The police stormed in with gas masks. When they entered the home office, where the bodies lay, they found deep scratches striating the door, clawed cries of hope and wretchedness from her nails. For long minutes before her death, she had futilely been trying to escape him, escape that room. She died knowing his fatal goals for both of them.

The gas fireplace had been adjusted to emit carbon monoxide from the moment it was turned on; to turn the gas off, Odilie would have had to adjust the combustion shroud, which sat in the middle of the flame, if she even knew enough about gas fireplaces to begin with. She could have turned off the flame and adjusted the very hot combustion shroud, and possibly saved herself. But the police investigator reasoned that as wooziness descended, logic departed, and an animalistic instinct for survival had overtaken instead, thus the grooved marks on the door.

They also found trace amounts of Ambien in a glass of wine sitting atop the desk. Later, toxicology reports suggested that Tom had slipped the pill into Odilie’s drink, a weekly doctor-approved treat for her during her pregnancy. The Ambien, on top of an antihistamine she had taken to sleep, dulled her faculties before the poisonous gas put her in a final sleep.

Even if she had managed to turn off the gas, merely being trapped in that windowless room would probably have killed her, considering the amount of carbon monoxide released. The brownstone, with all its shiny objects, wasn’t properly renovated and didn’t have a stopcock. Not the first time the investigator had seen shoddy work from an expensive contractor.

Days prior, SNAPea had removed all technology from the home office, no computer to use for help. Tom had also left both their phones in the kitchen. Aside from his suicide note, there was another paper left with crude markings, some kind of blueprint for an animal enclosure that Tom had been working on, perhaps for horses.

The detectives were the ones who found the note, slipped into a desk drawer, that was later leaked to the press:

To Whom It May Concern:

I have been left with no choice. Vera MacDonald has left me with no choice. These past few days I’ve realized how much her cold rejection of me has carved a hole in my heart so painful and so enormous that I cannot go on living. I’m sorry, Penelope. But this is the best decision for all of us. Your mother deserves everlasting peace, free from my transgressions. Vera, even as I write this, I still love you.