Chapter 3 - The Blood on the Linoleum
I took the aluminum stairs four at a time, the Walther gripped in my right hand, my heart hammering against my ribs like a battering ram.
The bookcase swung shut behind me with a muted click. I didn't stop in the study. I sprinted through the arched double doors, down the carpeted gallery of the third floor, and took the winding service staircase down to the second-floor medical suite.
The Duca brownstone maintained a fully equipped clinical infirmary on the second floor—a legacy of my father’s paranoia, designed to treat gunshot wounds and emergency surgical interventions without generating police reports at Massachusetts General.
The frosted glass door at the end of the hall was cracked open two inches.
A narrow beam of surgical white light cut across the dark parquet floor.
I flattened my back against the wainscoting, holding my breath, listening. No voices. No movement. Only the rhythmic, metallic drip... drip... drip of a liquid falling into an empty stainless-steel basin.
I kicked the door open with the flat of my boot, clearing the threshold with the muzzle of my weapon leveled at chest height.
"Clear!" I growled instinctively.
The room was empty of shooters. But it was not empty.
Lying on the examination table beneath the high-intensity halogen surgical lights was Grace Harper.
Her eyes were rolled back in her head, her face an unearthly, cyanotic blue, her chest barely rising in shallow, agonizing gasps. Tied tightly around her right bicep was a red rubber tourniquet. Projecting from the median cubital vein of her forearm was a twenty-gauge disposable syringe, its barrel half-filled with clear, oily fluid.
On the floor beside the gurney lay a shattered glass ampoule. The printed label was smeared with blood, but the chemical name was fully legible: Pancuronium Bromide—a paralytic agent used in clinical euthanasia to induce complete neuromuscular failure and respiratory arrest within six minutes.
Beside the tray sat Grace’s canvas housekeeping apron, soaked through with dark, venous blood where someone had stabbed her twice in the left thigh with an orthopedic scalpel to keep her from fighting while the paralytic was administered.
"Grace!" I roared, throwing the gun onto the instrument tray and lunging across the room.
I yanked the needle from her arm, tore the tourniquet from her bicep, and grabbed an emergency ambu-bag from the wall bracket. Her jaw was locked tight, her tongue partially swollen. I tilted her head back, forced the plastic airway between her teeth, and began pumping oxygen directly into her paralyzed lungs with rhythmic, desperate squeezes.
One. Two. Squeeze. Three. Four. Squeeze.
Her pulse at the carotid artery was like a dying bird, fluttering, skipping three beats, then sinking into nothingness.
I reached across the stainless-steel prep counter with my left hand, sweeping boxes of suture kits and sterile gauze onto the floor until my fingers found the emergency cardiac box.
I tore open the sealed plastic seal of an auto-injector: Atropine and Epinephrine.
I slammed the auto-injector through the fabric of her denim skirt directly into the vastus lateralis muscle of her uninjured right thigh.
CLACK.
The mechanical spring fired with an authoritative punch.
For ten seconds, nothing happened. The infirmary smelled of ozone, copper, and the cold lemon polish Grace had used on my desk three hours earlier.
Then, with a violent, concussive gasp that sounded like a drowning diver breaking the surface of an icy lake, Grace’s back arched off the padded vinyl table.
Her eyes snapped open. Her pupils were blown wide, completely black with terror and adrenaline, her fingers clawing frantically at the air until they clamped around the lapel of my bespoke suit with surprising, feral strength.
"Mia..." she wheezed through the plastic airway, blood-tinged saliva bubbling at her lips. "Mr. Duca... the girls... he took... he went to the basement..."
"Mia and Lily are safe, Grace," I shouted into her face, holding her shoulders firmly against the table. "They are locked in the pantry. Nobody is touching them. Look at me! Who did this to you?!"
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Her chest heaved, the epinephrine driving her cardiac rhythm into a frantic, hammering drumbeat.
"Julian..." she choked out, her fingernails tearing through the silk lining of my jacket. "Julian and Councilman Vance... they’re at the port... Berth 42. They have the shipping containers... they know you're looking at the manifests on Monday... they came to burn the house, Mr. Duca... they’re setting the timers in the sub-cellar right now!"
