Chapter 6 - THE BASEMENT UNDER ST. VINCENT'S
Adeline slapped Enzo before she understood she had raised her hand.
The sound cracked through the red-lit corridor.
Luca stopped moving.
Detective Quinn did not.
She watched Enzo's face instead.
He did not touch Adeline.
He did not raise his voice.
He simply looked at her as the mark from her palm began to rise along his cheek.
"You saw Daniel?"
Adeline could barely breathe.
"Three years ago?"
Enzo's answer was quiet.
"Yes."
"And you said nothing."
"I did not know he was missing then."
"That is a lie."
"No."
"He was already gone."
"Not when I saw him."
Adeline stared at him.
"When?"
"June seventeenth."
The date from Daniel's tape.
The last date anyone was supposed to trust.
Her knees felt weak.
"Where?"
"St. Vincent's basement."
"Why?"
Enzo looked at Quinn.
"Because that basement is not on the hospital plans."
Quinn's eyes narrowed.
"What is it?"
"It used to be a private trauma room."
"Used by whom?"
"My family."
Adeline laughed once.
"Of course your family had a secret hospital."
Enzo accepted the contempt.
"Twelve years ago, after I was shot, I was taken there instead of the emergency department."
"Why?"
"Because the police were looking for me too."
Quinn's expression sharpened.
"For what?"
"A homicide I did not commit."
"Convenient."
"I was twenty-five and stupid enough to solve problems with people who created bigger ones."
"That does not answer the question."
"The victim was Vincent Caruso."
Quinn went still.
The name was old Chicago history.
Caruso had been a union broker whose murder triggered three years of investigations and two gang prosecutions.
No one had ever been convicted of killing him.
Enzo continued.
"Camilla was there the night I was shot."
Adeline stared.
"You knew her twelve years ago?"
"I met her that night."
"And then you became engaged?"
"Seven years later."
"Why?"
Enzo looked toward the dark service door where the false Daniel had vanished.
"Because she had a video from that basement."
Quinn's expression changed.
"Of the Caruso murder?"
"Of me holding the gun."
"Did you shoot him?"
"No."
"But the video makes it look like you did."
"Yes."
Adeline felt a new kind of anger.
Camilla had not merely been the spoiled fiancée of a feared man.
She had been holding a knife against his throat for years.
"You married her to keep the video buried."
"I agreed to marry her."
"Same cowardice with better tailoring."
Luca looked away again.
Enzo absorbed the insult.
"Yes."
The answer disarmed her.
He did not excuse himself.
He did not call the decision strategic.
He called it what she had.
Cowardice.
Footsteps returned from the corridor.
Luca's men came back empty-handed.
"Service tunnel exits to the parking garage."
"We lost him."
Quinn looked at Adeline.
"Did the voice sound exactly like your brother?"
"Yes."
"Could it have been a recording?"
"Maybe."
Enzo picked up the cassette recorder.
"Daniel warned her about audio and video."
Quinn nodded slowly.
"So someone has enough samples of his voice to imitate him."
Adeline thought about her brother's old interviews.
News broadcasts.
Public hearings.
Phone messages.
Thousands of recorded words.
Hope collapsed into suspicion again.
She hated whoever was doing this for that most of all.
They were making Daniel alive and dead over and over.
"We're going to St. Vincent's," she said.
Enzo looked at her.
"Daniel told you not to trust the first person who says he's alive."
"He also told me to make you show me the basement."
Quinn checked her watch.
"We go with a warrant."
Enzo almost objected.
She raised one finger.
"Try me."
He closed his mouth.
They spent nearly an hour waiting for the search order.
During that hour, Adeline learned what fear looked like when it had nowhere to go.
Enzo walked exactly seventeen steps from one end of the Trust building lobby to the other, turned, and walked back.
He did it eleven times.
Luca eventually said, "You're wearing a path into your father's floor."
Enzo stopped.
"Good."
Adeline sat on a marble bench with Quinn.
"Does he always pace?"
"Men who think they control everything become fascinating when paperwork controls them."
Adeline smiled despite herself.
Quinn's phone buzzed with updates.
Bellamy's bank cards had not been used.
His passport remained electronically inactive.
Gabriel's phone was off.
A traffic camera had captured a dark SUV leaving the Trust building nine minutes after the photograph was sent.
Its license plate belonged to a delivery van stolen two days earlier.
Inside the lobby, Enzo's people searched old visitor books.
One entry from three years earlier carried Daniel Croft's signature.
Date: June seventeenth.
Time in: 10:41 p.m.
Time out: blank.
Adeline stared at the line.
"He was here."
Enzo stood beside her.
"Yes."
"After St. Vincent's?"
"We don't know yet."
The handwriting looked like Daniel's.
Quinn photographed it.
"The ink needs dating."
Adeline sighed.
"You ruin everything."
"Professional obligation."
A retired night porter was reached by phone.
He remembered Daniel because Daniel argued with Matteo in the lobby.
"About what?" Adeline asked through speakerphone.
The old man coughed.
"A book."
"Mr. Marchetti kept saying it wasn't one book."
"He said, 'North is a map, not a ledger.'"
Enzo frowned.
That phrase meant nothing to him.
The porter continued.
"The younger man said someone named Valerie would kill people if they waited."
Adeline looked at Enzo.
"Valerie?"
He shook his head.
"I don't know."
The name would matter later.
For now it joined the growing list of unexplained things.
The porter remembered one more detail.
Daniel had been carrying a canvas bag.
When he left the lobby through the basement stairwell, he no longer had it.
"Where did it go?"
"Mr. Marchetti had it."
Adeline turned to Enzo.
"Your father took Daniel's bag."
