Chapter 10 - The Betrayal at Midnight
At 11:46 p.m., Adrian received a call from a number that hadn't contacted him in eleven years.
We were sitting in a private conference room at Mercy General with Detective Reyes and two attorneys.
The storage device, the photographs, and the messages had all been entered into evidence.
Every new discovery made the original mystery larger.
Then Adrian's phone illuminated.
He stared at it.
"Answer," Reyes said.
Adrian placed the call on speaker.
For a moment, there was only static.
Then a woman spoke.
"Adrian?"
His face lost its color.
"Elizabeth?"
I gripped the edge of my chair.
The voice on the phone sounded weak but unmistakably adult.
"Don't let them take Lucy."
Adrian leaned forward.
"Where are you?"
"Victor knows about the files."
"Elizabeth, listen to me. Are you safe?"
A small sound came through the speaker.
A child crying.
Then a man's voice said something indistinct.
Elizabeth inhaled sharply.
"I made a mistake trusting Catherine."
The call ended.
Nobody moved.
Reyes immediately contacted the technical team working on the case.
Adrian remained staring at the phone.
"She's alive," he whispered.
I'd never heard those words sound simultaneously joyful and devastating.
"Adrian."
He looked at me.
"She's alive."
I nodded.
"Then we can still help her."
His expression shifted.
Something hard returned to his eyes.
"Victor has been lying for eleven years."
"Yes," Reyes said. "Which is why I need everyone in this room to let the investigation proceed without interference."
Adrian looked at her.
"You think I don't understand the stakes?"
"I think you've spent most of your adult life solving problems with resources the average person doesn't possess. Tonight, we need evidence that will survive in court."
I almost smiled.
I liked Detective Reyes.
She had an extraordinary ability to make powerful men look like schoolboys caught cheating on an exam.
But our biggest shock arrived twenty minutes later.
Marco received a message from one of Adrian's security supervisors.
An internal vehicle had departed the Russo estate without authorization.
The driver had accessed a restricted garage using a senior security credential.
Adrian frowned.
"Whose?"
Marco hesitated.
"Vincent Caruso."
The room became silent.
I looked at Adrian.
"Who's Vincent?"
"My head of corporate security."
"Is that bad?"
Marco's expression answered before Adrian could.
Vincent Caruso had worked for the Russo family for eighteen years.
He managed several private facilities, oversaw transportation schedules, and supervised a large portion of the organization's legitimate security operations.
He also knew exactly where I'd been staying.
"Did he know about the storage device?" Reyes asked.
"Only that one existed," Adrian said.
Marco looked down at his phone.
"Sir, Vincent sent a message."
He read it aloud.
Tell Adrian I warned him that protecting the Shaw girl would destroy everything his father built.
Attached was a photograph of my guesthouse room.
The bed.
The desk.
The open drawer.
My father's photograph was missing.
A cold wave passed through me.
"He was inside my room?"
Marco nodded grimly.
The next message appeared seconds later.
Midnight. East River Pier 19. Come alone, or the next photograph will be of the child.
Adrian stood.
Reyes immediately shook her head.
"Absolutely not."
"Vincent knows our systems."
"And now we know he's compromised. This becomes a coordinated rescue operation."
Adrian ran a hand over his face.
I understood his desperation.
He'd thought Elizabeth and her child were dead for eleven years.
Now they were alive, and someone was using them to pull him into a trap.
I stood, too.
"I need to tell you something."
Everyone turned.
"Vincent came to Mercy General last month."
Adrian stared at me.
"What?"
"He donated equipment on behalf of Nightjar. He was introduced as the foundation's security adviser."
Reyes opened her notebook.
"Did you interact with him?"
"Briefly. He asked about the emergency department's staffing patterns."
My stomach twisted.
"That's how they knew when I was working."
Adrian's jaw tightened.
"Vincent had access to your schedule before I did."
I looked at him.
The pieces fell into place.
His arrival at Mercy General hadn't merely been a questionable attempt to contact me.
Someone else had known he would come.
Someone had arranged for him to be injured.
Someone wanted him inside that hospital, standing beside the daughter of Daniel Shaw.
"Adrian," I whispered.
"What?"
"What if you weren't the one who found me?"
Reyes looked up.
"What do you mean?"
"What if Victor and Vincent deliberately put us together because they needed us to find the missing files?"
The room went still.
Adrian slowly sat down.
For the first time, the entire sequence made sense.
The knife wound.
The hospital visit.
The photograph behind curtain four.
The attempted break-in at my apartment.
The anonymous messages.
We hadn't discovered the mystery by accident.
Someone had been guiding us toward it.
Then Reyes's phone rang.
She listened for several seconds.
Her expression darkened.
"What happened?" I asked.
She looked directly at me.
"Emma, hospital security just reviewed the footage from the night Adrian was injured."
My pulse quickened.
"And?"
"The person who photographed you behind curtain four was wearing Mercy General scrubs."
I stared.
"Who?"
Reyes turned her phone around.
The security image showed a woman standing beside the nurses' station.
Short dark hair.
Blue scrubs.
A hospital identification badge.
I recognized her immediately.
"Dana?"
May you like
My closest friend at Mercy General had been working for the people pursuing us.
And she'd had access to my apartment key for three years.
