Chapter 14 - The Doctor Was Never Missing
Victor’s hospital room was empty.
The IV line lay neatly coiled on the bed.
His clothes were gone. So was the second-ring photograph.
Detective Grant found a note beneath the pillow.
I’M SORRY. I SHOULD HAVE STOPPED THIS YEARS AGO.
Alessandro read it twice.
“He was part of it.”
“Maybe,” Grant said. “Or he thinks he was.”
Enzo refused to talk. Carlo, sedated after surgery, asked for a lawyer.
Isabella did talk.
She admitted Enzo had been in the kitchen, but insisted the third voice—the one called Doctor—was not Victor.
“Then who?” Grant asked.
Isabella shook her head. “I never saw him clearly. Enzo made us keep the lights low. He said cameras couldn’t identify what they couldn’t see.”
“But the kitchen camera saw Enzo.”
“He didn’t know about that one.”
Alessandro remembered who had installed the camera: Victor.
Not security. Victor.
Three months earlier, after food had begun disappearing from the kitchen, Victor jokingly suggested a small camera to catch the “cookie thief.”
He had created the evidence that now implicated Enzo.
Why?
Alessandro drove to Victor’s apartment with Grant.
The place was almost empty. No suitcase. No passport. Nothing suggested an escape.
In a desk drawer, they found letters from Alessandro’s father.
The last one was dated two days before his death.
Victor,
If anything happens to me, do not trust the diagnosis. Enzo knows why.
Alessandro stopped breathing for a moment.
His father had died of a heart attack at fifty-eight.
Victor had been a resident then.
Grant read the line again. “Your father suspected something.”
Alessandro stared at the wall.
“This didn’t start with me.”
“No.”
A floorboard creaked behind them.
Grant drew her weapon.
“Police!”
A man stepped out from the kitchen with both hands raised.
Victor.
He looked exhausted.
“I didn’t run,” he said. “I came here to get the letters before Enzo’s lawyer found them.”
Alessandro crossed the room and grabbed his shirt.
“Who is the doctor?”
Victor did not resist.
Then he said the one name Alessandro never expected.
“Your father’s cardiologist.”
May you like
Dr. Samuel Pierce.
The man who had signed Alessandro Romano Sr.’s death certificate.