Enzo looked toward the old elevators.
"Then whatever was inside may have stayed in this building."
They searched Matteo's former office while waiting for the warrant.
No canvas bag.
No notebooks.
No North Ledger.
But behind a drawer they found a torn envelope with Teresa Marchetti's handwriting.
For Elena, if Matteo fails.
Adeline showed it to Enzo.
His face tightened.
"My mother knew someone named Elena."
"Apparently."
Now it was Adeline's turn to use his word.
He gave her a tired look.
"I deserved that."
At 2:58 a.m., Quinn's phone rang.
The judge had signed the order.
Enzo stopped pacing.
The fear did not leave his face.
It simply became direction.
By three in the morning, St. Vincent's legal counsel had been awakened, a judge had signed a narrow search order, and a hospital administrator named Dr. Evelyn Shaw was standing in a service elevator looking furious.
"There is no secret basement," she said.
Enzo pressed the button marked B2 even though the panel displayed only B1.
Nothing happened.
He removed a brass key from his wallet.
Adeline stared.
"You carry the key?"
"I have for twelve years."
He inserted it into a small slot beneath the buttons.
A light appeared behind B2.
Dr. Shaw went pale.
Quinn noticed.
"You were saying?"
The elevator descended.
When the doors opened, cold fluorescent light revealed a hallway sealed in dust.
Old medical carts stood beneath plastic sheets.
A red line ran along the floor toward a set of double doors.
Enzo walked more slowly now.
Memories altered his posture.
Adeline could see the twenty-five-year-old man inside the feared one.
He stopped outside treatment room three.
"This is where they operated on me."
Quinn opened the door.
The room was empty except for an exam table and a wall cabinet.
Adeline looked around.
"Where did you see Daniel?"
Enzo pointed farther down the hall.
"Records room."
They found it locked.
The hospital administrator claimed she had no key.
Enzo used his.
Again.
Quinn looked at him.
"Your key opens a lot of doors in a hospital you supposedly do not control."
"My father funded this floor."
Inside the records room were shelves of paper files.
Most were more than a decade old.
Adeline searched the labels.
No Croft.
No Daniel.
Then Luca called from the hallway.
"Enzo."
They found him beside a section of wall where the paint was slightly newer.
A rectangular outline showed beneath it.
Enzo touched the seam.
"There used to be a door here."
Dr. Shaw shook her head quickly.
"I have worked at St. Vincent's for nine years."
"There has never been a door there."
Enzo looked at her.
"I walked through it twelve years ago."
Quinn turned to the hospital administrator.
"Who ordered the wall sealed?"
"I don't know."
"Find out."
Luca tapped the wall.
Hollow.
They obtained permission to open it.
A maintenance worker cut through drywall.
Behind it stood the original steel door.
The lock had been welded shut.
It took twenty minutes to open.
The room beyond was small.
No windows.
No furniture.
Only a drain in the concrete floor and a row of hooks on one wall.
Adeline's stomach turned.
Quinn shone her flashlight toward the back.
"There."
Someone had scratched words into the concrete.
A + D.
Beneath the initials was a date.
6/17.
Adeline touched the A.
"Daniel used to sign birthday cards A plus D."
"Adeline and Daniel."
Enzo looked toward the drain.
"This is where I saw him."
She turned.
"In this room?"
"He was standing in the doorway."
"He asked me where my father kept the North Ledger."
"I told him I did not know what he was talking about."
"Then what?"
"Gabriel came down the hall."
Adeline went still.
"Gabriel Stone?"
"Yes."
"Your security deputy?"
"He worked for my father then."
"What did Daniel do?"
"He left through the garage tunnel."
"And you never saw him again?"
"No."
Quinn crouched beside the drain.
Something metallic caught the flashlight.
She put on gloves and reached inside with forceps.
A small brass object emerged.
A key.
The number 214 was stamped on one side.
Adeline stopped breathing.
The key stolen from her apartment lay inside the secret hospital room.
Quinn held it up.
"Either someone put this here very recently..."
"Or whoever searched my apartment came here afterward," Adeline said.
Enzo looked at the freshly disturbed dust near the door.
Footprints crossed the room.
One set.
Large.
Recent.
Luca followed them toward the back wall.
They ended beneath the row of hooks.
He reached up.
One hook moved.
A hidden panel opened.
Inside was a thin file folder.
Quinn removed it.
The label read CROFT, DANIEL.
Adeline's knees nearly gave out.
Quinn opened the folder.
The first page was a medical intake form.
Patient name: Daniel Croft.
Date admitted: June 17.
Discharge date: blank.
Condition: gunshot wound.
Adeline looked at Enzo.
"You said he walked away."
"He did."
"Then how was he admitted here later that night?"
Enzo stared at the page.
"I don't know."
Quinn turned to the second sheet.
A physician signature appeared at the bottom.
Dr. Evelyn Shaw.
Everyone looked at the hospital administrator.
She backed toward the door.
"That is not possible."
Quinn held up the page.
"It is your signature."
Dr. Shaw shook her head.
"I wasn't working on this floor then."
Enzo's eyes narrowed.
"You said you had worked here nine years."
"I have."
Adeline did the math.
Daniel disappeared three years ago.
Shaw had been here.
The woman looked terrified now.
"I never treated Daniel Croft."
Quinn turned the page.
A photograph had been clipped to the back.
It showed Daniel unconscious on a hospital bed.
A newspaper lay beside him.
The date was two days after his official disappearance.
Adeline covered her mouth.
He had been alive.
At least for two days.
Then she saw the person standing in the corner of the photograph.
May you like
Camilla Ashford.
ENZO MARCHETTI & ADELINE CROFT
