Chapter 11 - My Daughter Was the Leverage
Ortiz refused to let me go alone.
I refused to stay behind.
So we compromised in the way desperate people do: badly.
Police set a perimeter two blocks from the warehouse. I drove the final distance with a backpack full of copied financial files while officers tracked me through a transmitter taped beneath my shirt.
The warehouse had been empty for years.
One light burned inside.
“Emma!” I shouted.
My voice echoed through rows of rusted shelving.
Lucas stepped from behind a pillar.
He looked exhausted.
“Stop there.”
“Where is my daughter?”
“She’s alive.”
“Show me.”
He hesitated.
Then Emma appeared on a mezzanine above us.
Her hands were free.
Vanessa stood beside her.
Alive.
A bruise darkened one side of Vanessa’s face.
Emma saw me.
“Daddy!”
I nearly ran forward.
Lucas raised a gun.
“Don’t.”
Vanessa shouted, “Lucas, this wasn’t the deal!”
His hand shook.
“I don’t have a deal anymore.”
Then Graham Voss walked out from the shadows.
He was seventy now, silver-haired and lean, dressed like a man arriving for a board meeting.
He smiled at me.
“You look like your father when he was scared.”
“My father wasn’t scared of you.”
“He should have been.”
I held up the backpack.
“You wanted files.”
“I want access credentials, debt records, and the trust documents Claire found.”
So Claire had found something before she vanished.
I looked at Vanessa.
She closed her eyes.
Voss noticed.
“You never told him?”
“Told me what?”
Voss smiled wider.
“Your wife discovered the reason your father expelled me.”
I stared at him.
“Theft.”
“No.”
His expression hardened.
“Murder.”
May you like
Above us, Emma gasped.
And for the first time, Voss looked up at her like he had forgotten a child was listening.
