My fingers curled into fists against the mahogany desk. “Why didn’t he save her?”
“He tried,” Olivia whispered, a tear finally spilling down her cheek. “Ten minutes before the ambulance arrived, two of Mr. Bellini’s men cornered my uncle in the pharmacy corridor. While one held a suppressed pistol to my mother Margaret’s temple at the nurses’ station—and showed my uncle a Polaroid of seven-year-old me sleeping in my bedroom—another orderly injected potassium chloride straight into Katarina’s IV line. It stops the heart in ninety seconds and looks like massive cardiac arrest unless an immediate forensic vitreous-humor draw is performed.”
My throat constricted until breathing burned. Twelve-year-old me had stood outside that exact hospital room eating a vending-machine Hershey bar Richard Bellini bought me while my mother died thirty feet away.
“My uncle signed the death certificate to save my mother and me,” Olivia continued, wiping her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Look at what he did first, though—before the body was released, he secretly drew two vials of her cardiac blood and preserved the tissue slides, hiding them inside the LaSalle Street depository box before fleeing Chicago under a dead patient’s Social Security number. For twenty-two years, he lived as a rural clinic doctor in northern Wisconsin. Until eight weeks ago.”
“What happened eight weeks ago?” I asked.
“The LaSalle Street depository sent out a twenty-year dormancy notice requiring an in-person renewal or the box would be drilled open and turned over to the Moretti estate executors—which meant Richard Bellini,” Olivia said, her voice breaking. “Uncle Thomas drove down to renew it anonymously. Somebody recognized him near the loop. That night on I-94, a black SUV forced his sedan through a guardrail at seventy miles an hour. He survived, barely, and is lying in a medically induced coma under a John Doe alias at St. Jude’s Metro Hospital. Before the surgeons intubated him, he pressed the wax packet into my hand and told me the brass key was behind the portrait in your east hallway.”
She looked toward the crack in the door where Lily was now patting the carpet. “I couldn’t go to the police because Mr. Bellini owns half the precinct captains, and if I walked up to your front gate asking to speak to you about Cedar Lane, Bellini’s guards would have intercepted me before I reached the driveway. So I applied for the housekeeping job. When I saw the hidden compartment two nights ago, I realized Bellini had someone inside the house watching the portrait too—because one of the wall brackets had already been scratched. I kept the torn half of the letter on me so that if anyone stole the box first, they still wouldn’t have the vault number on the back of the photo, and I used my daughter’s cool-mist humidifier tube behind the canvas so you would be the one to take the painting down.”