Chapter 15 - The Friend Who Opened the Door
Her name was Beth Finch. Lucía had trusted her for four years. Beth worked in medical billing and had offered to explain the strange payments appearing in Mom's records. She'd even brought dinner to Lucía's apartment the night before she disappeared.
"She told me I was brave," Lucía said, voice breaking. "She said I could trust her."
"Maybe she wasn't working for them at first," Nora said. "We need to establish when that changed."
Beth was found at a bus station with one suitcase and a bruised cheek. Faced with footage from the hospital, she admitted entering Lucía's room under a stolen badge. She said Mercer had threatened to have her father arrested for years of fraud unless she silenced Lucía.
"So you decided my sister should die?" I demanded through the interview-room window.
Nora pulled me back before Beth could hear. "You'll get your chance to speak in court. Not like this."
Beth's statement gave investigators a missing piece. Harold Finch had built the false accounts. After Marisol died, Daniel and Mercer used the same records to move rent income into Northline. The funeral was meant to eliminate Lucía before she could expose the fraud. Beth said she'd delivered the sedative to Pike, but insisted she didn't know he would put Lucía in a coffin alive.
Nora didn't accept that excuse as proof of innocence. She documented it.
Jamie, meanwhile, woke in a guarded hospital room and told us where Daniel had been sleeping: a small caretaker's house on the hill, reached by a service road beyond the storage cellar. He'd heard Daniel and Mercer arguing about leaving town. Mercer wanted cash. Daniel wanted the blue ledger destroyed.
"He also kept saying something about your mother," Jamie told me. "He said she was the only one who knew where the second set of papers was."
Lucía raised her head. "The second set?"
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Then Jamie remembered one more thing. Daniel had stood outside the locked room the previous night and said, "Before I leave, I'm going to finish what Marisol started."
At that very moment, smoke rose from the hill above our orchard.
