Chapter 9 - The Second Woman
My breath caught in my throat. Dr. Laura Sims.
She wasn't just Ryan’s colleague.
Two years ago, during an Apex company Christmas party that Emily had dragged me to, I had watched Laura Sims across a crowded banquet hall. She was polished, ambitious, and watched Ryan with the hungry, possessive focus of a predator sharing a kill. At the time, Emily had laughed it off, saying, *“Mom, you think every woman in corporate America is having an affair.”*
It wasn't an affair. It was a joint venture.
I shoved the phone into my coat pocket, put the car in gear, and pulled up to the front entrance of First Fidelity Bank just as the security guard unlocked the glass doors for the morning.
I walked straight past the teller line to the glass-walled office in the back.
Arthur Sterling looked up from his computer, his gray mustache twitching in surprise. “Carol? Good heavens, what are you doing here at eight-thirty on a Tuesday?”
I closed the door behind me and sat down opposite him. “Arthur, I need to see Box 40812.”
Arthur blinked. “Carol, you know how safety deposit boxes work. Unless your name is on the signature card—”
“Ryan Vance’s name is on the card,” I said, placing the brass key on the green felt blotter. “And right now, Ryan Vance has Emily locked in a private wing at Saint Jude’s with an unregistered IV line. His mother was arrested two hours ago with counterfeit passports. Look at my face, Arthur. Do I look like I’m asking for a banking courtesy?”
Arthur’s face paled. He looked down at the key, then at my eyes. He had known me for twenty years. He knew that when I spoke in that low, steady whisper, someone was either going to prison or to the morgue.
“I can lose my license, Carol,” Arthur whispered.
“You’ll lose a lot more if an infant and my daughter die because you followed a protocol for a child-killer,” I said.
Arthur swallowed hard. He stood up, locked his office door, and retrieved the master vault key from his drawer. “Follow me. The security cameras in the outer vault cycle every forty-five seconds. Don't touch the outer frame.”
Two minutes later, we were standing in the quiet, climate-controlled chill of the basement vault.
Arthur slotted the bank’s master key into Box 40812, then turned Ryan’s brass key. The heavy steel door popped open with a solid metallic *thunk*.
I pulled out the long metal box and set it on the examination table.
Arthur stepped back toward the vault door, turning his back to give me plausible deniability. “I didn't see anything.”
I lifted the lid.
Inside were four thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in federal reserve bands—approximately forty thousand dollars in cash.
Beneath the cash lay an envelope addressed to *Saint Jude’s Department of Clinical Research*.
Inside the envelope was an offshore banking agreement registered in the Cayman Islands, listing two equal beneficiaries for a corporate account holding four point two million dollars:
*Ryan Vance.*
*Laura Sims.*
And clipped to the agreement was a handwritten clinical trial waiver, pre-signed by Dr. Laura Sims, approving Emily Vance as a subject for an "experimental coagulopathy intervention."
They weren't just killing Emily for the two-point-five-million-dollar insurance policy.
They were using her death to hide a multi-million-dollar clinical trial embezzlement scheme. If Emily died of a "rare, documented blood disorder" during their experimental trial, Saint Jude’s research foundation would release a four-million-dollar private grant directly into Laura Sims’s offshore shell company.
Emily was worth six point seven million dollars dead.
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And she had less than three hours before Laura Sims administered the final dose.
***
