Daddy's Gone a Hunting (42 page)

“Hannah, after we got back from the hospital yesterday, your dad was very upset even though Kate was doing much better and was going to be moved to a private room soon. You would think that he would be happy that she’s going to wake up soon. Anyhow, I tried to persuade him to have Bernard drive us up for a nice lunch in one of those dear little inns near the Hudson River, you know, around West Point, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He . . .”

Hannah couldn’t listen anymore. She closed the phone and dropped it into her bag. She thought about the important executive meeting scheduled for four o’clock regarding the spring fashion show. She would have to miss it. She pushed back her chair, grabbed her coat off the rack in her small office, and threw it over her shoulders. She stopped momentarily at the reception desk as she rushed toward the elevator. “I have to go to the hospital. I have to be with my sister. Tell them I’m sorry. I just can’t wait any longer.”

It took ten long minutes to get a cab. “Manhattan Midtown Hospital,” she said nervously, “and please hurry.”

Alarmed, the driver looked back at her. “You’re not having a baby or something, are you, lady?” he asked.

“No. No. Of course not. My sister is a patient there.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. I’ll do the best I can.”

Has Kate been moved yet? Hannah wondered, as twenty agonizing minutes later, she threw money into the slot between her and the driver, hurried out of the cab, and ran into the hospital. There was a line at the visitors’ desk but, apologizing to the other people who were waiting, she rushed to the front of it. “I believe my sister was being moved from intensive care to a private room today. Where is she?”

“What is her name?”

“Connelly. Kate Connelly.”

The receptionist checked the computer. “She is in room eleven-oh-six. Her father just arrived a few minutes ago. He should be with her now.”

A sense of sheer panic consumed Hannah. She turned and began to run to the elevators. Not understanding why she was so frightened, she realized that she was pleading, “Let her be all right. Please, let her be all right.”

97

C
onnor Connelly stepped off the elevator at the top floor of the hospital. At the nurses’ station he was directed to turn left and walk down the long corridor to room 1106. “It’s the very last room, the nicest one on the floor, and the quietest,” a nurse said cheerfully. “I just looked in on your daughter. She was quite restless earlier but now she’s sleeping like a baby.”

“I won’t wake her up,” he promised. “I just wanted to see her.”

He was pleased to observe that the room was a good distance from the nurses’ station and to be told that Kate was asleep. If the nurse had just checked on her, it was unlikely that she would come back soon. Being careful not to seem in too much of a hurry, he walked down the corridor to 1106. His mind was churning.

He knew that the caller who told him yesterday he had one week to pay up meant business. His only chance of putting his hands on nearly $4 million was to collect the insurance. He knew that the insurance company wasn’t going to budge until Kate could be interviewed about what had happened that night.

If Kate was dead, they’d never be able to prove that she had anything to do with setting off that explosion. A good lawyer could make the argument that when she happened to call her old friend Gus, as she sometimes did, he laid a trap by asking her to meet him in the
museum. Gus was the one with the technical know-how to set off an explosion and he was just bitter enough to do it.

The disgruntled dealer was smart enough to know that if he comes after me, he’ll never get paid. If I can convince him that the insurance company will have to pay the claim in the next couple of months, he’ll wait but he’ll keep racking up the interest.

How could Jack and I have had the colossal misfortune to have timed that explosion for just when Kate and Gus happened to be there in the middle of the night?

And how could that antique desk have turned out to be a fake? It had been in the museum for forty years. Even my father was fooled on that one, Connor thought. And he bragged that he knew everything there was to know about antique furniture.

His mind jumping wildly, his breath coming in short gasps, he nodded to a patient whose door was open and who was looking directly at him as he passed by.

I planned everything out so carefully, he thought, almost bewildered at how everything had gone wrong. When I told Jack I was thinking of putting him in charge of the plant five years ago, I laid out my entire plan for him. It was so simple. One by one over the next five or six years, we would take a valuable antique from the museum and replace it with a reproduction. We’d do that until we had just enough left of the real stuff for the insurance investigators to find genuine remnants in the ruins of the fire that we would set.

“This way we make millions by selling the real stuff privately,” I told Jack. “There are plenty of people in China and South America who will pay top dollar in cash for the originals, no questions asked as to which private collection they came from. So our records will indicate for the insurance company that all of the originals were in the museum when the fire destroyed it.” I promised Jack 10 percent of every sale. He jumped at it.

But that was why we had to retire Gus. He would have spotted a reproduction in the museum with his eyes closed.

For five years, they had been removing the priceless originals at night and replacing those pieces with the fine copies that to an untrained eye were indistinguishable. It had been easy for Jack to manipulate the documentation showing the supply of stock in the warehouse.

I’ve gone through the money I made, Connor thought. I’ll bet Jack has most of his in an offshore account.

They always met in the hours after midnight. After they made a substitution, Jack would drive a van containing the antique and deliver it to the middleman in Connecticut who worked for the dealer. We were careful, Connor thought, as he neared the end of the corridor. It was only one sale every three or four months.

That homeless guy must have been sneaking in at night at the very back of the parking lot. On the news they said he admitted that he was inside that van when that college girl tried to talk to him. He admitted punching her and then hearing her yell for help. They all think he killed her.

