Chapter 2

I was at the lab by 4:40 in the morning. The Cascade Regional Crime Lab is empty at that hour except for the hum of the mass spec and the security guard who calls me "Doc" and never asks questions. I badged in, turned on the ICP-MS, and prepped three samples. Sample one: the tea. Sample two: forty strands of my own hair, plucked from the root, laid in a straight line on clean foil. Sample three: a nail clipping, right thumb, where the white bands were widest. Then I sat in my own chair, in my own lab, and waited to find out how my husband was murdering me. The machine finished the tea first. Thallium. 412 micrograms per liter. I read the number three times. The lethal dose of thallium sulfate for a woman my weight is roughly one gram. He wasn't giving me a gram. He was giving me a whisper. A whisper every night for five months. Thallium is the poisoner's classic for a reason. It's tasteless. It's odorless. It dissolves in hot liquid like sugar. It mimics twelve different diseases on its way through your nervous system, and by the time anyone thinks to test for it, you're a diagnosis, not a crime scene. I ran the hair next, and this is the part I'll never be able to unsee. Hair grows about a centimeter a month. Segment it, test each segment, and you get a calendar. A timeline written in keratin. My hair said the dosing started in the second week of March. I pulled up my email on my phone with hands that were, still, absolutely steady, and searched my inbox. March 9: the licensing agreement for my heavy-metals screening panel — the one I'd spent six years developing — finalized. First royalty payment: $384,000. Annual projection: similar or better. March 11: I forwarded it to Adam with a heart emoji. March 14: the first band of thallium in my hair. He waited three days. Three days between we're rich and let's start. I didn't cry. I want to be clear about that, because everyone asks. I opened a new folder on the lab's secure drive, then thought better of it, and started a folder on my own encrypted drive instead. I named it Case File — N.A. Because that's what I was now. Not a wife. A case. At six, I drove home and let myself in while Adam was still asleep, and I searched my own house like it belonged to a stranger. The safe in the closet had our insurance documents. Our joint life policy — the one we took out at thirty-one, two hundred thousand each, standard, boring. Except it wasn't two hundred thousand anymore. Five million. On me. Rider added in January. Accidental and natural death both covered after the contestability period, which — I checked the date twice — expired in eleven days. Eleven days. Three weeks to the obituary. Eleven days to the payout window. He hadn't picked a random date. He'd done the math. His sock drawer had a phone. Not his phone. A cheap prepaid thing, black, charged. I put on a nitrile glove from my bag before I touched it, because that is how my brain works now, and swiped it awake. No passcode. He'd never expected me to be standing. Four hundred messages. One contact. Saved as "Pharmacy." She's not eating again. It's working. Don't come tomorrow, her brother's stopping by. I know. I know. Soon. Just be patient with me, baby. You'll have the house by Christmas. I promise. And then, sent at 11:52 the night before, while I was upstairs pouring poison into a contact lens case: Rough night. She looked at me funny. Are we sure the last batch was strong enough? I scrolled up to the top of the thread, to the very first message, to see the name behind "Pharmacy" before he'd renamed it. Tessa Lund. My hand finally moved. Just once. Just a tremor. Because Tessa Lund wasn't a stranger. Tessa Lund wasn't some woman from a bar. Tessa Lund was the nurse who came to my house twice a week. The one who drew my blood. The one who charted my symptoms. The one who told me, gently, holding my wrist, that my labs looked totally normal, Nora, I promise.