Chapter 4 - The Blue Bottle
With Carol's consent, an officer went through her prescription history during questioning.
One of her regular medications was an exact match for the drug in Hannah's blood.
Derek jumped in immediately. "Then she mixed up her pills while she was cooking. Mom's careless like that. It was an accident."
A little before midnight, the lab called the ER.
The same medication was in the dinner sample. A crushed dose, stirred into the food.
Then my dad, who'd driven back to the house with two officers to get Hannah's clothes, found her old tablet in a nightstand drawer. It was still signed into Derek's messaging account.
One deleted thread had synced to the tablet before he wiped it off his phone.
The last message in it was from Derek to his mother.
"If she keeps losing weight at this pace, nobody will question what happens next."
Detective Reyes read it twice.
Then she got on the phone and told the officers at the house not to leave the property.
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By one in the morning, the police had Derek's and Carol's phones. By the next afternoon, a judge had signed warrants for the house, their bank accounts, the life insurance policy, and every cloud backup tied to Derek's account.
The next forty-eight hours filled in the whole picture.
