Chapter 14 - The Woman Who Wasn't His Sister
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On the laptop speaker, the rhythmic beep... beep... beep of my father’s heart monitor accelerated into a frantic, high-pitched alarm as my father struggled against the bedrails—followed forty seconds later by the flat, unbroken tone of cardiac arrest, and the sound of Brenda and Marcus calmly walking out into the stairwell two minutes before the night nurses burst in!
Diane hit pause on the laptop. Her hands were clenched into fists on the oak table.
"Brenda," I whispered, the horror of the last five years crystallizing into a picture so twisted it took my breath away. "Brenda isn't his sister. She’s his first accomplice—the woman he was actually with in Boston when he married Evelyn Hayes for her two million dollars!"
"Look at the Boston detective’s report on page six," Diane said grimly, flipping through Russo’s binder. "Ten years ago in Massachusetts, Brenda went by her real maiden name: Brenda Vane. She worked as a private home-care nurse for wealthy elderly families in Beacon Hill! That’s how she knew that injecting potassium chloride directly into an existing saline IV bag leaves zero puncture marks on the skin and mimics natural renal cardiac failure in patients with kidney disease!"
Everything suddenly made sickening sense.
Why had "Sister Brenda" always been so viciously jealous of me at every holiday dinner? Why had she married Greg Miller, a corrupt New Jersey probate lawyer, four years ago while living ten minutes away from Marcus and me in Westchester?
Because Brenda, Marcus, and Greg were a three-person syndicate!
Brenda used her nursing background and social connections to spot wealthy, vulnerable families with aging parents; Marcus played the handsome, devoted Ivy League suitor who married the daughter; Greg handled the forged probate trusts to drain the estate; and once the money was in the Cayman Islands, Brenda provided the untraceable medical "accident" that eliminated the witness!
Even Vanessa Cole—the twenty-eight-year-old junior partner Marcus had taken to Lake Tahoe—wasn't a real love affair! Marcus had only seduced Vanessa at Hargrove & Sterling four months ago so he could use her notary seal and her corporate escrow access to cover his bad trades, and then he had abandoned her in Reno the second the wire failed!
"Where is Brenda right now?" I asked, standing up so fast my chair nearly tipped over. "When she made her cooperation deal with the federal fraud prosecutors last week to testify against Greg and Marcus on the wire fraud, she got released on an unsecured personal recognizance bond!"
Diane’s eyes widened in alarm. "And ten minutes ago, when the federal receiver delivered this box from Greg’s basement safe to my office, the receiver’s clerk sent an itemized inventory receipt of the seized boxes to Greg and Brenda’s defense attorney—listing 'One uncatalogued estate box: Robert Mercer'!"
My blood turned to ice.
The moment Brenda’s lawyer emailed her that inventory receipt this afternoon, Brenda would realize that the missing box from Greg’s basement safe—containing my father’s Mount Sinai envelope and the recording that carried a mandatory life sentence for first-degree premeditated murder—had just been delivered to Diane Sterling and me!
And Brenda didn't think like a Wall Street white-collar criminal who hired lawyers when cornered.
Brenda was a black-widow killer who eliminated witnesses with syringes!
Before Diane could pick up her phone to call the NYPD homicide division, the video baby monitor sitting on my dining room sideboard—connected to the nursery camera upstairs on the second floor of my brownstone—flickered once with white static.
Wait.
I looked at the small monitor screen showing Leo sleeping in his crib. The front door of my brownstone had a high-security Medeco deadbolt and an alarm keypad—nobody had come through the front door.
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Then I remembered the basement utility entrance under the front stoop that connected to the shared boiler room of the four-unit brownstone building—where the gas company meter reader had been scheduled to do an annual inspection at two-thirty this afternoon!
On the baby monitor speaker, from the second-floor hallway outside Leo’s nursery door, came the soft, distinct creak of the third oak floorboard—the exact floorboard that only creaked when someone was standing right outside my son’s bedroom door!
