Chapter 8 - The Bait
I read the note three times.
YOU WERE NEVER THE BRIDE.
YOU WERE THE BAIT.
Until that moment, I had assumed I was the target.
Everything supported that conclusion.
The surveillance photographs.
The financial profile.
The forged condo transfer.
The sleeping pills.
The rushed marriage.
But bait is not the target.
Bait is what you use to attract the target.
Morales reached the same conclusion seconds later.
"If you were bait, who were they trying to draw out?"
My first thought was my father.
But he was dead.
My mother was dead.
I had no siblings.
Then I thought of Rebecca Sloan.
My father had written that she might be next.
Patricia was Rebecca's aunt.
The current case had pulled Rebecca directly into the investigation.
Maybe that was deliberate.
But Briarstone could not have known she would be assigned.
Unless someone inside law enforcement placed her there.
That possibility became impossible to ignore.
Rebecca had already been removed from the investigation because of the family connection.
Internal review expanded immediately.
Who assigned her?
Who knew her aunt was Patricia?
Who had access to the old Sloan family history?
The assignment had appeared random.
Randomness was becoming suspicious.
Rebecca was questioned by her own agency.
So was her supervisor.
So was the case coordinator.
I hated that she was being treated like a possible participant.
But I understood why.
Briarstone survived because it used trust as infrastructure.
Family trust.
Romantic trust.
Professional trust.
Institutional trust.
Nothing could be accepted at face value anymore.
The wedding ring was tested.
There were partial fingerprints on the inside band.
One belonged to me.
One belonged to Daniel.
The third did not match Elias, Patricia, Leonard, or Margaret.
The unknown print became another person in the room without a face.
Then investigators found microscopic red dust beneath the stone setting.
The lab identified it as iron-rich clay common to a narrow region west of the city.
Not enough to locate Elias.
Enough to reduce the search.
Security-company records showed he leased a rural training property in that region.
Agents raided it before dawn.
The buildings were empty.
But they found evidence someone had left in a hurry.
Food was still in the refrigerator.
A generator was warm.
Two beds were unmade.
And in a locked basement room were surveillance monitors displaying live camera feeds.
One feed showed the entrance to the apartment where I had been staying.
Another showed Rebecca's house.
A third showed the hospital where Leonard disappeared.
The fourth showed a home none of the agents recognized.
An older woman was moving through a kitchen.
The timestamp was live.
Investigators froze the image and ran the address through mapping software.
The house belonged to Allison Grant's sister, Caroline.
Police reached her before anyone else did.
Caroline was unharmed.
She had no idea she was being watched.
The camera had been hidden inside a utility box across the street.
When Morales told her why police were there, Caroline began crying.
She had spent three years being told Allison probably chose to disappear.
Now proof of surveillance suggested someone still considered the family relevant.
Caroline agreed to speak with me.
Her voice over the video call was exhausted but sharp.
She wanted to know everything about Daniel.
I wanted to know everything about Allison.
We traded pieces of the same nightmare.
Allison had been stubborn.
Financially independent.
Suspicious of easy answers.
She had also been an obsessive note-taker.
Caroline said Allison kept journals for most of her adult life.
Police found several after she disappeared.
One was missing.
The missing journal covered the final six months of her marriage.
Caroline believed Michael Danner took it.
Then she remembered something the original investigators ignored.
Two weeks before Allison vanished, Allison mailed Caroline a sealed envelope.
She wrote DO NOT OPEN UNLESS I CALL YOU.
Then Allison called the next day and asked for the envelope back.
Caroline returned it unopened.
She always regretted that.
I asked whether she knew what was inside.
She said no.
But Allison had mentioned one strange phrase on the phone.
"She said she had finally found the ledger."
Morales leaned toward the screen.
"What ledger?"
"She never explained."
The word hit me like a spark.
My father had been an auditor.
His notes documented shell vendors, false placements, and missing money.
Maybe Allison had found the same financial record independently.
If so, I might not have been bait for Rebecca.
I might have been bait for whoever had the ledger now.
Morales asked Caroline whether Allison ever named someone she trusted with documents.
Caroline thought for a long time.
Then she said one name.
Julia.
Julia Mercer.
The social worker who later married Daniel and disappeared.
Allison and Julia had known each other.
That connection had not appeared in the early files because they used different last names professionally.
