Chapter 4 - The Poison in the Gravy
🚨 FACEBOOK TRENDING HEADLINE: "I checked the security cameras from the night my husband died—and caught my own mother doing the unthinkable!"The camera footage was from our kitchen, dated exactly twenty-two days ago.
Adam and I were hosting a small family dinner. My parents were there, along with Cassandra. In the video, I could see myself leaving the kitchen to carry a tray of dirty dishes to the dining room. Adam was out of the frame, laughing with my father in the living room.
Only my mother and Cassandra remained in the kitchen.
Cassandra was holding a small, amber-colored glass vial. She handed it to my mother. My mother’s hands were shaking violently. She looked toward the dining room door—toward me—and then, with agonizing slowness, she unscrewed the vial and poured a clear liquid into Adam’s specific mug of decaf coffee sitting on the counter.
Five minutes later, the camera showed Adam drinking it.
The next morning, he complained of a split headache. Three hours later, he was brain-dead.
I sat on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing so hard I couldn't breathe. It wasn't an aneurysm. It was murder. My own mother, the woman who raised me, had poisoned my husband so her favorite daughter could inherit a multi-million dollar Victorian home and a life insurance policy.
But how did they falsify the DNA?
I picked up my phone and called the unknown number that had texted me earlier. I didn't think anyone would answer, but on the third ring, a voice picked up. It was a woman's voice, raspy and terrified.
"Bridget?"
"Who is this?" I demanded, wiping the tears from my face. "How do you know about this?"
"It’s Elena," the voice said. Elena was Marcus Vance’s head paralegal—and a woman I knew had been secretly in love with him for years. "Marcus set the whole thing up. He’s been sleeping with Cassandra for over a year, Bridget. He’s the actual father of Lucas."
My jaw dropped. "If Marcus is the father, how did they get a 99.9% DNA match with Adam?"
"Because they didn't use Adam's DNA from the coroner's office," Elena whispered. "Marcus used his legal clearance to swap the tissue samples at the lab. But they made a massive mistake, Bridget. Marcus didn't use his own DNA either, because he feared a fraud investigation would trace it back to him. He used a blood sample from your father."
The puzzle pieces violently slammed into place in my mind.
If they used my father's DNA, a standard familial DNA test looking for paternal links would show a massive genetic match to Lucas, because my father shared 50% of his DNA with me, and Cassandra...
No, wait. If they matched it against Adam's supposed profile, it shouldn't match. Unless... Marcus didn't just swap Lucas's sample. He swapped the reference file for Adam with my father's DNA profile entirely.
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"They think they've won," Elena said. "They are presenting the final probate motion tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM to evict you and grant Cassandra full administrative control of the estate. If you don't stop them, they'll sell the house by Friday."
"I’m not stopping them," I said, a dangerous, cold calm washing over me. "I’m going to let them walk right into the trap."
