Chapter 3 - The Woman in the Waiting Room
Rachel Voss had not aged the way I expected. If anything, eleven years had sharpened her — the soft edges of the twenty-two-year-old I'd known in college replaced by something more deliberate, more controlled. She was the last person I wanted to see in that hallway, and the first person I needed to ask a question.
"Rachel." My voice came out flatter than I intended. "What are you doing here?"
She slid her phone into her jacket pocket, unhurried. "My assistant's sister works in labor and delivery. I was picking her up from her shift when I heard there'd been some kind of emergency. I didn't realize it was your family until I saw you standing here." A pause. "I'm sorry, Adam. Truly."
I didn't believe the "truly." Rachel Voss was the CFO of Halloway-Ferris Group, the private equity firm that had spent six months trying to force a hostile acquisition of Reeves Capital Holdings by quietly buying up shares through three shell entities before I'd even noticed the pattern. We'd been in mediation over it for weeks. The fact that she was standing in this hospital, tonight, felt less like coincidence and more like a loaded gun someone had left lying on a table.
"You'll forgive me," I said, "if I find the timing strange."
Something flickered across her face — not guilt, exactly, but recognition that I'd said the thing she'd been braced for. "I understand why you'd think that. I would too, in your position. But I had nothing to do with whatever happened to Emily. I came to see my assistant, not you."
"Your assistant is Vanessa Okafor."
"That's right."
"Vanessa Okafor," I said slowly, "who was in this hospital as a labor and delivery nurse tonight. Assigned, according to the chart I saw an hour ago, to my wife's room."
For the first time, Rachel's composure cracked, just slightly, just at the corners. "I didn't know that."
"You expect me to believe that."
"I don't expect anything from you anymore, Adam. But I'm telling you the truth. Vanessa doesn't work private equity deals. She's my sister's college roommate. I got her the internship two years ago because she needed the hours. That's the entire connection."
Derek Ambrose, my COO and closest friend since business school, appeared at my elbow holding two cups of coffee neither of us would drink. He'd clearly heard the last part of the conversation, because his jaw tightened the way it did before he said something he'd regret.
"You should leave," Derek said to Rachel. "Now, before hospital security has to help you."
"Derek—"
"Adam's wife was poisoned two hours after giving birth, and the CFO of the firm trying to steal his company happens to be standing in the hallway. You want to explain how that looks?"
Rachel held his gaze without flinching, which told me something about her I hadn't fully clocked in college. "It looks bad. I understand that. I'm not asking either of you to trust me right now. I'm telling you that if someone at Halloway-Ferris did something to hurt Emily, I will help you find out who, because I would never — never — let something like this happen to get a deal done. That's not who I am, whatever you think of me."
She left her card with the ICU nurse before she walked out — her real number, not a corporate line, with a message: Call me. Any hour.
I didn't trust her. But I kept the card.
Twenty minutes later, Detective Sam Ibarra arrived, badge already out, expression grim. He'd been called in the moment Dr. Hale flagged the toxicology results as suspicious rather than accidental. He asked for a list of everyone who had been in or near Emily's room in the last six hours.
May you like
The list, once we finished it, had eleven names on it.
One of them, I would later learn, belonged to someone I had trusted with my life for over a decade.
