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He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”
The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.
“That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”
Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.
Fox was an international con man and thief, known for the sheer audacity of his high-risk swindles and heists and for the obvious joy he took in pulling them off. No matter how big his scores were, and he’d had some huge ones, he kept going back for more.
Kate had made it her mission at the FBI to nail him. She’d come close two years ago, when she’d discovered Nick’s plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s twentieth-story Chicago penthouse of all his cash and jewels at the same time that the self-proclaimed “King of Hostile Takeovers” was getting married in the living room.
It was a ballsy move, and pure Nick Fox. To pull it off, he somehow got himself hired as the wedding planner and brought in a motley crew of thieves as the caterers. When Kate crashed the wedding with a strike team, Nick’s crew scattered like cockroaches when the lights go on, and Nick parachuted off the top of the building.
Choppers were called in, streets were closed, roadblocks were set up, and buildings were searched, but Nick slipped away. When Kate finally straggled into her hotel room at dawn, there was a bottle of champagne and a bouquet of roses waiting for her. All from Nick. And charged to her room, of course. The whole time she’d been hunting for Nick, he’d been relaxing in her room, watching pay-per-view movies, ordering room service, and helping himself to the Toblerones in her minibar. He’d even stolen the towels on his way out.
The bastard is having way too much fun at my expense, Kate thought as she bolted through the hospital lobby, out the door past two surprised agents, and charged across the parking lot.
When she reached the cyclone fence around the old hospital building, she was sweating and her heart was pounding so hard she could almost hear it. She drew her gun and slowly approached the entrance to the lobby. As she got closer, she saw a red carpet and a sign that had been obscured in the shadows of the alcove under the portico. The sign read:
Welcome to the St. Cosmas Concierge Medical Center. Please excuse our dust as we remodel to give you more privacy, luxury, and state-of-the art care.
Hugging the lava rock walls she made her way to the door, yanked it open, and spun into the open space in a firing stance. But there was no one to aim at. Kate faced an elegantly furnished lobby decked out with contemporary leather furniture, travertine floors, and lush plants. On the wall behind the empty reception desk were photos of the surgical staff. She l
ooked at the photos and immediately recognized two of the faces. One of them belonged to Nick Fox, a stethoscope around his neck, exuding doctorly strength and confidence. The other one was her, with a dopey, drunken smile on her face. Her picture had been lifted, cropped, and photoshopped from the bridal party pictures taken years ago that were now on her sister Megan’s Facebook page. “Dr. William Scholl” was written in bronze letters under Nick’s photo, “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” under hers.
Okay, so where was the “surgical staff” now? she asked herself. And what about the six rich patients who’d come from far and wide for organ transplants?
Kate headed for the double doors that were located to one side of the reception desk. She pushed them open and stepped into a foyer, ready to fire. But once again, there was no one there. Directly in front of her were three more sets of double doors. One was marked “Operating Room #1,” the second “Post-Op #1,” and the third “Pre-Op.” An elevator was to her left. A stairwell door was to her right.
She eased open the door to the operating room and found a fully decked out surgical suite that took its design cues from an Apple Store. Everything was sleek and white. All the equipment gleamed like new cars on a showroom floor.
She closed the door and peeked into the post-op room. There was the standard hospital bed, the IV stand, and the usual monitoring devices, but the similarities to any other hospital room ended there. The room was luxuriously appointed with fancy French furniture, ornate shelves filled with leather-bound books, a flat-screen TV, and a wet bar stocked with assorted spirits.
He’s smart, she thought. Posing as an asbestos removal company was the perfect cover for Nick’s scam. It ensured that everyone at the hospital kept their distance from the old building while Nick and his crew were actually creating an elaborate set and staging their con.
Finally, she went to the pre-op room. The door opened onto a long ward with an abandoned nurses station and several curtained-off areas behind it. She stepped inside and cautiously slid open the first curtain. An unconscious middle-aged man in a hospital gown was stretched out on a gurney and hooked up to an IV drip. Kate checked his pulse. It was strong.
She made her way through the ward, yanking open curtains as she passed. All six of the men who’d come in that day from the airport were there, each of them sound asleep and, she assumed, a million dollars poorer.
The windows in the building vibrated, and she heard the unmistakable thwap-thwap-thwap of helicopter blades above her. Nick Fox was on the roof, she thought. Again!
She ran out of the room and to the stairwell, climbing the four flights as fast as she could, which was remarkably speedy for a woman whose most frequent dinner companions were Colonel Sanders, Long John Silver, Ronald McDonald, and the Five Guys.
Kate burst onto the roof ready to fire and saw a blue Las Vegas Aerial Tours chopper on the helipad, its side door open, several “doctors” and “nurses” inside.
Nick Fox was not among them. He stood casually midway between her and the helicopter with his hands in his pockets, the wind created by the chopper blades whipping at his hair and flaring his white lab coat like a superhero’s cape.
Kate had created the man of her dreams when she was twelve, and she’d hung on to the image. The dream man had soft brown hair, intelligent brown eyes, and a boyish grin. He was six feet tall with a slim agile body. He was smart and sexy and playful. So it was with terrible irony that over the course of the last couple years it dawned on Kate that Nick Fox was the living embodiment of her dream man.
“Dr. Scholl?” Kate yelled over the chopper noise. “Really?”
“It’s a very respected name in medicine,” Nick yelled back. “Glad to see you’re wearing sensible shoes.”
Nick knew she always wore Dr. Scholl’s gels in her black Nikes. It was one of the many things he’d learned about her over the last couple years. Most of what he’d learned intrigued him. Some of it was downright scary. The scary part was offset by a physical attraction to her that he couldn’t explain.
Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her flawless skin had a slight sheen from her dash across the parking lot and up the stairs. Sexy, but he suspected the fantasy the sheen inspired was better than the reality. She was the job. Probably wore Kevlar to bed. End of story. Still, he did enjoy playing with her. He liked her big blue eyes, cute little nose, slim athletic body, and her earnest dedication to making the world a more law-abiding place. It made his dedication to crime much more interesting.
“You’re under arrest,” she shouted.
