Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN IN THE RED COAT
Mara Bell had been my father's executive assistant for nineteen years.
Her desk had stood outside his office, and she knew his calendar more intimately than I knew my own.
She retired six months before his death after an alleged nervous breakdown.
I had sent flowers and a handwritten note.
I had never been told she had disappeared.
My new court-appointed lawyer, Daniel Mercer, looked at me as if every sentence I spoke came with a price tag.
“There are serious allegations against Mr. Hayes,” he said.
“And there are serious allegations against the man who murdered my father.”
“Those are different proceedings.”
“Only if someone makes them different.”
I demanded he obtain Mara's personnel file and check the visitor records from the detention facility.
He wrote nothing down.
“You need to focus on the appeal.”
“My appeal was never waived permanently.”
“That decision is complicated.”
I stared at him.
“Are you my lawyer, Mr. Mercer, or Silas's messenger?”
He gathered his papers and left.
That evening, a nurse delivered my regular medication and a cup of water.
I recognized the pills, but the cup smelled faintly of almond soap.
I set it on the tray.
The nurse frowned.
“Drink your water.”
“I'd like a sealed bottle.”
“There isn't one.”
“Then I won't drink.”
She reported me as refusing medical treatment.
An hour later, I heard shouting outside the infirmary.
Another patient had collapsed after drinking from a cup delivered on the same cart.
The facility went into lockdown.
By the next morning, officials called it a medical emergency with no evidence of foul play.
I did not believe them.
My father had died after a dangerous substance appeared in his medication.
The method was too familiar to dismiss.
A sympathetic records clerk named June quietly told me an investigator had asked about my medication schedule earlier that week.
“Which investigator?”
“He signed in as federal.”
“Did you see his name?”
June shook her head.
“But I copied the vehicle plate from the loading-bay camera because something felt wrong.”
She passed me the number on a scrap of paper.
I had seen those numbers before.
They belonged to a vehicle used by Vance Holdings' corporate security division.
Silas was reaching into the prison itself.
Two hours later, June was suspended for unauthorized contact with an inmate.
And I learned that the owner of the vehicle was a woman long presumed dead.
May you like
Clara Thorne.
