Chapter 7 - THE LOCKED CORRIDOR
The blood froze in my veins.
"What do you mean Miller isn't answering?" I cried, already lifting the hem of my wool coat and running toward the heavy mahogany side door.
Lucas beat me to it by half a second, his hand wrenching the brass handle down. The door flew open into the plush, red-carpeted private elevator lobby of the Grand Wellington’s fourth floor.
Across the lobby, beside the potted palms and the leather bench where seven-year-old Leo had been sitting with his crayons two minutes ago, U.S. Marshal Miller was on one knee, holding a white linen handkerchief against the side of his bleeding forehead. Next to him on the floor lay a shattered heavy glass ashtray from the elevator stand.
The leather bench was empty.
All that remained on the cushion was a single broken green crayon and the folded restaurant menu—with a jagged half-drawn dinosaur trailing off the edge of the paper.
"Miller!" Lucas shouted, dropping to one knee beside his partner, his hand immediately going to the Glock holstered under his suit jacket. "Where is he? Where’s Leo?"
"I’m sorry, Lucas—it wasn't Maddox," Miller gasped, blinking away blood as he pointed a trembling hand toward the brass stairwell door at the end of the corridor, where the kitchen service hallway intersected the lobby. "A guy in a catering jacket came out of the service elevator thirty seconds ago—twenty-six, dark hair, scar on his chin. I thought he was hotel staff until he swung the stand ashtray at my head. Right then Maddox burst through the kitchen doors behind him. They went down the East Freight Stairwell with the kid!"
Behind us, Sierra Vale stumbled into the lobby doorway, her face chalk-white when she heard the description.
"Twenty-six, scar on his chin?" Sierra whispered in terror. "Oh God. That’s Ricky. That’s my brother’s kid—the paralegal who stamped the forged deed!"
Lucas spun on his heel and pinned Sierra against the wall by her shoulders, his hazel eyes blazing with a fury I had never seen in my gentle little brother.
"Why the hell is your nephew in this building, Sierra?!" Lucas roared.
"He works security catering for the hotel group on weekends! That’s how we got the private dining room code!" Sierra sobbed, her hands shaking violently as she fumbled in her clutch for her phone. "When the livestream showed Arthur Vance reading Ricky’s expired notary stamp into the record twenty minutes ago, Ricky must have panicked! He knows he’s on felony probation for check kiting—if he goes down for real estate forgery, he gets five years at Stateville!"
"And Graham ran right into him in the kitchen corridor," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs as I remembered the layout of the Grand Wellington from the dozen charity galas I had organized here over the last decade. "Lucas—the East Freight Stairwell doesn't go to the street!"
Lucas looked at me sharply. "Where does it go?"
"It goes down to the sub-basement loading dock along the lower Wacker Drive riverwalk!" I said, already pulling the pearl earrings from my ears and kicking off my heels so I could run in my stockings on the marble floor. "Graham keeps his private boat moored at the Marina slip fifty yards from the lower Wacker service ramp from April through November! They haven't pulled it out for winter storage yet!"
Lucas didn't waste a breath. He spoke rapidly into his radio, ordering Chicago Police marine units and federal backup to seal the Lower Wacker service ramp, then shoved through the heavy steel fire door of the East Freight Stairwell.
I was right behind him.
"Clara, stay upstairs!" Lucas yelled over his shoulder as his dress shoes pounded down the concrete steps three at a time.
"Not a chance in hell, Lucas!" I shouted back, gripping the cold iron handrail as we plunged down four flights into the concrete bowels of the historic hotel.
Twenty-four years ago, I had dragged Lucas out of a smoke-filled house while Graham tried to bury our family’s future. I was not going to stand in an upstairs dining room while that same coward put his hands on Lucas’s little boy.
When we burst through the bottom fire door into the cavernous, fluorescent-lit sub-basement loading dock, the freezing November wind off the Chicago River hit us directly in the face. The giant corrugated steel roll-up door at the end of the concrete bay was raised three feet off the asphalt ramp—and its manual chain hoist had been jammed with a steel crowbar so it couldn't be lifted higher without cutting the gears.
Beyond that three-foot gap, fifty yards across the slick, sleet-covered concrete of Lower Wacker Drive, the black water of the Chicago River churned under the green iron girders of the Wabash Avenue Bridge.
And there, caught in the sodium-vapor streetlights near the riverwalk railing, stood Graham.
