Chapter 3 - Rachel's Secret
Ortiz wanted the phone on speaker. Daniel wanted to smash it through the wall.
Instead, he forced himself to listen.
"Where?" he asked.
Rachel gave an address: an abandoned printing warehouse near the river.
"You have forty minutes," she said. "No police."
The line went dead.
Ortiz immediately started coordinating an unmarked response.
Daniel blocked the doorway. "She said no police."
"Kidnappers always say no police."
"And if they see you?"
"If you go alone, you become another hostage."
"That's my daughter."
Ortiz stepped close enough that he couldn't look away. "Then act like a father, not a man being baited."
He hated her for being right.
Twenty minutes later, Daniel drove toward the warehouse with a hidden transmitter under his shirt and Ortiz's unmarked car several blocks behind.
He parked where instructed and entered through a side door.
The warehouse smelled of wet paper and rust.
"Rachel?"
"Daniel."
Her voice came from the dark.
He found her tied to a chair beneath a hanging work light. Her lip was split. One sleeve was torn.
"Emma?"
"Not here."
He rushed to her, cutting the plastic ties with a box cutter from the floor.
Rachel grabbed his wrist.
"You shouldn't have come."
"You called me."
"They made me."
"Who? Thomas Vale?"
Her eyes widened.
Daniel saw the truth before she spoke.
"You know him."
Rachel looked down.
"Rachel."
"Yes."
His voice went flat. "How?"
"He contacted me four months ago."
"Before Emma was born."
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"He said your adoption was illegal. He had documents. He knew things about your childhood no stranger should know."
"So you met him?"
"Twice."
Daniel backed away.
The Chicago trip flashed into his mind.
His missing ring.
Rachel's nervous calls.
"Did you take my ring?"
Tears filled her eyes. "I borrowed it."
"Why?"
"Thomas said it belonged to your birth mother. He wanted to verify an engraving. I was going to put it back."
"You let me think I lost it."
"I panicked."
Daniel laughed bitterly. "Apparently that's our family tradition."
A metallic click sounded somewhere above them.
Rachel's face changed.
"Daniel—"
A gunshot cracked.
The work light shattered.
Daniel pulled Rachel behind a concrete pillar as a second shot hit the floor.
"Stay down!"
Police shouted outside.
Someone ran across the catwalk overhead.
Daniel looked up just in time to see a figure disappearing through an upper door.
Ortiz's team flooded the building.
But Thomas was gone.
On the catwalk, police found a burner phone taped to the railing.
A video was already playing.
Emma slept in a bassinet beside a digital clock.
11:06 p.m.
A woman's hand entered the frame and gently touched Emma's cheek.
Then a voice Daniel had never heard said, "Hello, Danny."
Margaret, watching through Ortiz's body camera feed, collapsed into a chair.
"That's impossible," she whispered.
Daniel turned toward her.
"Who is that?"
Margaret stared at the screen.
"Evelyn Vale."
May you like
Daniel felt the air leave his lungs.
His biological mother was alive.
