Chapter 1 - THE MAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
Table of Contents 6
The second photograph changed everything.
Detective Maria Santos kept her eyes on me while I stared at the glossy image beneath the interrogation-room light. Karen Mitchell stood outside a coffee shop three blocks from the Valente estate. She wore sunglasses and a long black coat, but there was no mistaking her.
The man beside her was harder to accept.
His hair had turned gray around the temples. His shoulders looked thinner than I remembered, and a scar crossed the left side of his jaw.
But I knew that face.
“Where did you get this?” I whispered.
Santos didn’t answer immediately.
“Who is he?”
My fingers began trembling.
“Thomas Reed.”
“And Thomas Reed is?”
“My father.”
Santos leaned back.
According to every document I had ever seen, Thomas Reed had died eleven years earlier.
I was sixteen when a police officer came to our apartment and told my mother that Dad’s car had gone through a guardrail outside Milwaukee. The vehicle burned before rescuers reached it. Identification had supposedly been made through dental records.
My mother never recovered from losing him.
She died four years later.
After that, my younger sister Lucy became my responsibility.
Yet the man in the photograph was unquestionably my father.
Santos placed another image on the table.
This one showed Karen handing him a small envelope.
The timestamp was from two weeks before Emma was found in the dumpster.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
“Neither do I,” Santos replied. “But we traced Karen’s phone records. She contacted this man seventeen times during the month before Emma’s disappearance.”
My mind raced.
“Why would my father know Karen?”
“That’s what I hoped you could tell me.”
I couldn’t.
Santos opened a folder.
“There’s something else. Your employment at the Valente estate wasn’t random.”
I looked up.
“What does that mean?”
“The cleaning company you worked for received a specific request for you.”
Cold spread through my chest.
“From Adrian?”
“No.”
She turned a document toward me.
Karen Mitchell had personally requested that I be assigned to the estate.
Suddenly, every coincidence from the previous six months felt poisoned.
Karen had always been strangely friendly when I first arrived. She asked about Lucy. She asked whether I had family in Chicago. Once, she even asked whether my father had been close to me.
I had assumed she was making conversation.
Now I realized she had been collecting information.
The interrogation-room door opened.
A uniformed officer whispered something to Santos.
Her expression changed.
“What?”
The officer repeated it.
Santos stood immediately.
“Stay here.”
“What's happening?”
She hesitated before answering.
“Emma Valente stopped breathing twenty minutes ago.”
My anger disappeared beneath instant fear.
“Is she—”
“She’s alive. Doctors stabilized her.”
I closed my eyes.
That tiny blue hand beneath the blanket flashed through my mind.
Santos continued.
“They ran additional toxicology tests. The sedative found in Emma’s blood wasn’t something available inside the Valente home.”
“What was it?”
“A veterinary tranquilizer.”
My stomach tightened.
Then Santos placed one final document in front of me.
“The prescription was purchased through a clinic outside Chicago using a false name.”
I looked down.
My blood turned cold.
The false name was Lucy Reed.
My dying sister.
“No,” I whispered. “Lucy had nothing to do with this.”
“I believe you.”
“Then why is her name there?”
“Because somebody wanted us to find it.”
The door suddenly opened again.
This time Adrian Valente walked in.
Two detectives immediately stepped toward him, but Santos raised her hand.
Adrian looked nothing like the furious man who had slapped me three nights earlier.
He looked exhausted.
Ashamed.
And terrified.
He stopped across the table from me.
“I know you have every reason to hate me,” he said quietly. “But my daughter woke up ten minutes ago.”
I said nothing.
“She keeps crying for the woman who kept her warm.”
My throat tightened.
Adrian lowered his eyes.
“For you.”
I stared at him.
Then he placed something on the table between us.
My coat.
The same coat I had wrapped around Emma.
It had been washed, folded, and placed inside a clear hospital bag.
“I was wrong about you,” Adrian said.
“That doesn’t erase what you did.”
“I know.”
“You hit me.”
His jaw tightened.
“I know.”
“You had me arrested while my sister is dying.”
“I know.”
Each answer came without an excuse.
Then he looked directly into my eyes.
“And I’m going to spend however long it takes making that right.”
I wanted to tell him money couldn’t repair everything.
Before I could speak, Santos’s phone rang.
She answered, listened for several seconds, and slowly looked toward me.
“What?” I asked.
“We found Thomas Reed.”
My heart stopped.
“Where?”
She swallowed.
“Outside your sister’s hospital.”
And according to the surveillance team watching him, my supposedly dead father had been standing across the street for three hours.
Watching Lucy’s window.
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