Chapter 4 - The Toxicology Report
By 7:00 AM the following morning, Ryan was asleep beside me.
He lay on his back, breathing evenly, one arm thrown over his eyes as if he were the picture of an exhausted husband returning from a long journey. I lay motionless on my side of the bed, watching his chest rise and fall, counting the seconds until I could move.
The moment his breathing deepened into the rhythmic pattern of heavy sleep, I slid out from beneath the covers.
I dressed in warm layer clothing, packed my laptop, my passport, and the sample vial of soup into a tote bag, and slipped my shoes on by the front door. I left a hand-written note on the kitchen island: Went to the late-night pharmacy downtown to pick up stronger anti-nausea meds. Back soon. Love, E.
I took the stairs down six flights instead of using the elevator.
Outside, the Chicago morning was grey, rainy, and bitterly cold. The wind off Lake Michigan whipped through the alleyways, blowing rain against my face. I walked three blocks to a main avenue and hailed a cab.
"Northwestern Memorial Hospital," I told the driver. "Emergency entrance."
An hour later, I sat in a private consultation room in the toxicology wing of the hospital. Across from me sat Dr. Evelyn Reed, a sharp-eyed medical examiner and toxicologist whom I had worked with during my years as a litigation assistant.
Dr. Reed placed the plastic sample vial into a centrifuge machine on her counter, then handed me a cup of black coffee.
"You look terrible, Emily," she said bluntly, sitting in the rolling chair across from me. "What is this really about? You said on the phone it was urgent."
"I need an immediate qualitative assay on that broth, Evelyn," I said, my voice tight. "And I need a full toxicology blood panel done on me right now. Heavy metals, organic toxins, metabolic poisons."
Evelyn stared at me for a long moment, reading the sheer terror in my eyes. She didn't ask further questions. She drew four vials of my blood herself, labeled them, and walked out to process the samples in the priority lab.
Two hours of agonizing waiting passed.
I sat in the plastic hospital chair, watching the clock on the wall tick away. Every minute felt like an hour. Ryan would wake up soon. He would see my note. He would check the hidden cameras. He would realize I wasn't at the neighborhood pharmacy.
The heavy door opened, and Dr. Reed walked back into the room.
Her face was drained of color. She locked the door behind her and pulled her chair close to mine.
"Emily," she said softly, holding a computer printout. "Who gave you that soup?"
"What's in it, Evelyn?"
"Dimethylarsinic acid," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "It's an organic arsenic derivative. It's virtually odorless, dissolves completely in warm liquids, and mimics the symptoms of chronic inflammatory bowel disease or progressive liver failure over time. In small daily doses, it's almost impossible to detect in a standard ER blood screen unless you specifically test for heavy-metal metabolites."
I closed my eyes. Hearing it confirmed by a medical authority made the reality slam into me like a freight train.
"How bad is my blood panel?" I asked softly.
"Your liver enzyme levels are elevated, but you caught it in time," Evelyn replied, gripping my hands tightly. "If you had continued ingesting this compound for another two weeks, you would have suffered irreversible hepatic necrosis. You would have died in an ICU, and any coroner would have ruled it acute natural liver failure."
She reached for the desk phone. "I'm calling the Chicago Police Department right now, Emily. This is attempted murder."
"No!" I blurted out, reaching across the table to press down the receiver button.
Evelyn frowned, startled. "Emily, are you insane? Someone is trying to poison you!"
"If you call the police now, they will send two patrol officers to my apartment," I said, my mind racing through the legal protocols I knew so well. "Ryan will claim he knows nothing about the soup. He'll blame Claire. Claire will claim she bought the broth from a deli. The red notebook is hidden in his office floorboards—if they get wind of an investigation, they will burn that notebook and wipe the camera hard drives before a detective even gets a search warrant signed!"
"You can't go back there!" Evelyn argued.
"I'm not going back there to be a victim," I said, pulling out my phone and showing her the high-resolution photos of Ryan's red notebook. "I need ironclad, undeniable physical proof linking both Ryan and Claire to Luke's murder and my poisoning. I have the notebook photos, but I need the physical evidence from Claire's apartment—the camera storage drive and the chemical supply."
Evelyn looked at the photographs of the notebook entries on my phone screen. Her eyes widened as she read the detailed entries about Luke's brake lines and my dosage schedules.
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"You're playing a dangerous game, Emily," Evelyn warned, her voice trembling. "They are already killing you. If they realize you know..."
"They think I'm weak, sick, and clueless," I said, standing up from the chair, a cold resolve settling over my heart. "And that is the only advantage I have left."
