Chapter 8 - The Doctor

We drove north before sunset.

Marcus, Daniel, Owen, and I took one car. Vanessa stayed at the house under private security. She screamed that I had no right to hold her there.

Maybe I didn't.

I didn't care.

Dr. Alan Pierce lived alone in a pale yellow bungalow two blocks from the beach.

His front door was open.

Marcus drew his legally registered handgun but kept it low.

"Stay behind me."

We found Pierce in the kitchen, alive but bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow. A chair had been overturned. Cabinets hung open.

"They took it," he whispered.

"Took what?" I asked.

"The ledger."

Marcus crouched beside him. "Who attacked you?"

Pierce looked at Daniel, then me.

"A woman. Blonde. Expensive clothes."

Vanessa.

I called Owen's man at the house.

No answer.

Called again.

Nothing.

Then my phone buzzed with a home-security alert.

EAST GATE OPENED.

"She's gone," I said.

Pierce grabbed my sleeve.

"Wait. There's something you don't understand. Vanessa wasn't working for your father at the end."

"Then who?"

"Herself."

Pierce told us that after Claire escaped, Vanessa had continued paying him to maintain the false death records. She also paid a private clinic to create psychiatric files painting Claire as delusional and dangerous.

"Why?"

Pierce swallowed.

"Because your father was dying. Vanessa knew the truth would eventually come out. She needed Claire discredited before that happened."

"And Sophie?"

"I don't know."

A police siren sounded far away.

Pierce's face twisted with panic.

"You have to find the ledger. It proves every payment."

Daniel asked, "Where did you keep it?"

Pierce pointed toward the hall.

"Wall safe."

We opened it.

Empty.

Except for one photograph.

It showed Vanessa standing outside Claire's old safe house.

Beside her was a man I recognized immediately.

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Pierce kept apologizing while Marcus cleaned the cut over his eye. He said fear had made him obedient, then money had made obedience easy. I wanted to hate him cleanly. It was harder when he looked small and old and ashamed. Cowards, I realized, could destroy lives without ever thinking of themselves as villains.

My head of security, Owen.