Chapter 7 - The Perfect Daughter
Sebastian Vale had three children.
Alexander, forty-one, ran Vale Capital.
Nathaniel, thirty-eight, served on the foundation board.
And Victoria, thirty-four, was considered the family's golden child.
Victoria Vale was beautiful, brilliant, and impossible to dislike on camera.
She ran literacy programs.
She testified before Congress about child welfare.
She hugged refugees at airports.
She had also been standing twenty feet behind me when I destroyed the portrait.
I remembered her expression.
Everyone else looked shocked.
Victoria looked relieved.
Marcus arranged an interview.
She arrived with two attorneys and no visible fear.
“I want my father prosecuted if he is guilty,” she said.
The wording mattered.
If.
Daniel watched through the glass from another room.
When Victoria entered, he stood so quickly his chair fell backward.
“That's her.”
Marcus looked at him.
“Who?”
“The woman who moved Lucy.”
Victoria denied it.
She said Daniel was lying to protect himself.
Then she offered police something enormous.
Access codes to three Vale Foundation properties.
One was a private rehabilitation center in Connecticut.
The second was a warehouse in New Jersey.
The third was a townhouse on East Seventy-Third Street.
Police searched all three.
The warehouse was empty.
The townhouse contained financial records.
The Connecticut facility contained seven children.
Seven.
All had been reported missing during the previous four years.
The country exploded.
News channels abandoned every other story.
Sebastian Vale's name became poison overnight.
Federal investigators joined the case.
Vale Capital lost billions in market value.
And Victoria emerged as the courageous daughter who helped expose her own father.
People praised her.
She gave one interview outside federal court.
“If my family harmed children, blood will not protect them.”
It was a perfect sentence.
Too perfect.
That night, Daniel came to my apartment under police protection.
He placed Claire's old laptop on my table.
“I kept this hidden.”
“Why?”
“Because she told me not to open it unless Sebastian fell.”
I stared at him.
“He's falling.”
Daniel nodded.
We powered it on.
Most files were encrypted.
One folder opened with Claire's birthday.
Inside were photographs of the blue room.
A medical chair.
Restraints.
Cameras.
A wall covered in children's height marks.
Then I saw the final photograph.
Victoria Vale stood in the center of the room.
Beside her was Sebastian.
But Sebastian was looking toward Victoria.
May you like
And the expression on his face was unmistakable.
Fear.