Connor put his hand on the door, that had been angled closed, of Kate’s room. He thought back to when Jamie Gordon came running across the parking lot at three o’clock in the morning a few years ago and saw them carrying the antique table out of the museum. She was holding her jaw. It was bleeding. She was screaming, “Help me, help me!” and begging us to call the police. I grabbed her by her scarf and twisted it around her neck. I could see that Jack was panicking, but I had no choice. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was her doing. She was on my property. Jack was a wreck, but I told him to pull himself together. I made him tie up her body and put it in the van. He dumped it in the river on his way to deliver the armoire.

That detective said Jack was being cooperative. Did he tell the cops that I killed Jamie Gordon? How could he do that without burying himself? That cop was bluffing. Jack’s too smart. He knows they have no real proof of what he did.

If Kate is dead, no one will ever know that I’m not the real Douglas Connelly.

No one will ever be able to prove anything about me, either. Tracey Sloane was dumb enough to write me that sympathy note after the boating accident and ask if I had injured my hand. She wrote that she had seen a picture of me at the burial in the papers and she had noticed that I had a clenched hand, just like Connor did. She wrote that when she was waiting on his table at Tommy’s Bistro, Connor once told her the reason that he clenched his fist out of nervous habit was because his father insisted he keep flexing his hand to strengthen it after he broke it once.

It would only have been a matter of time before she figured the truth out or mentioned my clenched hand to someone who would have figured out what really happened. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get rid of her. She thought she was getting a ride home from my bereaved brother Douglas that night. My big mistake was to take advantage of the fact that they were paving over the parking lot and extending it farther back. It was easy that night to dump her under all the dirt. I never expected that godforsaken sinkhole would open at that spot all these years later.

Taking care not to make a sound, he stepped inside Kate’s room. Then he closed the door quietly behind him. The room had a small entrance foyer. Noiselessly, he moved the few steps to the end of it and looked into the spacious private room. It had a sitting area with a couch and chairs. He could see that the reason there was so little light was that the shades had been drawn. Kate was lying on the bed motionless. There was an IV in her right arm and what appeared to be some sort of monitoring device hooked up on the other side.

He would have to be quick. He had anticipated that when her breathing stopped, a dozen people would come rushing in. It wouldn’t work to smother her. The only way to get this done would be to make her swallow the powerful sleeping pills that were now in his jacket pocket. By the time the monitors reacted, it should be too late for them to bring her back. If she died in her sleep, they might attribute it to the brain injury or to a mistake in her medication.

They’ll know that I was here. Her loving father. I’ll make sure that I say good-bye to them on the way out. I’ll tell them she was still sleeping and thank them again for taking such good care of her.

I’ll be only one of many people who had access to her in this room today. Maybe they’ll even think it was one of those “angel of death” type nurses who did it.

Connor moved to the side of the bed. He reached into his pocket and opened the vial of sleeping pills. Realizing that she might have difficulty swallowing them whole, he broke all of them and dropped them into the glass of water that was on the night table. He watched as they dissolved and then placed his hand around the back of Kate’s neck and raised her head several inches.

“Time for your medicine, my little girl,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes and gasped with instant recognition that he was going to harm her. “Tell me one more time what you were never permitted to say again.”

When she did not move her lips, his tone became harsh. “I told you to say it.”

“You’re not my Daddy,” she whispered, now defiant.

“Why do you think I punched that mirror that night, little girl? I had to be sure that my hand was in a cast for a while so if I did ever flex it, there’d be a reason. It hurt a lot but it worked until I was able to get over that habit.”

Connor reached for the glass. “Now drink this. It’s not going to
hurt. It’s going to kill you . . . If you don’t, I’m going to kill Hannah. You wouldn’t want that, Kate, would you?”

Terrified, she began to open her lips, then as he held the glass up to them, her expression changed. She was looking past him.

“I heard you!” Hannah screamed. “I heard you!” As he spun his head around, he saw that she was standing directly behind him. Before he could react, she lunged for the hand that was holding the glass. Knowing that it was all over, he still tried to force the contents down Kate’s throat, but she pursed her lips and turned her head, the contents of the glass spilling onto her neck and the sheet.

As Connor turned to attack Hannah and his fingers closed around her neck, Kate frantically groped for and then pressed the call button, which was covered by a fold in the blanket.

When the nurse responded on the intercom, somehow Kate managed to get out the words that eerily were almost the same as the last words Jamie Gordon had uttered. “Help us. Help us.”

Fifteen seconds later a burly male nurse rushed in to find Hannah, now losing strength, struggling to claw Connor’s fingers away from her neck.

Instantly, he lunged to pull Connor away from her and forced him down to the floor. As Connor continued to violently resist, other aides came pouring into the room. It took three of them to subdue him.

One of the nurses was tending to Hannah, who was desperately trying to pull herself up. “Is Kate all right?” she asked, sobbing. “Did he hurt Kate?”

“No. She’s all right. Look for yourself,” the nurse assured her as she helped Hannah to her feet. Kate outstretched her arms and Hannah let herself collapse onto the bed next to her sister.

Epilogue