She couldn’t believe that it had been nearly five years since his death. It had shattered her world. Weeks of frantic worry had been followed by the devastating blow of his loss, followed by months of emotional trauma.
Nobody had known why her husband, an ambitious and high-earning law partner in his early thirties, had collapsed and been admitted to ICU after complaining for weeks that he had felt unwell. Test after test were done, but the results kept coming back inconclusive. His kidneys were damaged, his liver was failing, his skin was breaking out in lesions. He had started suffering from seizures, his blood pressure sky-high, unable to keep food down.
Falcone, back in her old life, had also been a lawyer, working for a civil litigation firm. She had taken extended leave to be by his bedside, watching his condition deteriorate daily, with surges of frantic hope as new treatments were tried, followed by crushing despair as they failed.
Finally, they had a diagnosis, and it was one that shattered her world.
Just before his final, fatal seizure, new tests were done and a cause for the strange affliction was found. Her husband, Marco, had been suffering from long-term, systemic heavy metal poisoning.
Falcone ran faster, pushing herself to the limit as she remembered her horror and disbelief at the diagnosis. How could this have happened? Marco was not exposed to chemicals in the course of his work, and as a cyclist who’d aspired to turn professional, or at any rate, win gold medals in the amateur league, he had been extremely fit.
The police had investigated, and she’d been a primary suspect as the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Battling to cope with her grief, and the demands of her young daughter, Falcone had her house searched and turned upside down not once, but numerous times. She herself had been tested, questioned, interrogated, her phone and laptop seized, and there had been multiple trips to the police headquarters for interview after interview.
Her father’s constant support, and the need to care for her toddler, had saved her from a serious breakdown, although she knew how close she had come. Facts had emerged—hideous, terrible and unexpected. These bombshells had crushed her so badly she had thought she’d never recover.
Marco had been in serious conflict with one of the other partners in the law firm who had wanted to buy him out, or force him to resign, but he had refused.
Even more soul-destroying, she learned that Marco had embarked on an affair with one of his secretaries, soon after their daughter was born. The affair had grown serious and she had pressured him to leave Falcone. At that stage, six months before his death, Marco had broken it off, but the disgruntled woman had remained with the firm.
Head down, legs burning, Falcone sprinted across the park. This flat, straight path was where she pushed herself to the limit. She remembered her horror as her world had crumbled around her. The life she’d thought was so perfect had turned out to be a sham. Her own happy ignorance had somehow been the worst of all. How could she—an intelligent woman with a legal qualification—not have known about any of this? How had she been so immersed in her own world that she had been oblivious to it?
Gradually, like a dark, terrible cloud, the investigation had passed over, but it had left only uncertainty in its wake because the results had been inconclusive. The police had not been able to link anyone to Marco’s death. In the end, the theory they favored was that he had taken contaminated muscle-building supplements.
Falcone herself had seen how many potions and powders and tablets he took, in his efforts to gain the edge of fitness and strength that make the difference between winning and losing. She’d teased him about it many times but he’d insisted that his dream was to turn professional, no matter what it took.
Not all the supplements he bought had been properly registered, the police said. Some of them were obtained from friends of friends, and others from unlicensed manufacturers. Overdosing on a contaminated batch for a number of months could have caused a fatal and irreversible toxic buildup, but there was no powder available for testing in the empty containers of the products that Marco had continued to use up, even after he started feeling too ill to cycle.
Up until then, Falcone had always been impatient of her father’s calling to be a public servant. After that, when her world changed, she realized that to obtain the peace of mind and closure she needed, she had no choice but to follow in his footsteps.
Soon afterward, Falcone had quit her job and joined the local police unit as a junior constable. She’d risen quickly through the ranks and had been promoted to detective just two years later, and department head a year after that. Her legal background gave her a valuable advantage in the department, but it was her own past experiences that gave her the dogged determination to follow through on her cases, pursue every avenue, and never ignore any piece of evidence, no matter how small it seemed.
Reaching the end of her sprint section, Falcone slowed, gasping for breath. She thought she might have achieved a personal best on that section, and was looking forward to checking her Fitbit when she got home. The only problem was that in trying to outrun the bad memories that had crept up on her so unexpectedly, she hadn’t given thought to her latest case. The fresh air hadn’t been used to ignite the spark of inspiration she needed.
Well, where inspiration wouldn’t come, plain hard work was a good substitute.
After the usual morning chaos of breakfast, dressing her daughter, and waiting for her school bus to arrive, Falcone headed to work. She was eager to see if her hunch from the previous day might pay off, and if the local detectives, or Social Services, had
