Chapter 13 - The Officer at the Gate
The officer’s name was Tate. I knew that before he said it because his badge had been visible in the store footage from the night I escaped. He had been the second officer to arrive, the one who never entered the convenience store.Marcus stepped in front of me. “State the charge.”“Violation of a guardianship order and destruction of property.”“Neither is an arrestable offense under this order.”Tate raised his weapon. “You can explain that downtown.”The house alarm shrieked behind us. Celia appeared at the garage entrance with one hand pressed to her shoulder. She had staged a wound.“He shot at me,” she said.Marcus looked at the ceiling. “I fired one warning shot.”Tate moved toward us. “Drop the weapon.”Marcus placed the pistol on the ground.I held up my phone. “Every word is being recorded.”Tate’s expression did not change. “Then you have nothing to fear.”“The officer at the store knew about the psychiatric petition before seeing any evidence. You were there.”“I was responding to a call.”“Celia called you.”“You are escalating.”“You are arresting me for leaving a house where I was held against my will.”Tate looked toward Celia.It was quick. It was enough.Mara stepped behind the patrol car and kicked the rear tire. Tate turned instinctively. Marcus lunged, grabbed his arm, and forced the weapon toward the ground.I ran.The driveway ended at a locked gate. I climbed the fence, caught my jacket on a spike, and tore free. Behind me, Tate shouted. A shot cracked through the night.I dropped behind a concrete drainage channel.Mara landed beside me. Marcus followed, bleeding from his eyebrow.“Are you hit?” I asked.“No.”“Where is the box?”Mara held it against her chest.We crawled beneath the road through a culvert and emerged in a wooded lot. An ambulance passed on the main street, siren flashing red across the trees.“We need to call someone,” Mara said.“Not the police.”“The federal authorities.”“We need admissible evidence first.”Marcus wiped blood from his face. “You have evidence in your phone, the letters, the tape, and the Vesper logs.”“And an officer willing to shoot us.”“That helps establish obstruction.”“If he is not protected.”We reached a closed tire shop where Marcus had left a second vehicle. Inside the glove box was a satellite phone and a file.“You planned for this,” I said.“I planned for Celia.”The file contained his investigative notes from the previous year. He had tracked payments from Mayfield Services to accounts controlled by Owen Bell. Bell had then paid a private security company that employed Tate.“Celia paid the officer,” I said.“Indirectly.”“Everything with her is indirect.”The satellite phone rang.Marcus answered. His face changed.“Who?”He listened.“No, she is with me.”He handed me the phone.“Abigail, this is Special Agent Naomi Cross with the FBI,” a woman said. “Your father contacted our office before his death.”“Why didn’t you intervene?”“Because his report was incomplete and he refused witness protection.”“He was murdered.”“We are investigating that possibility.”“Celia has forged medical records, moved money through a false beneficiary, bribed an officer, and tried to seize my trust.”“We have intelligence on Celia. We do not yet have evidence tying her to the financial theft.”“I have evidence.”“Then preserve it and do not confront her again.”“You cannot tell me that after she tried to kill me.”“I can if I want to keep you alive long enough to testify.”I looked at Marcus.“There is someone else behind her,” I said.“We believe so.”“My father suspected a family partner.”“Do you know who?”“No.”“Find the original device associated with HART-19. If the access logs are authentic, they may identify the person who coordinated the theft.”“My mother’s laptop was destroyed.”“Was it?”The call ended.Marcus took the phone. “What did she mean?”“The same thing we mean. Someone preserved it.”We drove to the old Vale family home in Macon, the house my father had sold after my mother died. It had been vacant for years and was scheduled for demolition.The front door was chained. We entered through a broken basement window.I remembered the kitchen where my mother had taught me to make biscuits. The room was stripped to studs. In the pantry, one shelf remained.Behind it was a metal vent.The laptop sat inside a plastic storage bin, wrapped in oilcloth.Its screen was cracked. The battery was missing. But the hard drive remained.Mara removed it and connected it to her reader.The files were encrypted.I searched the old family photographs until I found one of my mother standing beside the laptop. A note was written on the back.The password is what Abigail called the moon.When I was five, I had called the moon “the night door.”Mara typed it.The laptop opened.One file appeared on the desktop.It was an email from my mother to my father, sent the night before her death.Thomas, I know who the partner is. It is not Gertrude. It is the person you think you can still save.
