Chapter 7 - The Signature That Wasn’t His
At the station, nobody offered Sophie a blanket until she vomited into a trash can.
Then suddenly three people appeared with bottled water, tissues, and faces arranged into concern.
I sat in an interview room with my hands uncuffed but my freedom very much undecided. Detective Lena Ortiz placed a paper cup of coffee in front of me.
“I’m not your enemy,” she said.
“Then tell the officer outside to stop calling me a kidnapper.”
“I'm trying to figure out why a hotel maid with no criminal record was holding a billionaire's child in an alley.”
“Because the child was scared, and the billionaire was standing right next to me.”
Ortiz watched my face. “You’re angry.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Angry people sometimes tell the truth before they start protecting themselves.”
I gave her everything: the locked elevator, the rabbit, the room, the recording, the men in the garage. Then I placed the black binder on the table.
Ortiz opened it. Her expression changed at the third page.
“Where did you get this?”
“Room 417.”
“These are payments from the Vale Family Trust.”
“So?”
“So the destination accounts belong to a chain of residential treatment facilities. Three of those facilities were shut down last year.”
She turned another page.
“Why would a closed clinic receive money for a patient who officially died three years ago?”
I thought of Laurel’s tired face in the video.
Outside the interview room, raised voices reached us. Adrian was arguing with a uniformed supervisor.
“I signed a grant agreement,” he said. “Not guardianship papers.”
A lawyer answered, “The signature was witnessed and notarized.”
“By whom?”
The voices stopped.
Ortiz rose. “Stay here.”
She returned five minutes later with a printed copy of the order. She pointed to a line near the bottom.
“I checked the notary,” she said. “She died last February.”
My throat tightened. “Then why isn't this over?”
“Because a forged document is only one crime. Somebody also used it to move a child, freeze a trust, and possibly hide a living woman.”
Her phone rang. She listened, then turned toward the door.
“What?” I asked.
Ortiz looked back at me. “The hospital where Laurel's body was supposedly released just sent us the original discharge log.”
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“And?”
“There's no body. There never was.”
