Chapter 32 - The Crypt Beneath the Glass
The orderly hit the floor with a concussive thud after my third shot caught him in the shoulder, sending the axe clattering away across the shattered glass. Within three minutes, building security and the tactical sweep unit I had kept on standby flooded the executive floor.
Marcus arrived with two armed private investigators, his tie undone, face pale as marble.
"She used the laundry chute to escape Framingham, then hijacked an orderly's vehicle with his help," Marcus said, his voice breathless as he surveyed the bullet-shattered entryway of my office. "The orderly was her attendant. She manipulated him. Seduced him or promised him Arthur’s millions—God only knows what she whispered into his ear."
"She didn't come here to kill me," I said, wiping a fleck of shattered glass from my forearm, the adrenaline chilling into pure, tactical ice. "She came to deliver a message. She told me to look beneath the greenhouse. And then she said she was heading to Arthur’s hospice care unit."
Marcus grabbed his phone, barking orders to the private security detachment guarding Arthur Vance’s private medical wing in Boston. "Get a secondary perimeter set up around Arthur’s hospice room immediately! Lock down every elevator and stairwell! Shoot on sight if Eleanor Vance is identified within fifty yards!"
"No," I cut in, grabbing Marcus's wrist. "Eleanor wants us to defend Arthur. She wants every resource diverted to Boston so the estate grounds in the Berkshires remain completely deserted."
Marcus froze. "The ancestral manor? Claire, the mansion burned down months ago. It's nothing but blackened brick and charred timber."
"The mansion burned," I said, staring at the cryptic words Eleanor had scratched in her cell: *She wasn't the first. Look in the cellar beneath the greenhouse.* "The greenhouse had its own separate geothermal foundation. The glass dome survived the blaze. Arthur spent millions importing black orchids from South America every year, strictly forbidding any staff from ever setting foot in the sub-level soil vault."
Thirty minutes later, Marcus and I were in the back of an armored SUV, speeding through the torrential downpour toward the western hills. The headlights cut through sheets of violent rain, sweeping over the wrought-iron gates of the Vance estate. The gate hung ajar, fresh tire tracks cutting deep, muddy ruts into the overgrown driveway.
The greenhouse sat at the rear of the blackened skeletal ruins of the manor. Through the rain-lashed glass dome, a single, flickering yellow lantern burned like an evil eye in the darkness.
We drew our weapons and moved through the fractured glass doors. The air inside was humid, suffocating, thick with the stench of rotting peat moss, dead flora, and something else—something metallic and sweet, like copper and long-decayed organic matter.
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In the center of the conservatory, the slate floor tiles had been pried up with a rusted crowbar. A square hatch of reinforced iron, encrusted with padlocks that had been freshly cut through with an acetylene torch, stood wide open.
A narrow set of concrete stairs plunged into the absolute blackness of the earth below.
