Chapter 3 - The Room Someone Wanted Empty
Emergency lights flickered on thirty seconds later.
I ran upstairs with two officers behind me.
Emily’s bedroom door was open.
The locked drawer was empty.
The folders Grace had left there were gone.
The backup drive was gone too.
“No.”
I rushed toward the broken window.
A rope hung over the exterior balcony.
Someone had entered while we were downstairs.
Someone who knew exactly where to look.
One officer radioed the perimeter team.
Grace appeared in the doorway holding Noah.
“Daniel.”
“They took everything.”
She shook her head.
“Not everything.”
She reached beneath Noah’s sweater.
Around his neck hung a small fabric pouch.
Inside was the silver key.
And another storage card no larger than my thumbnail.
“I found it taped underneath the drawer.”
My knees nearly weakened.
Emily had prepared layers.
She had known somebody might find the first evidence.
Grace handed me the card.
“There’s more.”
Downstairs, Victoria had been taken into police custody.
Marcus had been separated from her.
The intruder had escaped across the rear gardens before security could close the grounds.
I took Noah and Grace into my office.
Two detectives joined us.
We inserted Emily’s second storage card into an offline computer.
A folder appeared.
EMERGENCY BACKUP.
Inside were photographs.
Bank records.
Audio recordings.
And surveillance images showing Marcus meeting with Victoria almost eighteen months before Emily died.
I stared at the screen.
That was more than two years before Victoria supposedly met me.
In one photograph, they were sitting together at a restaurant in Boston.
In another, Victoria was entering Marcus’s apartment.
Then we found an audio file.
Emily’s voice filled the room.
“Marcus, I know about Victoria Cross.”
My brother answered.
“You don’t understand what you’re looking at.”
“I understand that she has accessed Noah’s trust documents.”
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Then why did you give her credentials?”
Silence followed.
Then Marcus said,
“Because I thought I could control her.”
The recording ended.
I stared through the glass wall toward the room where Marcus was being questioned.
He had lied downstairs.
Victoria had not simply stolen access.
Marcus had given it to her.
Grace opened another file.
A spreadsheet showed transfers from the Hale Foundation into shell companies.
Beside each transfer were initials.
M.H.
V.C.
And a third set.
R.B.
I didn’t recognize them.
Grace did.
Her face went white.
“What?”
She pointed.
“Robert Bell.”
The name hit me slowly.
Robert Bell had been Emily’s private physician during the final year of her life.
He had signed her death certificate.
He had also written the confidential medical report attached to the petition claiming I was unstable.
I felt ice move through my chest.
“Why would Emily’s doctor be involved?”
Grace whispered,
“Maybe because Emily wasn’t the patient they were trying to control.”
Before I could ask what she meant, the detective’s phone rang.
He listened.
Then looked directly at me.
“The intruder left something behind near the garden wall.”
“What?”
“A hospital identification badge.”
He placed a photograph on the desk.
ROBERT BELL, M.D.
May you like
My wife’s doctor had just broken into my home.
And according to the timestamp on the badge reader at his hospital, Dr. Bell was supposed to have been working forty miles away.
