On the tablet screen, Ryan didn't look shocked to see Brenda stirring white powder into his sick mother’s drink. He didn't look confused or hesitant.
He walked right up to the granite island, unscrewed the cap on a concentrated bottle of clinical nasal vasoconstrictor drops, and squeezed the entire rubber bulb straight into Helen’s smoothie himself.
Because the hallway camera recorded high-gain directional audio, every word that came out of my twenty-eight-year-old son’s mouth echoed clearly through the quiet basement of my home.
"Make sure you stir it off the bottom, Brenda," Ryan whispered on the recording, glancing toward the bathroom door where his mother was washing her hands. "Uncle Paul said the blood thinner takes twenty-four hours to peak, and this phenylephrine will spike her blood pressure by tomorrow afternoon. Once she strokes out at the reception or in her sleep tomorrow night, Northwestern Mutual wires the $1.5 million tax-free within fourteen days, and I don't have to listen to my dad lecture me about my credit score ever again."
On the video, Chloe walked over, kissed Ryan on the mouth, and smiled. "And by Thanksgiving, baby, we’ll be closing on the brick mansion in Lincoln Park."
My knees buckled slightly, and I had to brace my hand against the cold concrete wall of the basement. I had held that boy the minute he was born. I had stayed up with him through ear infections, taught him how to ride a bike in the driveway outside, and worked sixty-hour weeks in the freezing Chicago winter so he could have a life of comfort. And there he was on camera, casually measuring out poison to induce a fatal brain hemorrhage in the woman who had carried him for nine months.
"In the State of Illinois, Attempted First-Degree Murder of a person over age fifty-five or physically disabled carries a mandatory minimum Class X sentence of twenty to eighty years at eighty-five percent truth-in-sentencing," Detective Kowski said, his voice tight with cold professional fury. "I can have tactical units kick in the door of your Naperville house in twenty minutes and put Ryan, Chloe, and Brenda in handcuffs."
"Hold on, Mike," Richard stepped in immediately, looking between the detective and the FBI agent who had just arrived at the top of the stairs. "If you arrest Ryan and Brenda in Naperville right now, Paul Miller and Gary Vance will see the arrest on the police scanner or get a panicked call from Chloe’s lawyer within thirty minutes. Paul won't show up at the hard-money lender’s office tomorrow morning to sign the fraudulent $1.4 million loan, Gary will smash his computer hard drives, and Paul’s defense attorney will claim Brenda stole his pill bottle out of his bathroom during the rehearsal party without his knowledge."
"Mr. Sterling is right," Special Agent Miller of the FBI agreed, pulling a leather binder from her coat. "Right now, we have state-level attempted murder on three of them, and uncompleted wire attempts on the others. If we give the Illinois State Police crime lab forty-eight hours to run certified Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry on that Mason jar—and we get an emergency federal Title III wiretap warrant signed by the duty judge this afternoon—we can catch Paul signing the $1.4 million bank fraud tomorrow, track where their offshore accounts are located, and arrest all five of them simultaneously under a combined federal conspiracy and state Class X indictment."
"What do you need me to do to keep them from running?" I asked, my voice steady as iron.
"They’re panicking right now because their airline tickets were voided and the country club manager filed a police report," Richard said, a ruthless glint in his eyes. "You need to make them believe they just broke you. Make them think you’re a terrified, grieving old man who will hand over the entire kingdom just to keep the family out of the newspapers."
Twenty minutes later, sitting at my dining room table with an FBI recording rig patched into my cell phone, I made two calls.
First, I called Arthur at the Waverly Country Club and wired $42,500 into a temporary corporate bond so he would call the Oak Brook police and place a seventy-two-hour administrative hold on the felony theft complaint.
Second, I dialed Ryan.
He answered on the first ring, screaming so loud the FBI audio needles spiked into the red. "You have ten minutes to explain yourself, old man, before I take that Quitclaim Deed down to the courthouse tomorrow and throw you out on the street!"
I let my breath hitch, forcing a wet, trembling sob into my throat. "Ryan... please, son, stop," I pleaded into the microphone while Detective Kowski watched me in silence. "Your mother is so weak... the doctors say any more stress or a lawsuit will kill her. I panicked last night at the hospital. I didn't cancel your bank wires—Chase’s automated computer flagged the HELOC because you logged in from a different IP address! I already paid off the country club manager this morning so the police won't bother you and Chloe."
There was a stunned, greedy silence on the other end of the line. I could hear Chloe whispering excitedly in the background.
"Oh, so now you’re begging?" Ryan sneered, his arrogance roaring back ten times worse than before. "You humiliated my wife at O'Hare in front of everybody, Dad!"
"I know, I’m sorry, Ryan," I choked out, staring at the red evidence bag holding the poisoned smoothie jar on my table. "I’m fifty-eight years old and I can't fight anymore. My lawyer says if I voluntarily sign an Irrevocable Family Trust & Corporate Transfer at our Friday night Executive Founders' Dinner at the Drake Hotel, we can release the $240,000 HELOC, the $92,000 hospital check, and full ownership of the Naperville house and my company to you and Chloe tax-free without the bank freezing a dime. And I’ll bring Chloe a $50,000 cashier’s check just to make up for the honeymoon flights."
"Make it $75,000 for Chloe, and leave the corporate seal in Uncle Paul’s lockbox tonight so we know you aren't lying," Ryan demanded coldly. "We’ll see you Friday night at seven. And don't bring Mom—Chloe doesn't want her ruining the dinner."
The second Ryan hung up, Special Agent Miller tapped her laptop screen—where the emergency federal wiretap had just gone live on Chloe’s and Brenda’s cell phones—and motioned for all of us to put on headphones.
Thirty seconds after hanging up with me, Chloe didn't call her mother or Uncle Paul to celebrate; instead, she dialed a prepaid Miami area code, and when a man with a deep voice answered saying, "Hey, Mrs. Cross, did the idiot sign it?", Chloe burst out laughing and revealed a secret that made even the seasoned homicide detective beside me gasp out loud.
