told Officer Miller everything. I started with the steak, the smell, Ethan’s refusal to eat, and Lauren’s sudden scream. Then I gave him the context—the context I had been too blind to see until tonight.
"My father passed away eighteen months ago," I explained, my hands clasped tightly between my knees. "He left a split estate. Half went to my mother, and the other half was divided equally between Chris and me. But there was a clause. If either Chris or I passed away without a living adult heir, our share of the commercial real estate holdings in Cedar Rapids would revert entirely to the surviving brother."
Officer Miller stopped writing. He looked up, his eyebrows raised. "And you have one son. A minor."
"Yes," Lauren interrupted, her voice fierce and sharp. "And Megan has been drowning in debt. Chris’s business failed last winter. They took out a second mortgage on their house. They’ve been begging Daniel for a loan for six months, but our financial advisor told us it was too risky. If Daniel died... Chris would inherit millions in commercial property immediately to settle his debts."
"And if Ethan had eaten that steak?" Miller asked softly.
A cold, sickening wave of nausea hit me. "Then there would be no minor heir to protect the estate. It would all go to Chris. And Megan."
Before Miller could ask another question, the vet technician knocked on the door. Her face was grim. "Mr. Vance? Dr. Kincaid needs you in the lab. We’ve extracted the stomach contents from your dog. We need you to identify something."
I stood up immediately, leaving Lauren with Ethan and Officer Miller. I followed the technician through the sterile, stainless-steel corridors of the clinic to a small laboratory room. Dr. Kincaid was standing over a glass beaker containing a dark fluid, her brow furrowed.
"We managed to pump his stomach before the full dose hit his bloodstream," Kincaid said, handing me a pair of latex gloves and a surgical mask. "We’ve stabilized his heart rate with atropine, but he’s still in critical condition. Look at this."
She used a pair of long tweezers to pull a small, partially dissolved plastic object from the bottom of a separate collection dish. It looked like the tip of a plastic dropper pipette, the kind used in industrial liquid transfers.
"This wasn't in the meat itself," Kincaid said. "It looks like whoever poured the chemical onto the steak accidentally clipped the tip of the dropper with the steak knife while trying to spread it into the seared crust. The chemical is Aldicarb. It’s an extremely restricted, highly toxic carbamate pesticide. It’s banned for residential use in the United States. It causes rapid respiratory failure."
"Aldicarb," I repeated, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. "Where would someone even get that?"
"Agricultural supply," the technician whispered from the corner. "Farmers use it for specific potato crops under strict EPA permits."
My mind flashed back to three weeks ago. Chris and Megan had taken a weekend trip to an old family farm property we still owned in rural Idaho—a property managed by a local tenant farmer who kept a locked chemical shed in the barn. Megan had asked me for the spare keys to the property under the guise of wanting to 'look at the old family antiques' in the farmhouse.
I had given her the keys. I had handed her the weapon.
"Officer!" I called out, bursting back into the hallway where Miller was standing. "It’s Aldicarb. She got it from our family farm property in Idaho. She planned this weeks ago."
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Miller didn't hesitate. He pulled his radio from his shoulder. "Dispatch, this is Unit 214. We have a confirmed intentional poisoning using a restricted chemical compound. Upgrade the domestic call at the Patricia Vance residence to an active felony warrant for attempted homicide. We need a search detail at the residence, and put a BOLO out on a 2022 silver Ford Explorer registered to Megan Vance."
The machinery of justice was finally turning, but as I looked out the dark window into the freezing night, I knew that the real nightmare was only just beginning. Megan was out there in the dark, and she knew she had been caught.
