Poisoned Love Read Free

taken his last breath. Jordan took a quick scan of the bedroom, looking for clues to explain what Greg might have taken. But he saw no prescription pill vials, no syringes, no sign of illegal drug use, nothing that looked out of place, and no suicide note. He and Preciado asked Kristin if her husband had any medical problems or was taking any medications.
    “Not that I know of,” she told them, though at one point she brought out a bottle of Vicodin from the bathroom.
    Greg’s pupils were fixed and dilated, but Jordan was determined to make every effort to bring him back. Jordan intubated Greg, then Butler hooked up the breathing bag and rhythmically squeezed air into his lungs. The heart monitor registered a flat line. With Greg’s heart refusing to pump blood through his veins, Preciado tried but found it virtually impossible to get a needle into Greg’s right arm. Jordan had more luck with the other arm, though he had to try a couple times before he got the needle in.
    Jordan tried everything in his drug box that might get Greg’s heart beating again. Atropine. Epinephrine. A pure sugar substance usually given to diabetics. And finally, 2 mg of Narcan, which reverses the effects of opiates, just in case Greg had overdosed on one. But nothing worked.
    Jordan rolled Greg’s body over to slide him onto a backboard for transport to the nearest hospital. That was when he saw the purple marks of lividity on Greg’s back and buttocks, a sign that the heart had ceased to beat and gravity was causing blood to pool in areas closest to the ground. There were no rose petals under his body.
    At 10:03 P.M ., Jordan and Butler carried their patient down the stairs to their ambulance and drove him to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, about four minutes away. One of the campus police officers followed, with Kristin in his cruiser. The emergency room doctor tried again to revive Greg, but he was gone. Greg was officially declared dead at 10:19 P.M ., six days before his twenty-seventh birthday.
     
    Kristin called her boss, a handsome, thirty-one-year-old Australian toxicologist, as soon as she got to the hospital and asked him to join her there. Two minutes later, she called her parents, crying. Her father answered the phone.
    “Daddy, Greg stopped breathing,” she said. “I’m so scared.”
    Ralph Rossum said he would meet her at the hospital as quickly as he could, handed the phone to his wife, Constance, and ran out to the car. Kristin spoke briefly to her mother, explaining that Greg was in intensive care.
    Kristin’s boss, Michael Robertson, arrived at the hospital about fifteen minutes later. While they were in the waiting area together, he put his arm around her, comforted her, and held her hand. The nurses thought he seemed like a very supportive supervisor.
    Kristin was still crying, but she was able to answer the ER nurse’s questions about Greg’s medical history and what drugs he might have taken. Kristin said he might have used some old prescriptions she’d purchased in Tijuana five years earlier, when she’d been trying to get off crystal methamphetamine. Then, the nurse told her the bad news. They’d tried again to resuscitate her husband, but they couldn’t get him back.
    Kristin’s mother got a call at 10:49 P.M . from Michael, who introduced himself as Kristin’s boss, and they talked for about ten minutes. He said Kristin was cold standing there in her pajamas, and he wondered what to do. Constance thanked him and suggested he drive Kristin back to the apartment. Kristin’s father was on his way down to meet her at the hospital, but he would figure out where to go.
    After allowing the news of Greg’s death to settle in, a social worker approached Kristin about tissue donation. Greg had decided to join Kristin as an organ and tissue donor about two weeks earlier, when he’d renewed his driver’s license, but because his heart had already stopped, his organs couldn’t be harvested. However, some