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Jessie’s back was killing her.

She and Ryan had spent the last couple of hours at the hospital, waiting for an all-clear from the emergency room doctor so that they could talk to Marcus Vega. She'd briefly drifted off while lying on the row of chairs and somehow bent herself into an awkward position while she slept. Now, it felt like someone had taken a hammer to her spine.

She sat up and glanced out the window. The first rays of morning sun were appearing in the distance. The clock on the wall said that it was 6:53 a.m. She looked around for Ryan, who was nowhere in sight. She was about to text him when he pushed through a double door across the waiting room with a coffee cup in each hand.

“My knight in shining armor,” she said as he handed one over. “Is this medium roast, dark roast, or Tylenol-infused, because I could really use that last one right now. I tweaked my back something awful.”

“I’m afraid it’s just standard hospital cafeteria coffee,” he told her, “but you may be in the right place to ask for some medication.”

“If it doesn’t settle down, I might,” she replied. “For now, I’ll make do with information. Did anything new come in while I was zonked out?”

“A little,” he said, sitting down next to her. “Your new best friend, Dr. Amelia Roth, tested Elena Vega’s blood sample. She found the same poison that was used on James Whitaker. So that’s official.”

“Not a surprise,” Jessie said, “but good to know.”

"Right," Ryan said, "and Jamil used the time of their neighbor's 911 call, along with security camera footage from the Vega home to calculate approximately how long it took for the poison to kill her. He said the footage showed them arriving home around six. By the way, it also showed the killer sneaking through the open driveway gate and entering the house right after Marcus Vega carried his wife inside. The man in black left the house at 7:35 p.m. So the time from when she was probably poisoned until she died fits that two-hour window that Dr. Roth estimated."

“Could Jamil give any more detail on the killer based on the video footage?” Jessie asked.

“Not yet,” Ryan said. “He says that everything reinforces that it’s a male, but because of the angle of the exterior camera and the darkness, it’s difficult to gauge height or weight. But he’s still working on it.”

“What about his car?” Jessie wondered. “He must have followed the Vegas from wherever he poisoned her. Was there any camera footage of what he drove?”

“Beth was working on that,” Ryan said. “She’s gotten permission to review footage from other houses on the street, but she’s not optimistic. Because most of those homes are set so far back, they don’t generally have views of the street from their front doors. We’re going to have to get lucky.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” Jessie said.

Just then, a nurse walked through the door and approached them.

“Mr. Vega is awake and lucid now,” she said. “If you’d like to speak with him, I can take you back.”

***

Marcus Vega, understandably, was in rough shape.

Jessie had seen pictures of him in the house and that man—suave-looking with black hair and olive skin—was almost unrecognizable as the same person. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and he had an ashen pallor. His hospital bed was at a forty-five-degree angle, and he had an IV in his left arm.

“Mr. Vega,” Ryan began. “I’m Detective Hernandez with the Los Angeles Police Department. This is Jessie Hunt. First of all, we’re terribly sorry for your loss.”

"Thank you," Vega said hoarsely. "I mean, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. My brain keeps telling me that I have to accept this, but it's not really working."

“This is an almost impossible situation to be in,” Jessie said. “We can’t pretend to know the right thing to tell you right now. But what we can do is try to catch the man responsible for your wife’s death. That’s why we’re here. We’re hoping that, as painful as it might be, you could walk us through what happened last night while it’s still fresh for you. It’s possible that some detail that might seem unimportant to you could be what helps us find this man and stop him before he does the same thing to someone else.”

“Someone else?” Vega replied in disbelief.

“Yes,” Ryan said. “Your wife is the second victim that we’re aware of. An almost identical incident occurred two nights ago. We fear that the perpetrator might be planning to do the same thing again tonight. We’re hoping to prevent that.”

Vega nodded silently, as if he was wrapping his head around the larger dimensions of what had been exclusively a personal tragedy for him until now.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“What were you doing prior to arriving home?” Ryan asked.

“We went to an afternoon movie,” Vega explained before adding sheepishly, “I do pretty well for myself, but you can’t beat those matinee prices.”

Jessie was briefly tempted to ask him what he did for a living but decided they could get that information from Jamil and Beth later on. Right now, they needed to focus on his personal experience.

“And we understand from your neighbor that the man who did this admitted to poisoning your wife while he held you captive last night,” she said. “Was he more specific than that?”

“He said that he had put something in her soda toward the end of the movie,” Vega said. “He didn’t explain anything more than that. I don’t know if he was sitting next to her the whole time or if he snuck over when she went to the restroom or what.”

His tone got increasingly agitated as he spoke.

“Okay,” Ryan said, moving on quickly, “So after the movie, did you go straight home?”

“Yes. It was close to dinner time, and we planned to have some leftover takeout Thai food from the night before. But Ellie started feeling sick on the way home.”

“We saw on your security camera that you had to carry her inside,” Jessie said. “She was in such bad shape that she couldn’t walk on her own?”

“She threw up when she was getting out of the car,” he said. “I could tell she was really struggling and just wanted to get her inside. I think that’s how the guy got in. I just kind of kicked the door shut and didn’t even think about locking it.”

Jessie could hear the creeping guilt in his voice. It was the same feeling of responsibility that Sarah Whitaker had felt when describing helping her husband inside. It wasn’t justified in either case. But before she could tell him that, he pressed ahead.

“I didn’t even see him until I heard this loud thump. I looked over and saw that Ellie was on the floor in the living room. Thinking back on it, I wonder if she was trying to get up to help me. When I went over to her, the intruder was right there. He subdued and tied me up before I really knew what was happening.”

“Did he explain why he chose you or why he was doing this?”

"He said something about us flaunting ourselves at the movie," Vega said, "but I don't know what he was talking about. And when I pleaded with him to help Ellie, he said—and I remember this vividly—'you have to see it. You have to feel it. You have to understand.' I asked him what that meant, but that's all he said."

Jessie wanted to ask more about the 'flaunting ourselves' comment but remembering the incident seemed to be too much for Vega. His eyes got wet, and when he tried to speak, his voice cracked. He started to break down. The nurse came in a moment later. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor next to Vega. Jessie understood why. The man's blood pressure was sky high.

“We’re going to have to end this for now,” she said firmly. “Mr. Vega, I’m going to give you another sedative to calm you down, all right?”

She didn’t wait for his answer as she pushed buttons and adjusted dials. Jessie and Ryan stepped outside. It was clear that the interview was over.

They walked silently through the emergency room, passing rows of pulled curtains as they listened to the symphony of beeps that defined the place. As they walked, Jessie could feel that familiar, unwanted anger rising in her chest.

Just as she had with Sarah Whitaker, she pictured Marcus Vega sitting helplessly, forced to watch the life leech out of the body of the person he loved. Her fist clenched at the thought of the kind of person who would do this, who would make two people suffer for hours, one dying a painful death, while their partner was made to witness it. She imagined what she would do if she got her hands on the perpetrator. Would she slap cuffs on the man or give him a little of his own medicine?

“We should head back to the station,” Ryan said, pulling her back into the moment. “Maybe Jamil and Beth have uncovered new info since we last checked in.”

“Sounds good,” Jessie said.

She hoped they had found something—anything—for her to channel her energy into. If she couldn’t find some productive way to direct it, she feared she might explode.