Chapter 17 - The False Trail
Waiting proved worse than running. Adrian sat at his mother's kitchen table and watched the clock move in tiny, deliberate jumps. At midnight he made coffee nobody drank. At twelve fifteen he checked his phone, although Harris had promised to call. At twelve thirty he found Ben asleep against Mateo's shoulder, one hand still gripping the hem of his uniform.
“Your mother would have made us all sandwiches,” Mateo said.
“She'd have ordered me to bed.”
“And would you have listened?”
“Not a chance.”
They smiled briefly. Then Adrian asked the question he'd avoided all day. “Can you forgive me for what happened in the hallway?”
Mateo considered it. “You didn't put me on that floor.”
“I left a system in place where Celeste thought she could.”
“Yes,” Mateo replied. “You did.”
Adrian nodded, accepting it.
“I don't know about forgiveness yet,” Mateo continued. “But I know what you did when you came home. Keep doing that. Maybe we'll get somewhere.”
It wasn't absolution. It was better: a chance to do useful work without being promised a clean conscience.
Harris immediately treated both messages as unverified. She ordered separate checks on the depot and the second phone's origin.
The depot held a locked office, a bare chair identical to the one in the photo, and a camera tripod. No Sofia. Someone had staged the image there and then moved her—or had manipulated the setting to mislead them from the beginning.
At Blackthorn, Ben watched Mateo pace the library. “Grown-ups keep saying they'll find her,” he murmured. “What if they don't?”
Mateo sat beside him. “Then we keep looking. That's what people who love you do.”
Ben pulled a folded receipt from his backpack. “Mom told me not to lose this. It's from the place where she stored her papers.”
The receipt named a storage facility in Bellport. Nora recognized the address: directly across the road from a vacant building once operated by the trust.
Harris sent officers to secure the area. Adrian stayed at the mansion, where reporters had gathered beyond the gate. He wanted to be useful. He felt useless instead.
Celeste called from the sheriff's office. “Martin didn't choose the old depot because it was safe,” she said. “He wanted you to go there. He wanted the police away from the real location.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because if Sofia dies, I can't keep pretending I didn't know what kind of man he is.”
“What real location?”
“The original training house. I found a basement key in his car.”
She gave him an address. Adrian relayed it to Harris and waited by the kitchen window until her team confirmed they were on the way.
May you like
At 11:47 p.m., Harris called back.
“We found Sofia,” she said. “She's alive. But she has something to tell you about your father.”
