[ WP ] You are a detective who has closed every case but one , a serial murderer who has taunted you all your career . After retiring you start to suspect your significant other .

It was an odd little watch. It was n't particularly expensive, but then I was n't exactly popular either, so that odd little watch on that stupid satin box with the ribbon was exactly how I wanted it to end. As the last rays of the sun died out, the building slowly emptied itself - the drones in their grey suits and fat corsets left without a word and the silence that remained was my ally. 
 
 No doubt the witch had put together some whiny little party with wheezy drunks for the evening, and if there was one thing I hated more than my co-workers it was those drunkards that the witch insists I make small talk with. Social life. That's what they call it. And while, despite her obvious cerebral limitations, she manages to get ahead in her job, her colleagues made her look like Einstein - they showed a more distinctly recognizable palsy one tends to find in a plastic stationery salesperson, accentuated even further when drunk. 
 
 The thought of her company awoke memories and almost instinctively, I reached for the last drawer where I kept my cigarettes and a manila envelope - my two failures in life. The Marlboros had started to disintegrate - I tend to smoke when I need to concentrate, and most cases in the last couple of decades had been obvious in-your-face drivel chock filled with fingerprints and DNA, even if they confounded the idiots I work with. And so they had laid there for not a few years. 
 
 The manila envelope had kept pristine for some reason... which was odd... but the contents represented a far worse failure - an unsolved mystery, an uncaught killer, that has marred my otherwise stellar career. Yep. Stellar. I may be a misguided misanthropic monologue maker in my mind, but I am the epitome of rationality when it comes down to objective analysis. And all rational evidence through my life pointed me towards one obvious well-questioned fact - I was heads and shoulders above anyone else on the intelligence scale. An obvious assessment that most people did n't seem to agree with, but put up with because they needed me. And this folder was my only link to my nemesis. My Moriarty. 
 
 I took out the case files, each long closed by the department as unexplained unconnected poisonings, and laid them out. On the face, a very simple, very distinctly coherent pattern with symptoms that looked like a cross between a cardiac arrest and a disco drug overdose. I did n't have much against the way the police had handled it - they put it down to ODs... and negative autopsies, lack of obvious motives or methods and a close-knit set of party animals supported their hypothesis. There were n't any crosses or zodiacs or swastikas carved into their flesh either, like television loves to show serial murders. The pattern was much more subtle, much more statistical - too far strewn out for it to be an obvious serial killer, but too regular to be a statistical result of a string of unrelated overdoses. I had nothing more than the profiles of the dead and the gut feeling of mathematical rigour to base it on, and several sleepless nights followed after what I'd fancy the next victim, the next clue in the ultimate game between me and the genius in the shadows. It helped that the department saw no reason to stop me from taking low priority work out of the office., It helped that I saw it, not as justice or righteousness or some other airy concept, but as a personal pet puzzle. And it certainly helped that the witch was nicer when I took home work - almost as if she was happy to be rid of me and get the extra bed space. 
 
 I lit a cigarette and reached for the second sheaf of papers - personal research on poisons. Symptoms and autopsies rules out mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals and anything accumulative or with high dosages, so that left the smaller sneakier organics - like ricin - that dissolve back into the body when done, or stimulators and medications that stimulated a normal bodily function to the point of overload - I once cracked a particularly nasty case of clostridium poisoning cleverly disguised as botox, where the toxin had leaked into the bloodstream. 
 
 I opened the window, coughing the cigarette out and lighting another. Party drugs, hypertension, no bodily accumulation. Seemed like MDMA, except for the traces, or lack thereof, except that I had ruled it out. I pulled out my laptop again - a coherent thought is too precious to be isolated in a human mind. Amphs were my most promising lead - except that there were literally thousands of variations. And outliers like ephedrin, Death and others were always possible. I set aside my last cigarette. Drug research was a well traversed path for me - slow, methodical, matching up numbers and probabilities, accounting for autopsy errors and interpretations, and I would need that cigarette, and more, before soon. I was half tempted to go to the party and con a couple of pills out of that bald guy she calls boss... 
 
 *** 
 
 I sit up a bit stunned, my heart racing. I hate it when the bleeding obvious strikes you from a lateral thought. I wheel my chair back to the victims. A good many victims in stationery sales. Far too many others that hang around in Danny's and that Chinese Karaoke near that. And these guys could happen to know a fair number - even as high as half of the victims. It is time to separate the noise out - the actual OD cases from the poisonings - and see how the numbers added up. 
 
 The harsh ringtone interrupts me... my wife. My heart is still racing, and I did n't want to lose a single moment, so... Reject, Turn off, Sort, Count. About a third, not too much to read in there. Get some water, look up SurePlastik. Home, stationeries, manufacturing. Vertical integration. Raw materials and byproducts would be available to the odd employee in manufacturing. 
 
 Bromo propyne, now where have I heard it? Propargyl bromide. Google. [ E for ecstacy ] ( http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_for_Ecstasy ). It's that Parkinson's medicine contaminant. 
 
 I light up that last cigarette, and balance that empty pack on my knuckles, dropping ash inside... and get my second heart attack of the day. The pack says 2014, and I've had them for a year. 
 
 It's ironic how, during the last few instances of your life, your brain goes into overdrive instead of shutting down, and attempts to give you that one last ecstacy of solving the puzzle. There was one obvious intersection - cigarettes, car, wife, SurePlastik VP, medical contaminant. the pieces fell into place. Killing for promotions. Passing it off as party ODs. Clever indeed... only, not at her job. And ultimately rational, killing off the one person who could expose it, expecially with extra time on his hands. Methods, opportunity, motive. 
 
 And this time, I decide to answer the call. Glancing back at the screen, I smile out a single word, `` selegiline''. 
 
 *** 
 
 I do n't know how long we had been silent. In my hyperventilated tachycardiac state, it was an eternity. And so we talked, a full conversation without the need to see or speak, and I understood for the first time - that it was n't malice that drove here, nor promotions or money. It came down to this - there was no better way to get my attention, to get me to devote some time with her, understanding her love for me. It was an expression of love. If only I could understand... 
 

