Chapter 12 - Lockdown
Daniel ran before anyone finished reading the message.
“Lock down St. Matthew’s!” he shouted at Ortiz.
The hospital went into security protocol within minutes.
Doors sealed.
Visitors were stopped.
Police moved floor by floor.
Sarah had already sensed something was wrong when a nurse entered and quietly closed the blinds.
“Where’s Grace?” Sarah asked.
“NICU is secure.”
“Where is my husband?”
“On his way.”
Sarah pushed herself upright despite the pain.
“No. Bring my baby here.”
The nurse hesitated.
“Now.”
Grace was wheeled in under guard.
Sarah took her daughter and held her against her chest.
Across the hall, Arthur sat in a chair with his injured arm in a sling and a heavy walking cane beside him.
When he saw a woman in blue scrubs enter from the service elevator, he noticed one thing immediately.
She wore expensive black heels.
Hospital staff did not wear heels in the surgical wing.
“Ma’am,” Arthur called.
The woman kept walking.
Arthur stood.
“Stop.”
She turned.
Not Eleanor.
A younger woman Arthur recognized from Mercer’s office.
She reached into her scrub pocket.
Arthur swung the cane into her wrist.
A small pistol clattered across the floor.
Security tackled her.
Sarah heard the commotion and tightened her arms around Grace.
Detective Ortiz arrived three minutes later.
The woman was Leah Price, a paralegal who had worked for Mercer for seven years.
Under questioning, she broke fast.
“Eleanor said nobody would get hurt,” Leah insisted.
“She sent you into a maternity wing with a gun,” Ortiz said.
“It was supposed to scare Sarah. Just scare her into signing something.”
“What?”
Leah pointed to a document hidden beneath her scrub top.
It was a notarized statement claiming Sarah had slipped from the balcony and that Arthur had falsely accused Eleanor because of a personal grudge.
Sarah read it and laughed once.
“She thinks I’ll sign this after what she did?”
Leah looked terrified. “She said you would if she had the baby.”
Daniel arrived just in time to hear that sentence.
He crossed the hallway in three strides.
“Where is Eleanor?”
Leah shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
Ortiz leaned close. “Then what do you know?”
Leah began crying.
“She kept talking about one place. She said if everything went bad, she had one last thing Charles could never take from her.”
“What place?”
Leah swallowed.
“The old Vance headquarters.”
Daniel looked at Ortiz.
“The trust archive.”
May you like
Leah nodded.
Then she added, “She said she was going to burn it to the ground tonight.”
