Chapter 6 - THE MOTHER WHO CALLED HER A LIAR
Elisa didn't run.
She laughed.
“You're going to believe a criminal?”
Marcus stared at her.
“You financed Halcyon?”
“Don't be absurd.”
Evan's files contained transfers.
Shell corporations.
Consulting payments.
Enough to establish a trail investigators could follow.
Elisa's father had helped create Halcyon years earlier.
She inherited his interest secretly.
Her marriage to Marcus had given the operation access to his cybersecurity infrastructure.
“Did you marry me for the company?”
Marcus asked.
Elisa looked almost offended.
“No.”
That answer somehow hurt him more.
“I loved you.”
“Loved?”
“I still do.”
“You threatened our daughter.”
“She was going to destroy everything.”
Marcus stared.
“She is five.”
“She saw Evan.”
“So you told her she'd be taken away?”
“I was protecting this family.”
There it was.
The sentence people use when they're protecting everything except their family.
“Where is Sophia?” I asked.
Elisa looked at me.
“I don't know.”
“Ben took her.”
“I didn't authorize that.”
“Where would he go?”
She refused.
Marcus stepped toward her.
Then stopped himself.
I saw something break in him.
Not love.
Illusion.
“You knew I grabbed her.”
Elisa said nothing.
“You knew I was losing my temper with my own daughter because I was terrified she'd expose the basement.”
Still nothing.
“And instead of stopping me, you taught her to blame herself.”
Elisa whispered:
“We all made mistakes.”
“No.”
Marcus looked at her.
“Don't turn choices into weather.”
That was the first honest thing my brother had said in days.
Elisa finally gave us a location.
An abandoned Halcyon data center outside Joliet.
Police moved.
Marcus and I waited.
Longest forty-seven minutes of my life.
Then the call came.
Sophia was alive.
So was Evan Rourke.
Benjamin had kept him hidden for eighteen months, moving him between properties while trying to force him to reveal where he'd copied the archive.
Sophia had been taken because Benjamin believed she knew where the memory card was.
She did.
But Bunny was already with us.
May you like
A five-year-old had protected the evidence better than every adult around her.
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