Chapter 3 - The Doctor's Needle
The sub-level holding room smelled of damp limestone and aging French oak. It had no windows, one heavy solid-core door with an exterior deadbolt, and two wooden chairs bolted to the concrete floor.
June sat on the edge of the second chair, refusing to lean back because the pressure on her fractured ribs made the room turn gray at the edges. A plastic bag of melting ice sat untouched on the metal table before her, condensation pooling around its edges.
The door unlatched with a heavy, metallic clank.
It wasn't Caleb. It was Dr. Valenti, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, smelling faintly of surgical scrub and antiseptic. He carried a small stainless steel tray covered with a blue cloth.
"Second-degree burn," Valenti said without preamble, pulling the empty chair around to face her. "Partial thickness across the thenar eminence and the palm. The blistering is clean. No tissue death, thank God. She’s sedated on a pediatric dose of chloral hydrate. Sleeping in the Don’s bed."
"Did she scream when you debrided it?" June asked, her voice rasping.
Valenti pulled off the blue cloth, revealing an elastic bandage, a syringe of toradol, and an alcohol wipe. "A little. Caleb held her feet. He didn't blink once. Which means someone is going into the river before sunrise." He looked at June's side, where her black silk blouse was stretched tight over a massive, purpling swelling above her hip. "Unbutton it."
June slowly worked the buttons free. Valenti's cold fingers palpated the eighth and ninth ribs. June hissed through her teeth, her knuckles going white on the steel table.
"Floating rib is cracked," Valenti muttered. "Not punctured. You got lucky he was balancing the baby, or he would’ve driven the bone into your spleen."
"He was protecting his blood," June said, staring straight ahead at the rough mortar between the stones. "I would've done the same thing."
"Would you?" Valenti swabbed her shoulder with alcohol and sank the needle in before she could flinch. "Meredith Shaw is upstairs right now having Earl Grey with Caleb’s mother. The old lady is telling her that accidents happen in nurseries when guards are uneducated."
"Mrs. Whitcomb never liked my father," June said. "She thought my father took too much commission on the waterfront."
"Your father took five percent because he stopped two federal indictments," Valenti said, taping a broad support bandage around June's torso with brutal efficiency. "Listen to me, June. The Shaw family controls sixty percent of the longshoremen's votes in Newark. Caleb’s shipping lanes through the bay depend on Arthur Shaw's signature on the labor charter next Monday. If you accuse Arthur's oldest daughter of torturing an infant heir, you had better have high-definition video with timecode and five signed affidavits."
"I don't need five affidavits," June said, buttoning her shirt with stiff, awkward fingers. "I have the camera."
"Do you?" Valenti stood, packing his tray. "Meredith spent twenty minutes in the study before Caleb went down there. I saw her coming out of the library wing with her phone in her hand. She was smiling."
June's eyes narrowed. "Where is the Don now?"
"In the server room," Valenti said, knocking twice on the heavy door for the guard outside to slide the bolt. "He has your drive in his pocket. But Vito is with him. And Vito’s sister is married to Arthur Shaw’s youngest boy."
The bolt shot back, and the door swung open.
June stood up, ignoring the flare of white-hot agony in her side. "Doctor."
Valenti paused in the doorway.
"Tell me what Meredith brought into the house this morning," June said. "She had a hatbox from the boutique on Madison. The baby clothing inside it wasn't bought off the rack. It was delivered from the Shaw estate in Cold Spring Harbor."
Valenti’s jaw worked. He looked at the floor, then back at June. "The clothes were Claudia's," he said softly. "The ones Caleb’s late wife wore when she was an infant. Meredith told Caleb it was a family tradition to dress the heir in them for the portrait sitting this evening."
June felt the hair on her arms stand up. "Claudia was born six weeks premature. Her baby clothes were tailored small."
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"They were too tight for Elara," Valenti agreed. "Meredith was in the nursery trying to press out the seams to make them fit. That’s what she told Caleb."
"You don't press wool with a dry iron at high heat," June said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "You burn it."
