Chapter 5 - The Trap is Baited
For the next seven days, I acted the part of a dying man.
I dragged my feet when I walked up the porch steps. I allowed my hand to tremble slightly when I poured my morning coffee. When Maris was watching me from the dining room table, I would pause, place a hand over my chest, and take a deep, labored breath as if fighting off a sudden wave of intercostal pain.
Maris was magnificent.
She played the worried, devoted wife with breathtaking precision. She brought me warm tea, adjusted my blankets on the couch, and stroked my hair while making soft, cooing sounds of concern.
"Babe," she whispered on the evening of November 14th, three days before the scheduled house call, as I sat on the living room sofa pretending to recover from a "dizzy spell." "I really think we should have Reginald come over and do a full mobile EKG. You're working too hard. Your heart can't take this stress."
I looked up at her, letting my eyes appear unfocused and weak.
"Maybe you're right," I rasped, squeezing her hand. "I... I felt a strange flutter in my chest during my shift yesterday. It felt like my atrium was misfiring."
Maris’s thumb stroked the back of my hand, her pulse completely steady. "Don't worry, my love. Reginald will take care of everything. He’s family."
Down the hallway, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, Lumi was watching us. Her face was completely still, but her hands were tucked into her hoodie pockets, her small fingers making two quick, subtle motions against her sides.
Two squeezes. I am ready.
That night, after Maris went to sleep, I executed the second phase of my plan.
Using the data on Clara’s USB drive, I contacted Detective Marcus Vance—no relation to the family, but a senior lead investigator in the San Diego Police Department’s Homicide Division whom I had worked alongside during dozens of trauma room shooting investigations.
We met at 2:00 AM in an empty ambulance bay behind Mercy General Hospital.
I handed him the USB drive, the toxicology report from Lumi’s backpack, the lab analysis of the digitalis-laced B-complex capsules, and a copy of the court conservatorship record.
Marcus sat in his unmarked cruiser, flipping through the physical documents under the faint glow of the interior dome light. As he read through the chemical analysis and the sixty-day trust clause, his hardened detective’s face turned into a mask of pure, dark fury.
"This is insane, Gideon," Marcus said, looking up at me through the open window. "This woman wiped out her first husband, used her seven-year-old kid as psychological insurance, and set you up to be harvested for four million bucks?"
"She and Reginald," I corrected him. "Reginald is the supplier and the signatory. They operate like a surgical team."
"I can get a warrant signed by a judge by noon tomorrow," Marcus said, reaching for his radio. "We can raid the Birch Street house right now and arrest them both for conspiracy to commit murder."
"No," I stopped him, placing a hand on the car door frame. "If you arrest them now on conspiracy, Reginald’s team of defense attorneys will claim the digitalis capsules were contaminated during manufacturing. They'll claim the trust clause was standard estate planning, and they'll drag Lumi through three years of brutal depositions until her testimony is shredded."
Marcus stared at me. "What are you suggesting?"
"I want them caught red-handed," I said. "I want Reginald in that house, with the syringe in his hand, injecting the drug into a vein while your wire picks up every word out of Maris’s mouth."
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Marcus leaned back against his headrest, eyeing me with deep professional respect mixed with concern. "You're asking to be the bait in a lethal injection scheme, nurse. If his finger slips on that plunger, you're dead in sixty seconds."
"I'm a trauma nurse, Marcus," I said, a cold smile touching my lips for the first time in weeks. "I know exactly how to manage an airway."
