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Jessie almost felt like she needed sunglasses.

When they pulled up in front of the West Adams mansion, there were so many flashing lights that she had to squint to see the house clearly. Ryan ended up having to park halfway down the block because of all the emergency vehicles.

They got out and walked on the sidewalk past the other mansions, which had a varied mix of architectural styles including Victorian, Craftsman and Beaux-Arts, all of which were typical for the historic district, located not far from downtown L.A. When they arrived at the address, Jessie looked up at the impressive place.

The house they'd been sent to was a Victorian. It was mostly green with white shutters. It had a giant yard and a large, wraparound porch. There were angled bay windows and a deeply pitched roof that led to an impressive turret. Jessie guessed that the home was built around 1900. She didn't have to guess to know that it was pricey.

They walked up the path to the huge front porch, where both police tape and a uniformed officer stopped them. Ryan held up his badge and ID before the young man could object to their presence.

“We’re looking for the officer in charge,” he said.

“That would be Sergeant Delco,” the officer replied. “I’ll alert him that you’re here.”

As he radioed the sergeant, Jessie gave Ryan a satisfied nod. They’d worked with Paul Delco before, and she’d always found him to be competent and professional. Knowing that he was the one who requested them was a good sign. Delco wouldn’t have reached out unless this situation was beyond the norm.

When he stepped outside to meet them, she was reminded of something else: Delco didn’t give off a touchy-feely vibe. A rail-thin officer in his late thirties with crew cut brown hair, the man wore a permanent scowl. She didn’t mind.

"Good to see you again, Sergeant," she said affably, just to see if she could get him to crack a smile. She couldn't.

“Ms. Hunt,” he replied crisply before acknowledging Ryan, “Detective Hernandez. Thank you both for getting here so fast.”

“We were told that you thought this case might be right for HSS, but we don’t know why,” Ryan said. “Care to fill us in?”

“Sure,” Delco said, motioning for them to follow him inside, “the victim’s name is James Whitaker, 56 years old, an investment banker at Wiley McComb. The medical examiner has just started his work, but unofficially, it looks like the guy was poisoned."

"What makes you so confident of that?" Jessie asked.

“That’s what his wife, Sarah, said before she was taken away to the hospital,” Delco explained. When both Jessie and Ryan gave him questioning looks, he continued.

“She started having a panic attack soon after I arrived and had to be sedated,” he explained. “But according to the first officers on the scene, she said that her husband started to feel bad on the drive home from dinner. While she got him inside the house, an intruder apparently snuck in. He tied her up and made her watch while James died. The intruder told her that he’d poisoned him at the restaurant and then followed them home to make sure everything went as he’d planned and that she saw the whole thing.”

“So he poisoned the husband so that he could make the wife watch while he died?” Ryan confirmed as they walked down a long hallway.

"Yes, over the course of several hours," Delco said. "Then the guy apparently left her there, tied up, next to her dead husband. Now you understand why I thought this was a case for Homicide Special Section. This isn't your standard-issue murder."

They reached the breakfast area and Jessie stopped for a moment to take the room in. She didn’t immediately look at the body that she could see out of the corner of her eye, lying on the floor.

Instead, she made her way to the kitchen, where she noted over a dozen chunks of plastic, metal, and wiring strewn on the floor. It took her a few seconds to grasp that they had once been a cordless phone. She wondered if it had broken in some kind of struggle while one of the Whitakers tried to call for help. They'd learn those details soon enough when they spoke to the wife at the hospital. Right now, she needed to learn as much as possible from the scene. She knelt down and noted what looked like bloody zip ties on the kitchen floor, along with copious blood drops on the ground.

“Your people already saw these?” she asked Delco.

“Yes,” he said, “they just didn’t want to bag anything until you got a chance to review everything.”

“You ready to look at the body?” Ryan asked, well aware of her preference to take in the surroundings before studying the victim. She nodded. They walked to the breakfast room table, where multiple crime scene unit members were swabbing, dusting, and the like.

Jessie recognized the deputy medical examiner as Kelvin Soto, a smallish Latino man in his forties with brown hair parted neatly to the side. He was kneeling beside the body of James Whitaker.

The victim was lying on his side. Whitaker was slightly pudgy, with thinning brown hair. He was wearing slacks, a button-down shirt, and a sport coat, which suggested the restaurant they’d gone to on a Sunday night was at least somewhat upscale. A pool of saliva rested under his cheek. His eyes were clenched tightly shut.

“Any preliminary thoughts?” Ryan asked Soto.

The examiner looked up, saw who he was dealing with, and got to his feet.

"Too early for anything definitive, but he seems to have died between six and ten hours ago, which would have been between 9:30 last night and 1:30 this morning. We'll do a tox screen once we get him back to the office, but the wife's claim that he was poisoned seems credible. We should have something to work with by this afternoon."

“Okay, thanks,” Ryan said, turning to Jessie. “Any theories yet?”

She shook her head.

“I’m just trying to wrap my head around the basics so far,” she told him. “It seems like someone somehow poisoned James Whitaker without anyone noticing, then followed the couple home, tied up Sarah Whitaker and spent the night making her watch while her husband died. Whoever we’re dealing with, they had this planned out.”

“That’s what worries me,” Ryan said. “Was this some kind of vendetta against the Whitakers that’s settled now? Or are we dealing with someone who’s just getting started?”

Jessie had the same concern.

“Let’s go to the hospital,” she said. “Right now, Sarah Whitaker may be the only one with those answers and we need to get them quick.”