When Hunter becomes Prey

At the end of their stay, they took a water taxi to the Marco Polo Airport, located on the mainland across from the islands that make up Venice.

Pete was still taking the last photos of Jean with the Rialto Bridge in the background on the Grand Canal. They both agreed that they understood the attraction that had brought so many artists, musicians and writers to Venice. It was the end of a glorious vacation, even as they prepared to part ways, Jean back to the States, and Pete to India.

They parted for their respective flights with hugs and kisses.

"Oh, my darling, Pete. I've had a wonderful time the last two weeks. We should think about other things to do together like this," Jean gushed.

"Yes, my dear. It made me very happy to be with you the last two weeks. You know I loved you from almost the minute that we met. It is so sad to be apart, even for just a couple of weeks."

Jean's flight was being called and she stood and gathered her bag that she was taking on the airplane.

"Okay, Pete. How about another kiss?"

He stood and started singing quietly to Jean.

"Besame, besame mucho, como si feura esta noche la ultima vez.

"Give me a kiss to last a lifetime, you sexy woman, you."

She did, then she was gone to catch her flight.

Within the hour, Pete was on his flight to India.

~~~*~~~

It was two-and-a-half weeks after Pete arrived in India, when he received an email from the Sheriff, asking him to contact him as soon as possible.

With a twelve-and-a-half hour time difference, it was tough for Pete to find a great time for a phone call, but he finally called at 10 PM Mumbai time and got Nathan in his office at 9:30 in the morning.

"Nathan, It's Pete. What's up? I assume it's an emergency."

"Pete, thanks for calling me back. Yeah, it is something of an emergency, although there isn't anything that you can do about it right now.

"I am so sorry, but I have to tell you, Jean is dead.

"Dead? How, I mean what, I mean... I don't know what I mean. We were together in Italy just a couple of weeks ago, for god's sake. She get in a car crash or something?"

"It appears to be from a drug overdose."

"Drug overdose? Jean doesn't do drugs!"

"I'm afraid that is what the pathologist found. A combination of methamphetamine and fentanyl. It was shaped into a pill form to look like Ecstasy.

"And there's more. I hate to be the one to tell you, but her body was found in Blake Molyneaux's condo. They were in bed together when they were found. They had been dead a couple of days. The neighbors called because of the smell. We had to break open the door to get in. We pretty much knew what to expect, so no one went in until we could have our guys come out in hazmat suits, which was good. They tell me that even smelling or touching a minute amount of fentanyl can cause problems.

"We talked to the neighbors, and they told us that everyone thought that Jean was Blake's girlfriend, so I guess that whatever they had between them had been going on for a while. Now in and of itself, that's none of our business, but when we find a couple of dead bodies, well, we need to understand."

"Oh dear god...dear god. Nathan, what should I do?"

"Are you coming home?"

"I don't know. Let me think on it overnight. What's happened to her body?"

"That's another thing. The bodies weren't in good shape. The condo was warm, and the bodies were deteriorating quickly. What remains are in coolers at the morgue."

"I'll call you back, same time tomorrow. Maybe I can calm down and think rationally about this by then. I just don't know what I can do."

"Truthfully, not much. Okay, call me back tomorrow, Pete, and let me know what to expect."

Pete hung up the phone and sat back.

What happened was not a shock or a surprise to him. It had been his plan.

Pete had not been watching the videos up in the cloud to see the sex between Blake and Jean. He was watching carefully for opportunity, and he discovered his opportunity when one afternoon, when Jean had Blake over and they had sex in the master bedroom. He watched as Jean pulled out a pill container from her purse. It was a common little thing; a lot of women carry them with supplies of aspirin or Tylenol or other over-the-counter medications in them for emergencies. What Jean pulled out was a square of wax paper that wrapped up ten or so white round pills. They could have been anything. But within 15 minutes after she and Blake washed down the pills with their drinks, they were having sex at an amp'ed-up level from their norm. To Pete's trained eye, it was clear that they had taken drugs to enhance their sexual desires and willingness to perform. Pete's assessment was that it was likely they had taken "ecstasy."

Pete was also aware that the drug cartels in Mexico were spiking their drugs with fentanyl to make them more effective, cheaply. And they would make them appear to be other drugs, one of the reasons for the huge increase in overdose deaths. People thought they were taking benign prescription drugs, when they were getting fentanyl--a drug used by anesthesiologists to put people to sleep during operations. It was a dangerous drug because it only required small additional amounts to go from unconscious to dead.

As a chemist, Pete knew how to make or acquire both drugs. He had a lab, and an anonymous purchase from a dealer two states away and he had the ingredients. In his lab, he also had the equipment and the inert binding ingredients for making pills.

He also had the means of feeding the pills into Blake and Jean's hands without them realizing where they came from. It all came down to putting pills, wrapped up in wax paper, and slipping them into Jean's pill container in her daily use purse.

A couple of weeks away in Europe, followed by a business trip to India, and Pete hadn't even been around for more than a month when the deaths occurred. People dying from fentanyl overdoses were becoming so common because the drug was available everywhere, there was no especial reason for anyone to suspect him or even suspect that there was a crime, other than the people buying and taking potentially deadly drugs.

To a degree, Pete didn't even blame himself for their deaths. They, not him, chose to take pills from an unknown source that happened to have enough fentanyl to kill them, especially when combined with meth and alcohol.

They had abused Pete emotionally and tried to kill him to steal his fortune, and now they had paid the ultimate price.

The next night, Pete called up the Sheriff again.

"Nathan, I have considered what you told me. If Jean was injured, I would return immediately. If Jean had been killed accidentally, I would return immediately, but, she wasn't. She died, in effect at her own hand, with her lover. I have decided to stay here for the last two weeks that our contract calls for, and then I'll come home.

"In the meantime, is there any problem with my having a mortuary collect her remains and cremating her?"

"No, she can be released to the mortuary."

"Good. I'll have them pick her body up and cremate it, and I can hold a memorial service and bury her, when I return. My coming back two weeks early isn't going to make any difference, and I don't want to come all the way home to bury her and then have to turn around and come back to India for two weeks and then come home again."

The Sheriff assured him that there was no problem with his plan. There might be some people who would think that it was a little cold of him. Since the word had gotten around that Jean died while cheating on Pete (it couldn't be kept secret, too many people knew about it), well, no one seemed to think that it was that unreasonable.

That was how it played out.

If the inquest regarding Randy's death was perfunctory, the inquest for Blake Molyneaux and Jean Pearson was even more so. Pete wasn't even called up to testify because it had already been established that he was in India when the deaths occurred.

