“Turn that off!” Richard barked, lunging a step toward the podium, only to stop cold as two of my personal bodyguards stepped onto the stage stairs.
“That was written on October fourteenth, 2004, four hours before my mother died at Cedar Lane Medical,” I announced into the microphone. On the giant screen beside the letter, the certified toxicology report signed by Dr. Thomas Reed and Nurse Margaret Reed appeared, alongside the latent thumbprint match from the potassium chloride syringe hub. “My mother didn’t die of a heart condition. She died because she caught Richard Bellini smuggling synthetic narcotics inside children’s medical relief containers. And here is what he said the night before he had her murdered.”
Daniel hit play on the digitized microcassette from Box 409. Through every speaker in the grand ballroom, Richard Bellini’s unmistakable voice echoed from twenty-two years in the past:
“Katarina won’t listen to reason. When she comes into Cedar Lane tomorrow night after the espresso, make sure the potassium drip finishes the job before Lorenzo reaches the elevator. If Dr. Reed opens his mouth, remind him where his seven-year-old niece sleeps.”
At Table One, the four senior capos slowly stood up and took two steps backward away from Richard’s table, the universal sign in our world that a man was already dead to the commission. Across the hall, Olivia stepped out from the velvet side curtain holding Lily in her arms, watching as the truth her family had bled to protect finally blazed under the lights.
At the same moment, the main ballroom doors swung open, and U.S. Attorney Marcus Vance marched down the center aisle flanked by twelve federal marshals and Cook County Cold Case detectives.
Richard’s face twisted with animal panic. Backing against the banquet table, his hand plunged inside his white dinner jacket toward a concealed .38 revolver. He never cleared the silk lining. I crossed the stage in two strides, caught his wrist in a vise grip that snapped the radius bone with an audible crack, and slammed his right hand flat onto the oak podium.
With the heel of my dress boot, I crushed the silver serpent ring until the metal split in two, then shoved him straight down the steps into the waiting handcuffs of the federal marshals.
As the flashbulbs exploded and the man who murdered my mother was dragged weeping through the doors toward a federal supermax cell for the rest of his life, a tiny voice rang out from the side curtain: “You fixed it, Mister Gabriel! The mean snake man is all gone!”
Six months later, the heavy velvet drapes that had kept the east marble hallway of the Lake Forest estate in shadow for twenty-two years were gone. In their place, tall French windows stood open to a warm May afternoon, letting the scent of blooming lakefront lilacs and fresh cut grass drift across the polished stone floor.
A lot can change in half a year when you tear the rot out of a foundation.