Chapter 60 Chapter 60
Chapter 60 Chapter 60
At 6:40 a.m. on Friday, Derek went up to the main studio with the video from the office on a tablet and the look on the faces of men who hadn't slept for two nights.
“Boss.”
“Derek.”
“The camera in your wife’s office, from last Thursday, 12:22 a.m.”
Cavalier grabbed it and pressed play.
Twenty-three seconds.
Alex entering Laura’s office, the door latch clicking, Alex approaching, both hands on her face, the forced kiss, and Laura pushing him away with both hands on his chest—all in exactly three seconds.
Then the slap, and Alex on the couch with blood on his lip.
Cavalier handed the tablet back to Derek without looking at him.
“Derek, Alex Romero’s number.”
“It’s in the phone’s chat, boss.”
Cavalier took out his cell phone and dialed. Four rings. Alex answered on the fifth, his voice heavy with the early morning at 6:30 a.m.
“Hello?”
“Alex.”
“Cavalier.”
“Just one sentence, Alex.”
“Go ahead.”
“If you ever set foot near my wife’s clinic again—or near her, or near Carla—I’ll find you, and when I do, I won’t warn you first, okay?”
A five-second pause on the other end.
—Okay.
Cavalier hung up.
—Derek, Hazelton, time to head out.
“Forty minutes, boss. The helicopter’s already on the roof.”
At 9:20, the helicopter landed in Hazelton, West Virginia.
The director of the federal facility was waiting for Cavalier in the main office with the look of an official who’d spent the entire night huddled against the wall.
“Mr. Cavalier, I’m notifying you that Vanessa Ashford was transferred last night at 11:50 p.m. to the Lewisburg Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, pursuant to an order signed by Prosecutor Constance Vellori and authorized by Judge Henderson.”
“Henderson has been on medical leave since last Monday.”
“We verified this at 5:00 a.m., sir. The electronic signature was forged; the transfer was a escape. The convoy never reached Lewisburg, and the last report places it at a gas station near Cumberland, Maryland, at 2:10 a.m., after which the transponder signal was lost.”
—The guard?
—He was found this morning tied up on a country road, out of uniform and with a head injury. He said two armed men ambushed the convoy at 2:15 a.m.; the prisoner got out and got into a black sedan.
—Any visitors in the last fifteen days?
“Her lawyer, Constance Vellori, twice a week, and forty-five days ago, her father, Edmund Ashford.”
Cavalier nodded and left without waiting any longer.
On the helicopter ride back, he called Manuel.
“Grandpa, Vanessa escaped six hours ago; the convoy was ambushed near Cumberland. The prosecutor in the case is the same lawyer from the prison, and Edmund Ashford visited her six weeks ago.”
“Son, Edmund swore to me on his children’s lives two months ago that he wasn’t involved in this.”
“He lied.”
“I’ll kill him myself, son.”
“No, Grandpa, we’ll let him live—we need him to turn in his daughter, okay?”
“All right.”
Over the following weeks, Laura observed bed rest, and Vargas gave her a full discharge the next Saturday, with the pregnancy confirmed and the bleeding stopped. She returned to the clinic on Monday for a reduced six-hour shift, with two of Derek’s men in the lobby and another in the parking lot, and Cavalier didn’t question her routine even once.
Life settled into a routine at the mansion. Laura on the left side of the bed, Cavalier on the right, his hand on her belly every night before turning off the lamp. Vargas stopped by twice a week, and the baby grew week by week without a hitch.
Manuel made two trips to Boston and one to Philadelphia on Edmund Ashford’s trail, while Derek assembled a team of six men dedicated solely to Vanessa, but in thirty days not a single solid lead turned up.
Carla was seven months pregnant, and Marcela threw her a small baby shower in the covered garden. Laura attended in loose-fitting pants, her baby bump—now two months along—just beginning to show, with no media frenzy, no surprises. Thirty-five consecutive days without a crisis; the mansion was quiet for the first time.
Thirty-five days later, on a Friday at 2:10 p.m., Laura finished a call with the accountant and stood up from her desk to go to the small bathroom in the office.
She was eight weeks and one day pregnant, according to the latest ultrasound. Her uniform blouse still buttoned—but barely.
She washed her hands, smoothed her hair in the mirror, and walked out.
When she returned to her desk, someone was sitting in her chair.
White shirt, dark coat over it, long hair braided to one side, both hands folded in her lap, and the face of a woman who’d been free for thirty-five days after forty-two in a federal prison.
“Vanessa.”
“Sister-in-law.”
“How did you get in?”
“Through the service staircase—the same one Alex used.”
