I paid for the repair and thanked him deeply.
“Jason, thank you. Thank you. Really. You saved our lives.”
He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Are you going to be okay, Mrs. Barbara? Do you want me to call someone?”
“No. I will be okay. I need to leave now.”
The drive back home was blurry. I drove on automatic, still in a state of shock. Every traffic light seemed to take an eternity.
When I finally parked in the driveway, I saw that Robert’s car was already there. He had arrived earlier from work. I entered through the kitchen door and found my husband sitting at the table, visibly worried.
“Barb, what happened? Your message left me very restless.”
I put David’s laptop on the table and sat next to Robert. I took a deep breath, trying to find the right words. How do you tell your husband that your son is planning to kill you?
“Robert, I need you to stay calm and listen to me until the end.”
“Okay.” His expression became even more worried. “You are scaring me.”
“I know. Forgive me. But you need to see something.”
I took out my personal laptop, inserted the USB drive Jason had given me, and opened the files one by one. I showed everything to Robert. The spreadsheets. The notes. The conversations. The receipts.
I saw my husband’s face go through all possible emotions. Initial confusion. Disbelief. Horror. Deep pain. And finally a contained rage that I had rarely seen in him.
“This cannot be true,” he whispered with a broken voice. “Our son? Our David?”
“I did not want to believe it either,” I replied, taking his hands. “But it is real, Robert. All this is real.”
He stood up abruptly, knocking over the chair.
“Was he poisoning us?”
“He was.”
“My God, Barb. The dizziness I have felt in the last few weeks…”
It was like a bomb exploded in my head. Robert had complained of dizziness, unexplainable tiredness, even a fall we had last week, which we attributed to age.
“We have to go to the hospital,” I said, getting up too. “Now. We need to do blood tests. Check if there is any substance in your system.”
“And you, Barb? Do you feel bad too?”
I stopped to think.
“No, not me. But according to David’s notes, the plan was to start with Robert first. I would come later. I am going to do the tests too, just in case. But Robert, before we go to the hospital, we need to decide what to do if David finds out we discovered everything.”
“Let us go straight to the police station,” said Robert firmly. “Right now. I am not going to wait one more minute.”
“But what if they do not believe us? What if they think we are exaggerating? That it is just a misunderstanding?”
Robert pointed to the laptop screen.
“Misunderstanding, Barb? It is all documented here. He detailed everything like an idiot. He thought he would never be discovered.”
He was right. But something still bothered me.
“Robert. Who is this Victoria that appears in the messages? She talks as if she had already done this before.”
We went back to the files and started looking for more information about her. We found photos, conversations, even an address.
Victoria Fernandez. Twenty-nine years old. David’s girlfriend for eight months.
“Eight months,” I murmured. “He has been with her for eight months and never introduced her to us.”
In the conversations, it was clear that Victoria was the mind behind everything. She suggested the methods. She calmed David when he showed doubts. She planned every detail.
In a particularly shocking message, she wrote:
Babe, I know it is hard at first. It was hard for me too when I did it with my parents. But later you will see it was the best decision. Think about our life after. With all that money, we will be able to travel the world. Buy that house you dream of. It is worth it.
“She killed her own parents,” said Robert, with evident horror in his voice. “And she is teaching our son to do the same.”
We searched for more information about Victoria Fernandez online. We found old news from a newspaper in Florida about the mysterious death of a couple, Hector and Sylvia Fernandez, three years ago. The police had investigated but closed the case for lack of evidence. The couple’s only daughter, Victoria, inherited everything: a high-end house, investments, a condo on the beach.
“She has done this before,” I said, feeling a chill run down my back. “And she got away with it. Now she is using our son to do it again.”
