Deadly Dose Read Online Free Page A

every turn.
    Morgan wanted to be involved in the case so badly he could taste it. It was all he thought about day and night. But police protocol dictated that he stay out of it. Luckily, Morgan was never a person who cared much for protocol.
    The more he learned from his own interviews and from his coworkers, the more he was convinced that he knew what had happened; maybe not all of the details, but that would come later. He knew enough to know that a killer was roaming the streets, free and clear. A killer who might just get away with murder if something wasn’t done to turn up the heat on the investigation.
    The biggest problem was the Raleigh Police Department’s lack of access to Ann Miller. Her high-powered attorney, Wade Smith, kept promising she would come down to the station for an interview, but Morgan knew it wouldn’t happen. Wade Smith was an unfailingly polite and gracious man. In jest, he often called himself a country lawyer, but had an uptown practice with a price tag to match. He spoke with an educated lilt that made him sound more like an Ivy League college professor than an attorney. It was Morgan’s understanding that Smith was going to try to get Ann Miller to come down to the station for another interview, but it never happened.
    “I don’t really know what Ann told him,” Morgan says, always willing to give a star attorney like Smith the benefit of the doubt, “but I think she told him enough, even if she didn’t tell him the whole truth, so that he realized it would certainly not be in her best interest to actually cooperate with the police.”

THE E-MAIL TRAIL
    People are often still naively unaware, even with today’s advanced technology, that almost anything you delete from a computer can be retrieved. But this lack of clarity about what is accessible and what is not serves investigators well. It allows them to gather information they would never have had access to before.
    The e-mail trail that Ann Miller recklessly left in her wake was the first solid lead in the case. When her computer records started coming in, investigators got a better picture of what had really been going on in Ann Miller’s life. According to Morgan, a cop who was just learning how to maneuver around a computer himself, this information was probably the most damning circumstantial evidence he had ever come across in all of his gritty years in investigations.
    Like most cops, Morgan worked off-duty security to make a few extra bucks. It was a practice the department not only allowed, but endorsed. After all, who could support a family on a cop’s salary? One night while on one of his off-duty jobs, Morgan grabbed a stack of the e-mails investigators had collected in the Miller case and started reading.
    “What we found on Eric Miller’s computer was about as pure as the driven snow,” says Morgan, who’d expected as much. Eric’s e-mail communications were “vanilla” in nature, either work-related, or if they were personal, mainly focused on his baby daughter, Clare. There was nothing in Eric’s e-mail to suggest that he had problems in his marriage, nothing to suggest that he suspected his wife of infidelity. In fact there was nothing to suggest a conflict with anyone at all.
    For Morgan this was a key element because it showed that Eric Miller never saw anything coming. He had no idea that someone had put a target on his forehead. That’s why, even when he lay dying in a hospital bed, he would never have suspected that someone had poisoned him.
    In addition to searching Eric Miller’s computer, investigators searched his lab. There was no arsenic anywhere to be found. Clearly, this meant that the arsenic poisoning had not been the result of an accidental exposure. Something Morgan had always thought unlikely, but now the theory was finally disqualified.
    As soon as Morgan began reading the records from Ann’s computers, however, he got a very different picture of the allegedly loving spouse and now