Chapter 14 - The Trap at St. Luke’s
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Adrian stared at the phone in his hand for three agonizing seconds, his wet chest rising and falling as ten years of deeply conditioned habit warred against the woman standing in front of him.
"Claire, if she ruptured an organ falling down the stairs after my mother threatened her this morning, the police will come after Victoria," Adrian said hoarsely, trying to convince himself more than me. "I am going over there for ten minutes with my security chief to verify whether she’s actually hurt, take the police statement off my mother’s name, and tell Sophia to her face that she’s being prosecuted for stealing your emerald. Then I am coming straight back here."
"You don't need to come back here, Adrian," I said quietly.
He didn't hear the finality in my voice—or he chose not to. Turning on his heel, Adrian strode back into the elevator to head six blocks south to the hospital, still believing he was handling a crisis like the head of the family.
As soon as the elevator doors closed behind him, I looked at Dante Vance, who was standing calmly beside the credenza with a live GPS tracker tablet in his hand.
"Did any ambulance in the city of Chicago pick up Sophia Reynolds this afternoon, Dante?" I asked.
"Not a single one, Mrs. Moretti," Dante replied, tapping the screen. "And there is no 'Dr. Miller' on rotation at Northwestern Triage today. Sophia isn't even at Northwestern—her phone signal is pinging from a private cosmetic clinic suite on the sixth floor of the old St. Luke’s annex, which she rented for two hours using cash paid to an off-duty orderly."
I walked over to the window, watching Adrian’s black Maybach pull away from the curb below in the sleet.
"She knows Adrian cut her off this morning, and she knows Julian Cross will kill her on Friday night if she doesn't deliver the encrypted master keycard for the casino armored vaults before the Founders’ Ball," I said coldly. "Adrian keeps that titanium biometric card inside the inner breast pocket of his overcoat—the exact soaked overcoat he’s going to take off and drape over a chair the second he walks into a warm hospital room."
Dante’s eyes gleamed with professional admiration.
"Our two operatives are already positioned in the hallway outside the sixth-floor annex wearing hospital maintenance uniforms, ma'am," Dante reported. "And the micro-transmitter we slipped into the lining of Mr. Moretti’s wet overcoat while he was standing in our lobby downstairs is streaming live audio and high-definition video straight to your tablet."
Fifteen minutes later, sitting at my desk with a cup of hot tea, I watched the live hidden-camera feed on my screen as Adrian pushed open the door of Room 604 at the St. Luke’s annex.
Lying in the adjustable bed with an unhooked IV line taped to her arm and white gauze wrapped dramatically around her ribs was Sophia Reynolds. The moment Adrian walked in, he shrugged off his soaking-wet black wool overcoat—just as Sophia had predicted after ten years of studying his habits—and tossed it over the visitor’s armchair near the bathroom door while a man in a white doctor’s coat stepped up to distract him with a clipboard.
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"I’m not here to hold your hand, Sophia," Adrian’s cold voice came through the audio feed as he stood five feet from her bed. "I looked at my grandmother’s bracelet under a jeweler’s glass twenty minutes ago. You have sixty seconds to tell me where my wife’s Colombian emerald is before I call the Cook County State’s Attorney."
While Adrian was glaring down at Sophia’s fake tears in the bed, the "doctor" stepped smoothly behind Adrian’s back toward the armchair, slipped a gloved hand inside the breast pocket of Adrian’s wet overcoat, and pressed Adrian’s titanium master vault keycard into a handheld radio-frequency cloner.