~~~*~~~

Over the next six months, after Pete had buried his wife, in one of the wall crypts made for cremation urns, a couple of things happened.

Pete told his Board of Directors that due to the multiple tragedies that had occurred in the past year of his life, he had decided it was time to sell the company. He would continue to consult for companies developing generic drugs for FDA approval, but he was going to cash out and no longer be running his own company.

He sold the ranch, although he kept his family's cabin in the National Forest.

Blake Molyneaux's body was claimed and disposed of by his law firm. He, too, was cremated, but buried in an unmarked cemetery plot.

Pete moved away, a little closer to one of the big cities in the west. He never remarried, but he never had a shortage of women pursuing him. He figured it was the money, because an average man, now in his mid-50s, was not a prime target. Of course, he really was. A lot of women, anywhere from 40 years old and up would have liked to be taken care of, loved and their loneliness relieved by a man like Pete.

On the other hand, an older wiser Pete figured it was cheaper to hire women when he needed, and they were younger and sexier besides. Granted, it was his money they wanted, but there were no pretenses on either side. It was transactional.

Anyway, he told his would-be spouses, that having one wife die of cancer and a heart attack, and another of a drug overdose that he wasn't a safe man for a woman to be married to.

~~~*~~~

There was one person who was not entirely convinced that Jean and Blake Molyneaux's death was an accidental death and not a homicide. That was Stewart Brown, the PI who Pete had used to confirm Jean's infidelity.

He had a conundrum. He was not an attorney, so he didn't have a client privilege, per se, but unless he had real evidence that a crime had been committed, he had a duty to keep his work for a client confidential. The problem was, he had no real evidence, just a faint suspicion.

Stu was very likely the only person who had known prior to Jean's death that she was in a long-term sexual relationship with her half-brother. He also knew that Pete had decided to divorce Jean when he was told of the secret that Blake and Jean shared. He certainly knew that Pete could have produced pills that appeared to be Ecstasy, but instead a deadly dose of meth and fentanyl.

In his mind, though, it wasn't enough for him to approach the authorities accusing Peter Pearson of murdering his wife and her lover.

That fact that Pete had told him he was going to divorce Jean went against him murdering her. There was a pre-nup that would limit her ability to be awarded his assets, especially with the evidence of her incestuous relationship with her half-brother. Pete could simply divorce her--he didn't need to murder her.

From his surveillance of the pair, he knew they would take drugs to enhance their experience. He didn't know the source of the drugs, but it was very likely that they would have encountered fentanyl laced drugs at some point. He had no reason to believe that Pete had somehow slipped them drugs; for one thing he wasn't even in town for a month.

Another factor was, that the pair didn't HAVE to take the drugs. It was their own choice; no one forced the pills down their throats.

His final decision was just to keep strum. If Pete HAD murdered the pair (who had already stated an intention to murder Pete,) in such a way that there was no evidence, well, Stu wasn't going to stir the pot.

In any case, ever since Stu's wife cheated on him many years before, he had detested cheaters. He decided that he had no reason to feel the slightest bit of guilt and was just going stop worrying about it.

~~~ End ~~~

Thanks to Randi for going through this story and pointing out the many errors that I make but can't see myself when I review the story. There was the possibility that I would publish this in conjunction with Randi's last invitational event, but I wasn't confident that I would have it completed to my own satisfaction in time.

Not putting the story up at that time allowed me to make substantial changes to the story, trying to make Pete a little more sympathetic, and going into a little greater detail about Jean, his wife. Despite the fact that he (in effect) kills three people, they were all real threats to his survival if he left them alive.

The ending occurred to me, that since the PI had investigated the affair, he might have thoughts about the demise of the lovers, so it would make sense to explain his silence.

I've noticed a growing number of stories recently where the errant wife ends up dead, rather than just divorced. In this case, the story had been rattling around in my mind for years.