Chương 8 - The First Wife's Secret
I had never known Julian had been married before.
The truth waited in Minneapolis.
The address from my father's letter belonged to a storage facility.
The unit had been prepaid for twenty years.
Owner: Thomas Avery.
My father.
Inside were six boxes.
Everything Julian had apparently tried to remove from the house had duplicates here.
My father had planned for the possibility that someone would search his records.
Box one contained financial documents.
Box two contained photographs.
Box three contained newspaper clippings.
Box four contained copies of police reports concerning Michelle and Rebecca.
Box five contained information about Nathan Mercer.
Box six contained something none of us expected.
A marriage certificate.
Julian Whitmore and Rebecca Vale.
They hadn't been engaged.
They had been married.
Secretly.
For eleven months.
Which meant Rebecca wasn't merely an old girlfriend whose insurance paid Julian after her death.
She was his wife.
Laura hadn't known.
Neither had Rebecca's parents.
They had married in another state.
Why keep it secret?
The answer appeared in the next document.
Rebecca had inherited money.
A trust.
Marriage changed certain beneficiary and inheritance rights.
Julian had been positioning himself financially long before her death.
My father's notes formed a timeline.
Rebecca dies.
Julian receives insurance money.
Several years pass.
Julian meets me.
He researches my family's assets.
He courts me.
He marries me.
That realization hurt more than I expected.
Had our entire relationship been selected?
Had Julian looked at me and seen a woman?
Or an inheritance?
Caleb sat beside me on the storage-unit floor.
“Mom.”
I couldn't answer.
He squeezed my shoulder.
Then Detective Ruiz found another envelope.
Inside was a photograph of Julian and Nathan Mercer outside a hospital.
On the back, my father had written:
Mercer received $180,000 eleven days after Rebecca's death.
Payment records supported it.
A company connected to Julian had transferred the money to a consulting entity owned by Mercer.
It still wasn't proof of murder.
But it was something prosecutors could examine.
Then we found the final piece my father had left.
An audio recorder.
The battery was dead.
Ruiz replaced it.
My father's voice filled the storage unit.
He sounded older than I remembered.
“September fourth. Met with Nathan Mercer.”
I stopped breathing.
The recording continued.
My father described confronting Mercer.
Mercer denied everything.
Then another voice appeared.
Mercer's.
Faint.
Nervous.
“You don't understand what Julian does to people who become problems.”
My father asked, “Did he kill Rebecca?”
Long silence.
Then Mercer said:
“I signed what he told me to sign.”
Not a confession to murder.
But close enough to reopen questions.
My father pressed him.
“What did you sign?”
Mercer refused.
Then came the sentence that changed everything.
“He already has another woman.”
My father asked who.
Mercer answered.
“Your daughter.”
The recording ended.
I sat completely still.
My father had known.
Years before his death, he had known Julian might target me.
“Why didn't he tell you?” Caleb asked.
I already knew.
Because I was in love.
Because I would have defended Julian.
Because without proof, accusing him might have pushed me closer to him.
My father had chosen to investigate instead.
And died before he could finish.
Ruiz looked through another folder.
Then she became very quiet.
“What?”
She handed me a medical report.
My father's death.
Heart attack.
Natural causes.
But clipped behind it was a pharmacy record.
A prescription issued three days before he died.
Doctor:
Nathan Mercer.
I stared at Ruiz.
“Mercer had already lost his license.”
“Yes.”
“Then how did he prescribe this?”
“He couldn't legally.”
My father's death suddenly belonged inside the same pattern.
Michelle.
Rebecca.
My father.
And now me.
The people standing between Julian and money had a habit of dying.
Then Caleb found a final handwritten line at the bottom of my father's notes.
If I die before I can prove it, protect Clara from her husband.
I cried then.
For my father.
For Rebecca.
For Michelle.
For myself.
But grief didn't last long.
Because Detective Ruiz's phone rang.
Nathan Mercer had disappeared.
Sabrina was missing too.
And Julian had withdrawn nearly four hundred thousand dollars in cash.
They weren't preparing another quiet attempt.
May you like
They were preparing to run.
Unless they intended to finish what they'd started first.
