Chapter 7 - The Blue Teddy Bear
I asked hotel security to preserve every image of the courier and package delivery.
The parcel had not reached the children's room.
Reed intercepted it at reception under the security plan we had established after the first threat.
Olivia never saw the card.
When I called her, she showed me a blue teddy bear she had owned since preschool.
It had lost one button eye.
The resemblance was too specific to dismiss.
Someone had watched my family closely for years.
Lena was now unreachable.
My command confirmed that she had failed to report at the time required by her leave arrangement.
An internal inquiry had begun, and my compromised credentials were disabled.
I hated that I could not personally conduct the search for her.
That boundary was what protected the case from becoming a vendetta.
At dawn, I sat with the quadruplets around a hotel breakfast table.
Ethan asked whether our trip had been a mistake.
“No,” I said.
“But we found out some adults were not behaving safely.”
Noah folded his napkin into a square.
“Are we going home?”
“You are.”
“Not you?”
“I need to finish work with the investigators.”
Sophia looked at me with serious gray eyes.
“Then be careful, Mom.”
The children departed with Reed and another authorized escort.
I watched them disappear through airport security before returning to the case.
The warrant team entered the old storage property that afternoon.
Marlowe kept me away from the search itself.
I waited in a nearby office where my independent department liaison could receive approved updates.
They found hundreds of empty file boxes, two broken printers, and a welded metal cabinet.
The cabinet contained applications from veterans who had never received the benefits recorded in their names.
Some were homeless.
Some were deceased.
Some had paid out of pocket for rehabilitation care while foundation reports claimed to have funded it.
One folder contained a list of recipients whose initials appeared beside winter dates.
The investigators called it the Winter List.
The last page included my father's name.
Beside it was a transfer for four hundred thousand dollars.
The entry's date was after his death.
A dead man had supposedly received charitable funds through a bank account tied to a family trust.
I asked whether anyone had contacted my mother.
She had died when I was sixteen.
There was no one left to explain the records.
Then Marlowe told me they had recovered an audio cassette from the cabinet.
An examiner had cleared a portion for listening.
On the recording, my father said, “If the Reynolds family learns what I kept, they'll come after Kesha.”
He paused.
Then he spoke five words that stopped me breathing.
May you like
“Daniel has already been recruited.”
