Clare stopped reading and covered her mouth, fighting a wave of nausea. Beth gently took the pages from her trembling hands before she could continue.
“She’s a literal psychopath,” Beth said flatly, her voice dripping with disgust.
Sarah nodded once. “She also studied advanced chemistry in college. She was quietly expelled after missing toxic compounds were reported. She later worked for a regional pharmaceutical supplier with severe inventory irregularities.”
Rick looked up sharply, his medical instincts kicking in. “What kind of irregularities?”
“Poisons, Doc,” Sarah said grimly. “Restricted, highly toxic compounds. Small amounts taken over time. Easy to miss individually, impossible to explain away collectively.”
The lights in the hospital room seemed to dim around the edges.
“There’s more,” Sarah said, her voice dropping lower. “Two former, wealthy romantic partners of Tessa’s died young under circumstances that were ruled natural heart failures at the time. We’re moving to exhume the bodies tomorrow.”
Clare stared at her, horrified. “You think she’s done this before?”
Sarah met her eyes with absolute certainty. “I think you miraculously survived something that other people didn’t.”
Silence fell hard and heavy in the room.
Rick’s hand found Clare’s, steady and warm on the hospital bedspread. She gripped it with all the strength she had left in her body.
“What happens now, Detective?” she asked.
Sarah’s face set into that clear, unblinking determination that seasoned detectives sometimes wore when the sheer ugliness of a case only sharpened their resolve. “Now, Clare, we make absolutely sure neither of them ever hurts anyone else again.”
Derek was brought in for a recorded hospital visit the very next morning under the plausible pretense that medical consent forms required his immediate signature, and Clare wanted to talk privately before possible, life-threatening complications worsened.
It was Sarah’s plan. It was highly risky. It required precise execution. And it was absolutely necessary.
By then, Derek had already started positioning himself to the police as a manipulated, grieving husband caught in his crazy mistress’s toxic orbit. The emails were damaging, certainly, but defense attorneys loved muddying the water for a jury. A direct, recorded confession would turn the mud into solid concrete.
Clare insisted on doing it herself.
Rick hated the idea. He absolutely hated the thought of his granddaughter sitting alone in a room with the monster who had fed poison to her body and called it care. But when he tried to aggressively object, Clare looked at him with Margaret’s exact same impossible, iron stubbornness and said, “He underestimated me when he thought I’d quietly die. Let him do it one more time.”
So, Beth used pale powder to make Clare’s face look significantly sicker and weaker than she actually was. The recording wire was taped carefully beneath her hospital gown. Sarah watched intently from the adjacent observation room with two armed officers and a tech monitoring the sound levels. Rick stood nervously in the hallway where he could hear nothing and imagine everything, which turned out to be its own unique form of torture.
Derek entered the room carrying flowers.
Flowers.
Clare would remember that sickeningly hypocritical detail for the rest of her life. He set them down gently by the bed and took her hand, leaning in with perfectly practiced tenderness.
“Clare, sweetheart,” he said, his voice thick with fake emotion. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry. How are you feeling?”
She let tears gather in her eyes. This part required no acting; the grief for her marriage was real. “The doctors say there could be severe complications, Derek,” she whispered weakly. “The poison may have done far more internal damage than they initially thought.”
Something flashed quickly in his eyes. It wasn’t grief. It was hope. Then it disappeared behind the mask.
