Chapter 5 - Melissa’s Second Phone
I moved Sophie that night.
Not because Detective Ruiz ordered me to.
Because Sophie woke screaming at 3:06 a.m.
“He found us!”
I ran into her room.
Nobody was there.
Windows locked.
Alarm armed.
Still, she pointed toward the hallway.
“The man with the silver ring.”
“What man?”
“The one Mommy didn’t like.”
She had never mentioned him before.
“What does he look like?”
Sophie squeezed her rabbit.
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know about the ring?”
“Mommy showed me.”
That sentence mattered.
Melissa had shown Sophie something.
Perhaps deliberately.
I examined the stuffed rabbit.
One seam along its back looked newer than the others.
My hands started shaking.
I opened it carefully.
Inside the stuffing was a tiny key.
And a folded piece of paper.
Locker 317.
Detective Ruiz traced the number to a train-station storage facility.
Inside the locker was a backpack.
Cash.
Copies of medical documents.
And another phone.
Melissa’s real phone.
The device inside Wade’s bag had been a secondary one she apparently used for recording.
The hidden phone contained months of notes.
My daughter had been investigating something before she died.
Not Brent’s affair.
Not Wade’s clinic.
A network.
She had discovered irregular insurance claims tied to patients receiving unusual procedures through shell clinics.
Same doctors.
Same transport companies.
Same private aviation service.
And enormous payments routed through a medical foundation.
Mercer Hope Initiative.
Founded by Brent and Wade’s father.
Dr. Harrison Mercer.
The respected surgeon who had supposedly died six years earlier.
I remembered Harrison.
Brilliant.
Cold.
He wore a heavy silver signet ring.
My stomach turned.
“Sophie saw Harrison?”
“Impossible,” Ruiz said.
“He’s dead.”
Ruiz searched the death records.
There was a certificate.
Cremation.
No independent autopsy.
The certifying physician?
Wade Mercer.
Again.
Then Melissa’s phone revealed a photograph.
Taken through a car windshield three months earlier.
An older man entering Wade’s abandoned clinic.
His face was blurred.
But his hand was clear.
Silver ring.
Melissa had captioned the photograph:
Harrison?
My knees weakened.
Brent’s supposedly dead father might have been alive.
Melissa had discovered him.
Then she died.
Ruiz continued searching the phone.
One scheduled email had failed to send because the account password was changed after Melissa’s death.
She recovered the draft.
Mom, if anything happens to me, Brent is involved—but he isn’t the one I’m most afraid of.
Below that was an attachment.
A photograph of Harrison Mercer.
Alive.
Standing beside Wade.
And between them stood a woman.
I recognized her immediately.
May you like
My own sister.
Rebecca.
