The Cold Surgeon's Contract Bride novel Chapter 723

I gave the closed hospital door one last glance before standing up. "Alright, I'll head over now."

The route to The 5th Precinct was entirely too familiar by now. Officer Sutton was the one handling the case.

He asked for a detailed account of everything that had happened, then added, "While processing the scene, we discovered something else. That plate of homemade meat pies on your coffee table had a very distinct odor. The lab just sent back the results. They were laced with Potassium Cyanide."

Potassium Cyanide?

My head snapped up to look at Officer Sutton, my heart slamming against my ribs.

With my medical background, I knew exactly how lethal Potassium Cyanide was. Even a minuscule amount caused instantaneous death.

And those meat pies... Lucille had given them to me.

I had left them sitting outside my door for half the night before bringing them in. At the time, I just thought they smelled awful, so I pushed them aside. It had never occurred to me that they were laced with deadly poison.

If I had taken even one bite, I would have died right there on the spot.

"Are you absolutely sure, Officer Sutton? The meat pies actually contained Potassium Cyanide? It was inside the filling?" I asked in horror, unable to stop the rapid-fire questions.

I even grasped at a desperate theory. "Is there any chance the meat spoiled over time and naturally produced it?"

Lucille had made those herself. She claimed she had mixed the filling and spent all afternoon steaming them. How could there possibly be Potassium Cyanide in them?

"You're a doctor. You definitely know chemistry better than I do. No matter how badly beef spoils, it doesn't spontaneously generate Potassium Cyanide," Officer Sutton said gently. He paused, looking toward the window. "Besides, in this weather, there's no way those pies would spoil that fast anyway."

His words grounded me back in reality.

He was right. Spoiled beef doesn't turn into cyanide. In the middle of winter in Port Capital, with temperatures well below freezing, the pies would only freeze solid, not spoil.