Chapter 14 - THE PASSWORD ONLY EMILY KNEW
I called the account provider and locked the account, then gave Rios the access alert. The request had come from a remote session connected to the laptop Vanessa used for Lily’s schoolwork. She had taken that laptop when she fled.
Before the lock took effect, someone downloaded a folder named FIRST SNOW.
It was the name of the night Emily and I met, fifteen years earlier, in a parking lot while we both helped dig a stranger’s car out of a snowbank.
I felt sick thinking that Vanessa had touched those private memories.
Nora had a copy Emily sent her months before her death. She asked us to meet at the newsroom, where the files were stored on a computer disconnected from the internet.
One was a video of Emily sitting at our dining table. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil. She looked exhausted, alive, heartbreakingly ordinary.
“Daniel,” she said, “I have proof Frank wasn't the only one Mercer controlled. Your name is in the files because your father used you. Ethan tried to stop him. I didn't tell you sooner because I wanted enough evidence that nobody could turn you against your brother again.”
She paused and pressed a hand against her mouth.
“I keep thinking I have one more day to get this right.”
I reached toward the screen before I knew I was doing it.
In another file, Emily interviewed Luis Ortega in prison. Luis described hearing Mercer order a warehouse exit chained before the fire. A security guard had unlocked it in time for workers to escape, but the guard later disappeared from the witness list.
Nora leaned forward. “The guard's name was Paul Niven. He lives an hour from here.”
Rios called his home to arrange an interview.
May you like
His daughter answered.
“My dad died yesterday,” she said. “But he left a message for Daniel Reed.”
