“You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just tired.”
He left.
I poured both cups into the kitchen sink and watched the tea swirl down the drain.
My hands shook harder that night than they had all week.
At nine the next morning, Al called.
“Your boy just came out of Dallas Medical Supply on Elm carrying a small paper package.”
I gripped the phone tighter.
“Medical supply?”
“Commercial side. Restricted chemical accounts. Labs, industrial use, pest control. He didn’t stay long.”
“Stay on him.”
“Already am.”
Twenty minutes later, another call.
“He’s at Lakewood Gardens. Apartment 2B. Patricia Wilson’s address according to the mailbox.”
My jaw locked so hard it hurt.
“They’re together now?”
“Still inside. I’ve got photos of him going in. I’ll get more when they come out.”
Everything was moving too fast and not fast enough.
At noon, Dr. Johnson called.
“Victor, I need you back in the office immediately.”
Her tone made the world narrow.
“What is it?”
“Your bloodwork shows elevated levels of arsenic. Not trace exposure. Not environmental noise. Significantly elevated. You need treatment and you need to answer something honestly for me right now.”
I sat down hard on the edge of the truck bed.
“All right.”
“Do you have any reason to believe someone is poisoning you?”
People ask certain questions in medicine the same way cops ask them when they already know the answer and need to hear what you’ll do with it.
“Yes,” I said.
Her silence lasted one beat.
“Then you need to contact the police, and you need to stop ingesting anything you did not open or prepare yourself. Today. You’re lucky you’re still upright.”
When I hung up, my hand was sweating against the phone.
I called Al.
“Patch me through to someone good in Dallas PD.”
“Vic—”
“Now.”
He gave me Detective Richard Palmer.
Palmer had a voice like worn leather and the immediate focus of a man who had spent too many years listening to domestic ugliness through thin walls.
I met him and Al at headquarters an hour later.
Palmer listened to the whole story without making the mistake of looking shocked before the end. Lisa. Patricia. The fake abandonment story. The shell vendors. The poisoned tea. The blood test. The surveillance.
When I finished, he said, “If we move on attempted murder, we need a chain we can hold in court. Toxicology gives us poisoning. Financials give us motive. Surveillance gives us opportunity. But if you can get him talking on tape, that’s the piece that makes a jury stop wondering.”
“You want a confession.”
“I want him to be stupid.”
I thought about Benjamin. About his confidence. About the way he had watched me drink. About how close he must think he already was.
“Maybe I can help with that,” I said.
The plan was simple.
I would call him that evening and say I was having chest pains. Tell him I needed him at the house right away because I wanted to discuss the company and my will. The detectives would wire the study, monitor from the next room, and wait. If Benjamin thought I was close enough to death to rush the timeline, maybe he would show his hand.
That evening, I made the call.
He answered on the second ring.
“Dad?”
“Ben,” I said, forcing enough weakness into my voice that I barely recognized it. “I need you here. Something’s wrong.”
“What happened?”
“Chest pains. Can’t catch my breath. I don’t want the hospital yet. Just come.”
“I’m on my way.”
He made it in fourteen minutes.
Fast enough to look concerned.
Fast enough to suggest eagerness too.
I was in the study when he arrived, sitting in the chair by the fireplace with a blanket over my knees and my color deliberately bad under the lamplight. The detectives were in the dining room beyond the pocket doors. Al sat in the kitchen with headphones on, listening to live feed and probably enjoying himself in a grim professional way.
Benjamin came in without knocking.
“Dad, you look terrible.”
“Feels worse.”
He crossed the room and stood over me, all concern.
“You need an ambulance.”
“Not yet.” I let my voice drag. “Need to talk first. About the company. About the will.”
The word will did what I knew it would.
His posture changed by degrees. Not enough for a normal eye to catch. Enough for mine.
“What about it?”
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “If something happens to me, I want to make changes. I don’t think it should all go one direction.”
His face went blank in that dangerous way people’s faces do when they are forcing themselves not to react too soon.
“What kind of changes?”
“I want to leave part of Hayes Construction to Lisa. In trust for the baby.”
That did it.
All the performance fell off him.
Not slowly. Instantly.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I looked up at him.
“She’s carrying your child.”
“That child might not even be mine.”
The hatred in his voice made my stomach drop even though I had come there to hear exactly this sort of thing.
