Chapter 7 - Ward Four-B
The video call from the fourth floor of Saint Joseph's Medical Center cut to black, leaving me staring at my own reflection in the glass screen.
Even knowing today that Samuel was not my biological father, he was still the man who had taught me to ride a bicycle in the driveway, and he was the only living witness who could testify in court that Gwendolyn had poisoned Clara nine years ago.
If Evan pushed that syringe into Samuel's intravenous line, both my father's life and the murder case against Gwendolyn would die in that hospital bed in less than twenty minutes.
"Detective Miller, call hospital security on your police radio and have them storm Room Four-Twelve immediately," Julian Vance urged as we sprinted down the wet stairs of the Phoenix house toward Detective Miller's unmarked police cruiser.
"No, wait—do not broadcast the room number over the standard hospital security channel!" I shouted, grabbing Detective Miller's wrist before he could key his microphone.
"Gwendolyn worked as a senior nursing supervisor at Saint Joseph's for six years before she married Samuel, and she is standing right outside the door watching the nurse's station monitors!"
"If hospital security guards come running down that corridor or trigger a floor alarm, Evan will inject that syringe into Samuel's line and walk out down the service stairs before anyone can breach the locked door," I said rapidly as Miller hit the siren and floored the cruiser down Central Avenue at ninety miles an hour.
"Then how do we get inside a locked intensive-care room on the fourth floor without Gwendolyn seeing us coming down the main hallway," Detective Miller asked, weaving between red lights as the glass towers of Saint Joseph's loomed eight blocks ahead.
I closed my eyes for two seconds and pictured the complete structural blueprints of Saint Joseph's Medical Center's East Wing.
Three years ago, before I launched my own firm, my architectural team had designed the seismic ventilation retrofit for the fourth-floor cardiac intensive care unit at that exact hospital!
"Every pair of intensive-care rooms on the fourth floor shares a four-foot-wide interstitial medical-gas maintenance corridor directly behind the headboards so technicians can service the oxygen and vacuum lines without entering the sterile patient bay," I explained rapidly as the cruiser screeched into the emergency ambulance bay.
"And the access door to the interstitial service wall for Room Four-Twelve opens inside the linen supply closet of Room Four-Fourteen next door—completely invisible from the hallway where Gwendolyn is standing guard!"
Four minutes later, while Julian Vance walked out onto the roof of the adjacent parking garage carrying an empty metal decoy tube to keep Evan's phone line occupied on speaker, Detective Miller and I slipped out of the fourth-floor service elevator in blue surgical trauma gowns.
Keeping our heads down as we rounded the rear nurse's station, I spotted Gwendolyn standing fifty feet away outside the frosted glass door of Room Four-Twelve, nervously checking her wristwatch while talking to Evan through a wireless earpiece.
Without making a sound, Detective Miller and I ducked into the empty adjoining suite, Room Four-Fourteen, stepped inside the utility closet, and unlocked the narrow steel maintenance panel behind the oxygen manifold.
Inside the dimly lit utility wall, less than eighteen inches behind the thin drywall and two-way diagnostic mirror of Samuel's headboard, we could clearly see and hear everything inside Room Four-Twelve.
Samuel was strapped to the bedrails by his wrists, gasping in terror beneath his oxygen mask, while Evan Cole stood over him holding the loaded syringe in his right hand and his phone in his left.
"She just walked onto the garage roof across the street, Evan, I can see her standing by the parapet with the tube," Gwendolyn's voice whispered into Evan's earpiece from the hallway outside.
"Good," Evan murmured with a cold, twisted smile as he uncapped the needle and inserted the metal tip straight into the rubber injection port of Samuel's intravenous line anyway.
"Once I empty this syringe into the old man's heart, I will walk up to the roof, take the Reed signet ring from Paige, and throw her right over the seventh-floor concrete parapet so the police think she jumped in grief after her father died!"
Evan placed his thumb flat against the plunger of the lethal syringe and began to push downward.
At that exact split second, I slammed down the red manual emergency cross-clamp on the copper vacuum-suction manifold inside the wall and shoved the sliding two-way diagnostic maintenance glass behind Samuel's bed wide open!
Before Evan could depress the plunger a quarter of an inch, Detective Miller reached straight through the open wall aperture behind the headboard, clamped his steel handcuff ratchets around Evan's right wrist, and yanked his arm violently backward through the frame, snapping the syringe clean off the intravenous line!
While Evan screamed in shock with his arm pinned through the wall, I burst out of the adjoining door into the main corridor, tackled a fleeing Gwendolyn straight into a rolling metal crash cart, and watched two hospital security officers pin her flat to the linoleum floor.
Inside the room, Detective Miller dragged a kicking, pale-faced Evan Cole out into the hallway in handcuffs while nurses rushed in to unstrap my sobbing father and flush his intravenous line.
"It is over, Evan—both you and Gwendolyn are going to state prison for attempted murder," I said, holding up the real titanium cylinder and my birth mother's gold lion signet ring in front of his face as the officers searched his pockets.
Instead of begging for mercy as the police pulled a black encrypted satellite phone from his jacket, Evan stared at the ticking digital clock on the hospital wall and let out a low, chilling laugh that made the hair on my arms stand up.
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"You are ten minutes too late, Paige," Evan whispered as a breaking-news alert suddenly blared across the television monitor mounted above the nurse's station, showing a massive convoy of black armored cars surrounding my architectural firm and the Reed Tower downtown.
"I didn't come to this hospital alone—twenty minutes ago I sold the copy of your birth certificate to your mother Victoria's older brother, Victor Reed, the man who murdered your mother twenty-five years ago so he wouldn't have to split your grandfather's ten-billion-dollar empire, and his men just took your grandfather hostage!"
