Chapter 14 - THE WINDOW
Nathan moved Grace and Lily to a secure guesthouse on a private ranch north of the city.
Only five people knew the location.
Nathan. Grace. Claire. Rebecca. Owen.
By sunset, someone else did.
A drone appeared over the tree line.
Owen shot it down with an anti-drone system before it reached the house.
The memory card contained live GPS coordinates and zoomed images of Lily playing on the porch.
Grace watched all of them.
Then she noticed something.
“The drone was already in the air before we arrived.”
Nathan turned.
“How do you know?”
“The first image timestamp. It was circling the ranch twenty minutes before our convoy got here.”
Owen checked.
She was right.
No leak.
Their vehicles were being tracked.
Security swept the cars and found a magnetic beacon under Rebecca’s SUV.
Rebecca went pale. “That car was parked at the courthouse yesterday.”
Police pulled nearby surveillance.
A man in a maintenance uniform had crouched beside it for seven seconds.
Facial recognition identified him.
Dean Mercer’s younger brother.
Nathan called Ramos. “Pick him up.”
Too late.
Mercer’s brother was found unconscious in a motel room, drugged but alive.
Someone had used him, then tried to erase him.
In the room, police found a prepaid phone.
One unsent draft message contained a bank account number.
Forensic accountants traced the account to a Dane Capital shell company.
But the authorized signer was not Malcolm.
It was Victoria.
Ramos obtained an arrest warrant.
Officers reached her penthouse at 9:40 p.m.
The place was empty.
Her passport was gone.
So was her jewelry.
But on the kitchen counter sat a printed boarding pass.
Phoenix to Montreal.
Departure time: 11:05 p.m.
May you like
And beside it was a second boarding pass.
Passenger: Lily Cole.
