Chapter 8 - The Missing Nurse
Ashbourne’s administrator claimed the forms had been submitted electronically.
The submitting clinician was Dr. Karen Bell.
Ruiz checked the license number.
It belonged to a real psychiatrist.
Dr. Bell had died eight months earlier.
Someone was using a dead doctor’s credentials.
The admission forms listed a secondary evaluator.
Laura Simmons.
Registered nurse.
Ruiz found an address in Queens.
The apartment was empty.
A neighbor said Laura had left suddenly two days earlier.
“She had a suitcase.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No.”
“Was she alone?”
The neighbor hesitated.
“A blond woman picked her up.”
Ruiz showed Isabella’s photograph.
The neighbor nodded immediately.
“That’s her.”
Now Isabella was no longer merely denying evidence.
She was moving witnesses.
Rebecca obtained a court order freezing additional accounts.
That was when we discovered Isabella had transferred almost three million dollars out of accounts I had given her access to during our marriage.
Not at once.
Slowly.
Twenty thousand here.
Thirty thousand there.
Investments moved through shell companies.
Jewelry purchased and resold.
Money hidden beneath ordinary expenses.
Marcus studied the pattern.
“She started six weeks after the wedding.”
My marriage had lasted three years.
Almost every month of it contained theft.
I remembered anniversaries.
Vacations.
Christmas mornings.
The night Isabella sat beside Maya’s hospital bed during appendicitis and told me we were a family.
Had any of it been real?
That question nearly consumed me until Maya walked into my office carrying a drawing.
It showed our house.
Me.
Her.
Noah.
There was an empty space beside us.
“Who goes there?”
Maya shrugged.
“Maybe nobody.”
That answer freed something in me.
A family did not need the shape I had been trying so desperately to preserve.
That night, Marcus found Laura Simmons.
Not physically.
Digitally.
Her debit card had been used at a motel in Maryland.
Ruiz contacted local police.
By the time they arrived, the room was empty.
But Laura had left something behind.
A disposable phone.
One unsent voice recording remained in its memory.
Ruiz played it for us.
Laura’s voice shook.
“My name is Laura Simmons.”
“I helped Isabella Cole create medical records for Maya Hart and Nathan Hart.”
“I was paid.”
“I knew it was wrong.”
“But I did not know they were going to hurt the child.”
There was a sound behind her.
She began whispering.
“If anything happens to me, look at the birth certificate.”
The recording ended.
Rebecca frowned.
“Whose birth certificate?”
We assumed Noah’s.
We were wrong.
Ruiz searched the files seized from Isabella’s laptop.
Buried inside an encrypted folder was a scanned birth certificate.
Name.
Maya Elizabeth Hart.
Date of birth.
Correct.
Mother.
Emily Hart.
Correct.
Father.
The space where my name should have appeared had been altered.
Someone had inserted another name.
May you like
Julian Voss.
---