“Your face is on the watch list at six federal stations; the lobby guard saw you.”
“The lobby guard makes less than what your father-in-law pays the reporter, and the news thing can be handled with a wig and a dark jacket—I’ve been in Manhattan for five days without your husband noticing me.”
Laura didn’t walk over to the desk; she stayed standing next to the filing cabinet, three meters away from Vanessa.
“Vanessa, if you came all the way here, it wasn’t to talk.”
“No, sister-in-law.”
Vanessa slowly opened her right hand on her lap.
She was holding a medium-sized, silver pistol without a silencer, which she raised until it rested on the desk with the barrel pointing at the left-hand wall, posing no direct threat.
“Sister-in-law, don’t panic just yet—if I wanted you dead, you’d have been dead three minutes ago.”
—Vanessa.
“Yes.”
“I’m a nurse, two months pregnant. If my blood pressure goes up even a millimeter, my husband will find you before nightfall—and not because of the newspaper. Let’s talk while we’re sitting down, without you touching that gun, or I’ll call Derek right now.”
Vanessa rested her right hand on the barrel of the gun, without lifting it.
“Sister-in-law, before you call anyone, I’ve got some information you’d better hear first.”
Laura didn’t move from the filing cabinet.
“Go ahead, but make it quick.”
“The guy who paid for my escape, sister-in-law, has been on a Pacific island for three weeks and flies across the Atlantic in a private plane every fifteen days.”
Laura held her breath for three seconds.
“Marcelo.”
“Marcelo, sister-in-law. Your husband told you he’s under 24-hour surveillance, with no access to outside communication, but I’ve been free for thirty-five days, and he paid for it with money he withdrew before your father-in-law’s freeze.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because he left me high and dry a week ago; he got me out of jail to use me as a front, not out of love; and because when he gets to Manhattan, sister-in-law, the first thing he’s going to do is come for you and the baby.”
Pause.
—Vanessa.
—Yes.
“That’s some expensive information. What do you want?”
“A way out of the country, a clean passport, three million in Switzerland, and your father-in-law’s word that my father’s company won’t go bankrupt when all this is over.”
Laura held her gaze for five seconds.
“Vanessa, I’m not the one negotiating that—my father-in-law and my husband are. But let me tell you one thing: you don’t make an offer like that with a gun on the desk. Put it down. And move it away from your hand. Now.”
Vanessa looked at the gun for three seconds, then looked at Laura.
“What if I put it down?”
“If you put it down, I’ll call Derek and you’ll be taken to a room in the mansion under custody—not a federal cell just yet—and my father-in-law will talk to you first thing tomorrow morning. If you don’t put it down, I’ll call Derek anyway, but he’ll take you away on a stretcher.”
Vanessa didn’t lower her hand.
A long pause.
“Vanessa, one more thing before you decide.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re not a murderer.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because I’ve been treating people who kill and people who kill themselves for twelve years—the two have a different smell. Murderers don’t walk into a private clinic at two in the afternoon with a gun on their lap; murderers shoot in the hallway before the victim sees their face. You’ve been waiting six minutes for me to come out of the bathroom.”
Vanessa laughed—a short, hoarse laugh.
“Sister-in-law, you underestimate me.”
“I underestimate you just enough, Vanessa. Put it down.”
Vanessa looked at the gun again. Three seconds. Four.
And then she raised it, slowly, and aimed it at Laura’s left shoulder.
“Sister-in-law, I’m warning you: if I shoot you in the shoulder, your husband will kill me, but at least I’ll leave you with a bullet bearing my mark.”
“Vanessa.”
“Yes.”
“If you shoot me, he won’t kill me—he’ll kill my daughter. Vargas confirmed last week that the baby already has a heartbeat, and if my adrenaline’s pumping right now, I’m increasing the risk by twenty percent. Do you want to be the woman who killed an eight-week-old baby, Vanessa?”
Vanessa held his gaze for five seconds. Her hand holding the gun trembled a millimeter.
“Sister-in-law, your husband never loved me.”
“I know.”
“And you’ve had him for forty-two days.”
“I have him.”
“And that, Laura, pisses me off more than prison.”
And as she said this, Laura, with her left hand resting on the filing cabinet, had reached for the steel paper dispenser she kept tucked away on the edge.
She grabbed it.
“Vanessa.”
“Yes.”
“Last time. Put it down.”
“No.”
Laura threw it away with a smooth motion—the kind she’d learned at age twelve while restraining psychotic patients.
It hit her on the wrist.
Vanessa screamed. The gun fell to the floor. And before she could bend down to pick it up, Laura already had the desk phone in her hand.
“Derek, my office, now.”