Chapter 2 - The Woman Who Had Been Dead for Six Years
Walter did not look at the weapon.
He looked through the small window behind him.
Rebecca was still there.
His daughter.
Alive.
Grant stepped closer.
“Move away from the door.”
Walter finally looked at him.
“You buried an empty urn.”
Grant’s jaw tightened.
“So you checked.”
“I saw my daughter.”
“You saw a sick woman.”
“I know my own child.”
Grant smiled without warmth.
“Do you?”
The question hit Walter strangely.
Grant gestured with the gun.
“Walk.”
Walter remained still.
“If you kill me, Frank already knows where I am.”
It was a bluff.
Walter had called his old friend Frank Delaney before following Grant, but all he had said was that he was checking something suspicious.
He had never sent the location.
Grant studied him.
Walter saw calculation replace rage.
“You came here alone.”
“You willing to bet your life on it?”
A noise echoed from outside.
A truck door.
Grant glanced toward the corridor.
Walter moved.
He slammed the clipboard into Grant’s wrist.
The gun fired.
The shot exploded through the hallway.
Walter drove his shoulder into Grant’s chest.
They crashed into the wall.
At sixty-eight, Walter no longer had the speed he once possessed, but thirty years of loading steel fittings and construction equipment had left strength in his arms.
He grabbed Grant’s wrist with both hands.
Grant punched him across the jaw.
Walter staggered.
The gun skidded across the concrete.
The blonde woman screamed.
“Grant!”
Walter lunged for the weapon.
Grant kicked it beneath a cabinet.
Then alarms began shrieking.
The blonde woman slammed a red emergency button.
Heavy security doors started closing throughout the building.
Walter ran toward Rebecca.
The steel door required a code.
“Rebecca!”
She stood inside.
Confused.
Terrified.
“Dad?”
One word.
Walter’s entire world shifted.
“Yes!”
Rebecca stumbled toward the glass.
“Dad?”
Grant grabbed Walter from behind.
Walter drove an elbow backward.
Grant cursed.
Walter hit the keypad repeatedly.
“Rebecca, I’m getting you out!”
The blonde woman rushed toward them carrying a syringe.
Walter knocked her arm aside.
The syringe struck the floor.
Rebecca screamed behind the door.
Walter saw something then.
A hospital identification band around her wrist.
Not Rebecca Mercer.
Rachel Monroe.
Grant seized Walter’s coat.
“You’re done.”
Walter twisted free and ran.
Not because he wanted to leave Rebecca.
Because he realized he could not save her if Grant buried them both inside that building.
He reached the service exit as another security door descended.
Walter dropped to the floor and rolled beneath it.
Metal crashed inches behind his shoes.
He ran to his truck.
Grant appeared outside seconds later.
Walter started the engine.
Grant raised the recovered gun.
A bullet shattered Walter’s rear window.
Walter ducked and accelerated.
His truck fishtailed across gravel before reaching the highway.
He drove two miles before calling Frank.
“I found Rebecca.”
Silence.
Then Frank said, “What?”
“She’s alive.”
Twenty minutes later, Walter and Frank were sitting inside the rear room of a roadside diner while Walter held ice against his swelling jaw.
Frank had spent twenty-nine years with the state police.
He listened without interrupting.
When Walter finished, Frank leaned back.
“Why not call 911 immediately?”
“Because someone helped Grant declare my living daughter dead.”
Frank’s expression changed.
Walter continued.
“The blonde woman was at the hospital six years ago.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“And Rebecca was wearing another identity?”
“Rachel Monroe.”
Frank pulled out his phone.
“Give me the factory address.”
They drove back with two uniformed deputies Frank trusted personally.
The building was empty.
Completely.
The bed was gone.
Medication cabinet gone.
Cameras removed.
Computer equipment stripped.
Even the clipboard had disappeared.
A deputy examined the bullet hole in Walter’s truck.
“That supports your shooting claim.”
But there was no Rebecca.
No Grant.
No blonde woman.
Frank found something beneath a radiator.
The broken plastic cap from a syringe.
Then Walter’s phone rang.
Grant.
Frank motioned for Walter to answer on speaker.
“Where’s my daughter?”
Grant laughed softly.
“You’re having some kind of breakdown.”
“I saw her.”
“You saw a woman who resembles Rebecca.”
“She called me Dad.”
“People with psychiatric conditions say strange things.”
Walter looked at Frank.
Grant continued.
“You broke into private property, assaulted me and terrified a patient receiving medical care.”
“You fired at me.”
“Did I?”
Walter stared at the bullet hole in his truck.
Grant’s voice became colder.
“And now Noah is frightened because his grandfather is behaving erratically.”
Walter’s stomach dropped.
“What did you do with Noah?”
“He’s my son.”
“Put him on the phone.”
“No.”
“Grant.”
“You’ve become unstable, Walter. Until a court says otherwise, you’re not seeing Noah again.”
The line disconnected.
Walter nearly crushed the phone in his hand.
Frank spoke carefully.
“We need proof.”
“I saw her.”
“I believe you.”
“That should be enough.”
“In a courtroom? It isn’t.”
That afternoon, Walter returned home and opened the locked cabinet containing Rebecca’s death records.
Autopsy summary.
Cremation certificate.
Dental confirmation.
Accident report.
Frank spread everything across the kitchen table.
They began with the dental records.
Two hours later, Frank noticed something.
“Walter.”
He pointed to the dentist listed as having supplied Rebecca’s records.
Dr. Harold Pritchard.
Walter frowned.
“That wasn’t her dentist.”
“You sure?”
“Rebecca went to the same dentist since college. Dr. Anne Keller.”
Frank searched the name from the report.
Harold Pritchard had surrendered his license seven years earlier after insurance-fraud allegations.
One year before Rebecca’s crash.
The fraud was becoming visible.
Then Frank found something worse.
The body recovered from Rebecca’s vehicle had been cremated within forty-eight hours.
No independent family identification.
No DNA comparison with Walter.
No second dental examination.
Authorization had supposedly been signed by Grant.
Walter whispered, “Whose body did we bury?”
Frank didn’t answer.
Walter’s laptop chimed.
An email had arrived from an unknown account.
No subject.
One attachment.
A photograph.
Walter opened it.
Rebecca sat in the back seat of a vehicle beside the blonde woman.
A newspaper rested in Rebecca’s lap.
The date printed at the top was today.
Beneath the photograph was a message:
STOP LOOKING OR YOU WILL LOSE HER AGAIN.
Then Walter saw something reflected in the car window.
A highway sign.
Frank zoomed in.
Route 17.
Southbound.
They were moving Rebecca.
May you like
And there was only one person who might know where.
Six-year-old Noah.