They had both volunteered at Haven House.
They had both investigated Margaret.
And they had both later married the same man under different identities.
That could not be coincidence.
Maybe Daniel did not independently target them.
Maybe Margaret sent him to each woman because they shared something.
A ledger.
Evidence.
Knowledge.
The money stolen afterward may have been camouflage.
Financial fraud made disappearances look like greed.
It gave investigators an obvious motive to chase while the deeper motive remained hidden.
Then the federal lab recovered data from one of the burned drives at the Morris storage site.
Most files were corrupted.
One spreadsheet survived partially.
It listed initials, dates, asset values, and status codes.
AG appeared beside a date matching Allison's disappearance.
JM appeared beside Julia's.
MC matched Melissa Crane.
My initials appeared near the bottom.
But my row contained a status code different from the others.
BAIT-ACTIVE.
Next to my row was another set of initials.
RV-S.
The analysts could not identify the person.
I could.
Rebecca Voss Sloan.
Except Rebecca's middle name was not Voss.
At least that was what she had always believed.
A sealed adoption record proved otherwise.
Rebecca's biological father was Margaret Voss's late husband.
Rebecca was Daniel and Elias's half-sister.
Patricia had not simply been Rebecca's aunt who disappeared with two boys.
Margaret had been circling Rebecca's family from the beginning because Rebecca herself was part of the Voss bloodline.
The case had just become a family structure no one knew existed.
And the word beside Rebecca's initials on the spreadsheet was not TARGET.
Rebecca reacted to the word SUCCESSOR with anger rather than fear.
She requested every sealed record connected to her childhood.
Her agency counsel advised her to wait.
She refused.
For once, official patience felt too much like the silence Margaret depended on.
The adoption file revealed irregularities beyond paternity.
One court signature belonged to a judge later listed in my father's Haven House notes.
A home-study report was signed by a social worker who never held a license in that state.
Rebecca's adoption itself may have been manipulated to place her inside Patricia's family.
That raised an unbearable possibility.
Margaret might have deliberately positioned her biological husband's daughter with people she could monitor.
Rebecca's childhood had not simply contained a hidden fact.
It may have been designed.
She walked outside after reading the report and punched the side of her car hard enough to split a knuckle.
Then she laughed at herself because federal agents are trained not to punch evidence-adjacent objects.
I wrapped her hand with gauze from a first-aid kit.
"You don't have to be composed with me."
"That's convenient because I'm not."
It was the first time our relationship stopped feeling like agent and victim.
We were two women trying to separate ourselves from decisions made before we understood them.
Rebecca worried that Margaret wanted her career specifically because federal authority would make her useful.
Maybe the anonymous case file two years earlier had been a test of how she investigated.
Maybe Margaret wanted to see whether Rebecca could be manipulated through curiosity.
The idea disgusted her.
I asked whether she had ever made a decision that benefited Briarstone unknowingly.
She had.
In the anonymous case, she pushed one raid earlier than another agent recommended.
The suspects had already fled.
At the time, she blamed the leak on local police.
Now she wondered whether the anonymous source intentionally gave her just enough information to trigger the premature move.
Margaret may have used Rebecca to clear out a rival branch.
Successor did not necessarily mean future leader.
It might mean future tool.
That interpretation fit Margaret even better.
Later, analysts compared the RV-S code against old Briarstone accounting notes.
The letter S appeared elsewhere beside people being cultivated for specialized roles.
One became a notary.
One a banker.
One a nurse.
One a county records clerk.
The organization recruited careers, not just identities.
Rebecca's path into federal investigations could have been encouraged because Margaret saw strategic value years ahead.
That kind of patience made the operation feel almost impossible to fight.
Then Morales pointed out the weakness hidden inside the same strategy.
Long plans accumulate witnesses.
Documents.
Old grudges.
People who change.
Margaret's greatest strength had been time.
Time was now producing survivors who remembered.
Allison's sister remembered the envelope.
Melissa remembered the engagement dinner.
Dana remembered Nora.
Rebecca remembered background faces from childhood photographs.
The network had spent decades assuming isolated memories would never meet.
Now they were being assembled in one case.
When the partial spreadsheet finally connected Rebecca's initials to SUCCESSOR, the word no longer looked like destiny.
It looked like another plan that could fail.
May you like
It was SUCCESSOR.
