Chapter 16 - Runway Nine
The private airfield looked deserted from the highway.
It was not.
Alvarez’s team entered from both access roads while state police blocked the runway.
Anna stayed with Leo at a secure medical center this time.
She hated every second of waiting, but she had learned something at the lake house.
Running toward danger did not always mean protecting her child.
Sometimes protecting him meant being the one place that did not move.
Richard called from the airfield.
“We found the plane.”
“And Vanessa?”
“Not yet.”
A twin-engine aircraft sat near a hangar with its door open and engines cold.
Dale Kessler was arrested beside a fuel truck.
He claimed Vanessa had never arrived.
Nobody believed him.
Then a trooper found a second vehicle hidden behind the maintenance shed.
Inside were women’s clothes, a wig, cash, and a second fake passport.
Vanessa had changed plans.
Again.
Dale finally broke after Alvarez showed him Catherine in handcuffs.
“She said the family would protect me.”
“It won’t,” Alvarez replied.
Dale looked toward Richard.
“She was supposed to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his name. A lawyer.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. “What lawyer?”
Dale gave an address.
It belonged to Samuel Voss, the longtime attorney who had drafted Edward Mercer’s original estate plan.
The same attorney who had told the family for years that the trust could not be changed.
Anna had received the amended trust from a different lawyer because Edward had secretly replaced Voss during the final months of his life.
Alvarez searched Voss’s office records.
What they found changed the case.
For three years, Voss had been transferring company money through shell businesses connected to Catherine.
Vanessa knew.
Edward had discovered it shortly before his death.
The amended trust had not simply protected Leo.
It had also shifted enough voting power to Richard and Leo’s trust to force an audit.
If that audit happened, Catherine and Vanessa could lose everything—and possibly go to prison.
This had never been only about Anna.
Anna had simply been the easiest person to remove.
Richard whispered, “My father knew.”
Alvarez nodded. “And I think that’s why he changed the trust.”
Then a patrol officer radioed from Voss’s office.
The front door was open.
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There was blood in the lobby.
And someone had just triggered the building’s fire alarm.
