Chapter 11 - The Woman in the Photograph
The missing key should have ended the trail.
It didn't.
The shelter's security camera had captured the SUV entering the rear lot twenty-three minutes before we arrived. The driver wore a cap and kept his face down.
But the passenger looked directly toward the camera.
She was a woman in her sixties with short gray hair.
Daniel recognized her.
"Evelyn Crane."
The nurse who signed my forged death authorization was alive.
Detective Brooks ran the image through old licensing records and found a likely match under a new name: Evelyn Cross, living three counties away.
We drove there before dawn.
The address belonged to a modest assisted-living complex.
Evelyn's room was empty.
The bed was made. The closet had been cleared. A nurse at the desk said Evelyn had checked herself out less than an hour earlier.
"Who picked her up?" Brooks asked.
"A man," the nurse said. "Middle-aged. Expensive coat. He said he was family."
"Thomas Ashford?"
She looked at the photograph on Brooks's phone.
"Yes. I think so."
My anger finally broke through the numbness.
"He's cleaning up."
Sarah called immediately and pushed for an emergency court order freezing Thomas's access to certain corporate accounts and preventing destruction of records. Police still did not have enough to arrest him for kidnapping. Much of the evidence was old, and Evelyn's direct testimony mattered.
Emily sat in the hallway, exhausted.
"What if we never find her?"
I sat beside her.
"Then we keep going."
"You really do that, don't you?"
"Do what?"
"Keep going."
I smiled without humor. "I spent eighteen years getting out of bed after I thought you died. I can do almost anything now."
Emily leaned her head against my shoulder.
It lasted only a few seconds, but I held still as if movement might scare the moment away.
Then Sarah called back.
"I found the bank. Agnes Bell had a safe-deposit box at First Commonwealth. The account was closed six years ago."
"Closed by who?"
"That's the strange part. The bank has a scanned authorization form."
She emailed it.
The signature was Agnes Bell's.
But Sister Agnes had died only three months ago.
The box had been closed six years earlier.
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The person who signed the witness line was someone I knew very well.
My brother, Richard Vale.
