Chapter 10 - Jack’s Own Emergency Contact
The final four digits belonged to Colonel David Mercer.
Jack’s former commanding officer.
The man who had signed his first promotion recommendation.
The man who had called Emma personally after Jack was injured three years earlier.
The man Jack had listed as secondary military contact while overseas.
Mercer denied everything.
He was retired now.
Living forty miles away.
Ruiz brought him in voluntarily.
He arrived wearing a tan jacket and the expression of a man insulted by accusation.
“That is not my number.”
Jack stared at him.
“It was.”
“Three years ago.”
“You changed it?”
“Yes.”
“Who got the old number?”
Mercer shrugged.
“Phone company.”
Investigators verified.
The number had been reassigned eight months earlier.
Not to Mercer.
To a prepaid business account registered under:
Homefront Systems LLC.
Richard’s company.
Richard had deliberately displayed an old number Jack would recognize.
Misdirection.
Richard laughed when confronted.
“You people wanted a military conspiracy so badly I thought I’d give you one.”
Jack wanted to break the glass again.
But the trick revealed something useful.
Richard knew Jack’s personal history.
Not only deployment paperwork.
Old contacts.
Family structure.
Legal habits.
Enough to construct believable fear.
Where had that data come from?
Lena’s files.
She could no longer deny the central truth:
Her archive had made Richard dangerous.
But investigators still lacked proof she ordered Emma’s disappearance.
The text exchange with “BABY? / STABLE / PROCEED” came from another prepaid line.
Richard claimed Lena used it.
Lena denied it.
Phone tower data placed the device near Lena’s apartment at the time.
Damning.
But “near” was not “inside.”
The device was never recovered.
Meanwhile Margaret produced something she had hidden because Richard threatened her.
A handwritten note pushed beneath her front door three days before the funeral.
DON’T LET THEM TAKE EMMA TO MERCY LAKES.
There was no signature.
Margaret assumed it was nonsense.
Then Emma’s fake death certificate named Mercy Lakes.
Who knew that before Richard staged the paperwork?
Jack asked Lena.
She stared at the note for a long time.
“I didn’t write this.”
“You expect me to believe you again?”
“No.”
Her answer surprised him.
“I expect you to stop believing anyone until there’s proof.”
It was the first sensible thing she had said.
The paper was ordinary.
Ink common.
But the handwriting contained a distinctive habit.
The writer crossed lowercase t’s far to the right of the stem.
Margaret suddenly sat down.
“What?”
Ruiz asked.
Margaret whispered:
“Emma does that.”
The note was compared with Emma’s journal.
Match.
Emma had written the warning herself.
Three days before her disappearance.
Why warn Margaret instead of Jack?
Because Jack was still overseas.
Why Mercy Lakes?
Emma had discovered the fake-death plan before Richard drugged her.
At least part of it.
She knew someone intended to route a false death certificate through Mercy Lakes.
She had been investigating in secret.
That meant she may have left more clues.
Jack returned to the blue folder.
Page by page.
Receipts.
Emails.
Printouts.
Then a photograph of Emma’s twenty-week ultrasound.
On the back:
If this becomes about the baby, Lena has lost control.
Jack read it three times.
Not:
Lena is behind it.
Not:
Lena is innocent.
Lena has lost control.
Emma understood something before everyone else.
Lena had started a system she no longer controlled.
But someone else had decided Emma’s pregnancy changed the rules.
May you like
And beside the sentence, Emma had written only two initials:
A.V.
