Chapter 15 - THE ROAD
I called Dad.
No answer.
Again.
No answer.
Ben was already talking into his radio.
“District security, locate Dr. Harper immediately.”
Helen called state police.
My hands started shaking.
“What if Peter has him?”
Ben looked me in the eye.
“We don’t know that.”
“His car.”
“A photo of his car is not your father.”
It was a security answer.
Technically correct.
Emotionally useless.
Then Dad called.
“Dad?”
“Mia, I’m fine.”
I sat down hard.
“Where are you?”
“State police office.”
“Why didn’t you answer?”
“Interview room. Phone was outside.”
Ben took the phone.
“Daniel, Peter sent a threat with a photo of your vehicle.”
Dad went quiet.
“Where was the picture taken?”
Ben checked.
“Route 16, near the old water tower.”
Dad’s answer came immediately.
“I wasn’t driving that car.”
“What?”
“District security drove it back to school after I rode with Helen.”
Ben’s face changed.
“Who has the car?”
He called dispatch.
The answer was Officer Luis Grant, a district security employee who had worked events at Westbridge for years.
Grant’s radio stopped responding.
State police found the car twenty minutes later at an abandoned garden center.
Grant was inside, unconscious but alive, with a head injury.
Peter was gone.
On the passenger seat sat a manila envelope addressed to me.
MIA BENNETT.
Helen did not want me opening it.
I insisted.
Inside was a single photograph.
My mother.
She was standing outside a courthouse beside Peter Mercer eight years ago.
On the back, someone had written:
YOUR FATHER NEVER TOLD YOU THE REAL REASON SHE DIED.
Dad stared at it for a long time.
“This is manipulation.”
“Is the picture fake?”
“No.”
“Then what happened that day?”
He looked at Helen.
Then at me.
“Your mother met Peter privately.”
My chest tightened.
“Why?”
“She was trying to get him to cooperate with federal investigators.”
“Federal investigators?”
Dad nodded.
“The construction case was bigger than a safety settlement. It involved bribery.”
I remembered Mom’s unsent message.
Westbridge payments.
“How much did she know?”
Dad’s voice broke.
“Enough that someone followed her after that meeting.”
The room went silent.
I could barely speak.
“You said her accident was random.”
“I believed it was.”
“Believed?”
Helen interrupted gently.
“Mia, state police just reopened the crash file.”
“Why?”
She held up her phone.
May you like
“Because the drunk driver who hit your mother received $75,000 two weeks after sentencing.”
The money came from a Mercer shell company.