He didn't have his tuxedo jacket anymore. His white dress shirt was torn at the collar, soaked with freezing sleet. Twenty feet behind him, Sierra’s twenty-six-year-old nephew Ricky was already sprinting wild-eyed down the lower ramp toward a parked Honda Civic, abandoning Graham the second he realized kidnapping a federal prosecutor’s child carried a life sentence.
Graham was alone.
And he was holding seven-year-old Leo by the back of his little navy blazer right beside the concrete steps leading down to his forty-foot cabin cruiser, The Sovereign.
Lucas dropped to one knee and slid under the three-foot gap of the steel loading dock door, drawing his service weapon as he came up on the slick pavement. I scrambled under the door right behind him, tearing the knee of my stockings on the salt-crusted concrete, holding the silver-framed watercolor drawing Leo had left in the dining room against my chest.
"Graham! Let him go!" Lucas shouted, stopping twenty-five feet away, his gun aimed steady at Graham’s chest while he kept his finger disciplined along the frame to avoid any risk to his son. "It’s over! Look at the bridge—CPD cruisers already have the upper ramps blocked, and the Coast Guard cutter is at the Michigan Avenue lock! You aren't getting that boat fifty feet down the river!"
Graham looked up at the bridge above us, where flashing blue and red lights were already painting the wet iron girders. He looked trapped, erratic, and completely hollowed out—the way he had looked in 1997 when the banks rejected his first loan, before my father saved him.
Except Leo wasn't crying.
The seven-year-old boy stood remarkably still in the sleet, his round tortoiseshell glasses speckled with rain, clutching his small green crayon in his fist.
"You dropped my picture, mister," Leo said in a clear, steady seven-year-old voice, looking up at Graham without flinching. "My dad painted that when he was ten. You aren't supposed to grab kids' coats."
Graham looked down at the boy—at the unmistakable Hale jawline and hazel eyes staring up at him without an ounce of fear—and something inside my husband seemed to fracture completely.
"He took everything from me, Clara!" Graham screamed at me over the roar of the wind and the river, his right hand white-knuckled around the gold Montblanc pen in his pocket while his left hand held Leo’s shoulder. "Thirty years I built this name! Every tower on that skyline has Maddox on the brass plaque! And you stood in my kitchen for twenty-four years smiling at me while you raised him to take it all back!"
"I didn't build Lucas to take your name, Graham," I said, stepping carefully past Lucas across the icy concrete, holding my hands out clearly where Graham could see them. "Look at what I’m holding."
I held up the two silver-framed watercolor drawings—the smoke-stained one from 2002 that Arthur had brought in the suitcase, and the identical one Leo had carried into the restaurant tonight.
"You never once looked closely at that drawing in the suitcase tonight, did you?" I asked softly, taking another step closer until I was only ten feet from my husband and my grandnephew. "You thought Lucas painted three stick figures—me, my father, and himself—standing outside the Highland Park house."
Graham blinked through the sleet, his chest heaving. "What?"
"Look at the tall stick figure in the middle holding the little boy’s hand, Graham," I said, holding the 2002 painting up under the streetlight so he could see the clumsy yellow crayon tie painted on the tall figure’s chest. "My father never wore yellow ties. You wore a yellow silk tie the day we moved into Highland Park. Ten-year-old Lucas painted you, Graham. He painted you holding his hand outside our house, and he left it on your pillow the night of November 14 because he wanted you to finally think of him as your son."
Graham’s breath caught in his throat. His eyes locked onto the yellow crayon tie in the twenty-four-year-old drawing.
For two seconds, the ruthless mogul vanished, replaced by a broken, sixty-two-year-old man realizing what he had thrown into the flames twenty-four years ago. His grip on Leo’s blazer slackened.
"Leo," I said calmly, holding out my hand. "Come look at the dinosaur your dad told me about."
Leo immediately stepped out from under Graham’s limp hand and ran straight into my arms. I scooped him up, shielding his face against my neck as Lucas surged forward to cuff Graham.
"No!" Graham choked out, backing violently against the slick iron gate of the boat slip as Lucas closed the distance. "I’m not going to a federal cage at sixty-two, Clara! You hear me?! If I go down for that riverfront, you'll never find where I hid the rest of the trust!"
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Graham lunged backward onto the wet fiberglass swim platform of his cabin cruiser, reaching for the mooring line to cast off into the icy current—and as his leather dress shoes hit the sleet-covered fiberglass, his feet went completely out from under him.
There was a sickening crack as the back of Graham’s shoulder slammed against the steel cleat on the dock edge, and before Lucas could reach the gate, my husband plunged headfirst into the black, thirty-eight-degree water between the hull of the boat and the concrete seawall.
