Chapter 17 - THE NIGHT EDWARD DIED
The cell records arrived on Thursday.
Vanessa had lied.
At 11:18 p.m. the night Dad died, her phone connected to the cell sector covering our mansion.
At 11:26, it connected again.
At 11:44, again.
She told police she arrived after midnight.
Brooks placed the records beside the security timeline.
Dad appeared upstairs at 11:39.
The second figure appeared seconds later.
Vanessa’s phone was already near the property.
“Could someone else have had her phone?” I asked.
“Yes,” Brooks said.
“Could the tower cover somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
“How much somewhere else?”
“Several square miles.”
Not perfect.
But consistent.
Then the smart-home company produced another record.
Our front gate had opened at 11:12 using Vanessa’s vehicle tag.
The garage door opened at 11:14.
Her car was inside.
That narrowed things considerably.
I remembered being in Chicago when she called me at 12:07.
Her voice shaking.
“Daniel, your father fell.”
She had said she had just found him.
Now we knew her car arrived almost an hour earlier.
Brooks reopened the death investigation formally.
Not as homicide yet.
As a suspicious death requiring additional review.
That distinction mattered.
Dad’s preserved blood samples were requested for toxicology reanalysis.
The old report showed a sedative-class compound considered therapeutically insignificant at the time because Dad had several prescriptions.
But his physician told Brooks he had never prescribed that medication.
Vanessa had.
Six months before Dad died, she received a short prescription after dental surgery.
There was no proof the drug in Dad’s blood came from her tablets.
Still, another line connected.
I visited Mom.
She stared at Dad’s old photograph beside her bed.
“If she hurt him…”
I knew what she meant.
She had survived the stairs.
Dad hadn’t.
But I couldn’t promise the answer she wanted.
“We’re closer.”
“I should have protected him.”
“No.”
She looked at me.
“This is exactly what you told me not to say after Vanessa pushed you.”
A faint smile touched her mouth.
Then disappeared.
“Do you hate her?”
I thought about it.
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“That scares you?”
“Yes.”
Because hate would have simplified things.
Instead, I remembered Vanessa waiting outside my father’s ICU years earlier when he had pneumonia.
I remembered her rubbing my back through the night.
Had that been strategy too?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The investigation might prove crimes.
It could never perfectly autopsy twelve years of intimacy.
That evening Brooks called.
The toxicology lab had found something unexpected.
Dad’s blood contained not only the sedative.
It also contained a compound produced when the drug was crushed and dissolved rather than swallowed intact.
Someone might have put it into a drink.
Not proof of who.
May you like
But evidence Dad may have been drugged.
📖 Vanessa’s vehicle records placed her at the mansion before my father fell, and new toxicology finally raised the possibility that his death began before he reached the staircase. 👇
