Chapter 9 - THE RED NOTEBOOK
I ran down the stairs with my phone in my hand. Marco followed close behind. At the second floor, I heard the stairwell door slam above us.
We reached the street. Marco turned left. I turned right and called Park while moving toward a crowded bus stop.
Within minutes, officers found Marco two blocks away. The man in the gray coat was gone.
My phone had recorded Marco’s confession. Park listened to it twice, then asked him to repeat it in an interview room. He did. He admitted shutting off the cameras and taking Bellini’s money. He said he hadn’t known what the substituted pills were.
“What did Bellini want from Maria’s envelope?” Park asked.
“An account number,” Marco said. “Rosa had written it down.”
The envelope had disappeared, but I still had my grandmother’s red notebook. I brought it to Park. She photographed every page while I searched for numbers. On a page devoted to a chicken soup recipe, Rosa had underlined a string of digits in pencil.
Park followed it to a Harbor Bridge bank account. Rosa had recorded deposits that added up to far more than the stolen $86,000. Money from clinic donors, patient charges, and Maria’s account had all passed through it.
One outgoing payment caught Park’s eye: a monthly transfer to a company owned by a former clinic security supervisor. It began shortly after Rosa confronted Vale.
Park wanted to know why. So did I.
Antonio came to the precinct after Maria insisted on giving another statement. He stopped beside me in the waiting area.
“I shouldn’t have called Bellini,” he said.
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
“I thought I could make him answer me. I made things harder for Park instead.”
Maria joined us before I could respond. She slipped her hand through my arm.
“I told Antonio what Rosa meant to me,” she said. “I should have told you earlier too.”
“You couldn’t have known what would happen.”
“I knew Rosa was frightened.”
She reached into her purse and drew out a folded page. “This was tucked inside my coat pocket. I found it this morning.”
It was a letter from my grandmother to Maria. Most of it concerned the missing clinic money. At the end, Rosa had written one more sentence.
If anything happens to me, ask who ordered the cameras installed in the recovery wing.
Maria looked at me. “Rosa was never treated in that wing.”
May you like
I read the line again.
The recovery wing was where I had last visited my grandmother.
