Chapter 9 - The Man in the Sheriff's Jacket

Leah ordered the clinic team to finish the authorized search and leave before their presence became an ambush. But a black pickup was already waiting near the gate. Captain Owen Vale stood beside it, hands tucked under his raincoat.

“Evening, Agent,” he called. “You could've saved yourself a trip by asking for local assistance.”

Leah kept her expression blank. “We'll coordinate through proper channels.”

Vale's gaze landed on Paul. “Your brother was a good doctor. Shame what happened.”

“Then you won't mind us reviewing your crash file,” Paul said.

Vale smiled without warmth. “Review whatever you want.”

The convoy left without a confrontation. Only when they reached the highway did Dana speak. “He wanted us to know he could get here before we finished.”

Paul tried to eat a sandwich from a gas station and couldn't finish it. His phone kept displaying photographs from an old family album: Richard laughing beside their father, Richard teaching Paul to drive, Richard at medical school in a borrowed cap. The dead could stay fixed in photographs. It was the living, Paul thought, who kept turning into strangers.

At the hospital Nora woke from a nightmare screaming, “Don't make her drink it!” A child-life specialist calmed her while Elena sat at the bed and whispered the names of every pet they'd ever owned. Violet was able to sip water, but she winced when anyone mentioned the clinic.

Paul watched through the doorway. He thought of every parent who might have been told a child was anxious, difficult, or making things up. Grant had counted on adults dismissing children's words.

Leah brought back the first financial records. Bellwether didn't own its building. It leased it from a shell company registered to a lawyer's office. The lease guarantor was Mercer Development. The payments were more than rent—far more.

Then she laid down another page. An authorization for a bank transfer bore Richard Hayes's signature, dated four months after his reported death.

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The transfer recipient was a medical holding company in Arizona.

“Either somebody forged his name,” Leah said, “or your brother was alive when he signed it.”