CHAPTER 3 THE WOMAN WHO SENT HIM TO PRISON
For most of my life, I believed my mother died because a drunk driver crossed the center line.
Her name was Lillian Dennis.
She laughed loudly, sang badly, and made pancakes every Saturday morning whether we wanted them or not. I remembered the police officer sitting in our kitchen after the accident. I remembered my father staring at the floor while the officer explained that the other driver had fled.
No arrest was ever made.
Now my father’s photograph suggested the crash had not been random.
Worse, it suggested my mother had not been the intended target.
Dr. Warren gave me a change of clothes and treated the cut on my hand.
“You cannot stay here,” she said. “Detective Briggs will return.”
“Are you coming with me?”
She shook her head.
“If I disappear, they will know I helped you. I can protect my patients better from inside the system.”
“They threatened your license.”
“They have done worse to others.”
She gave me the address of a woman named Lena Ortiz.
“Your father trusted her. She worked in accounting at Dennis Industrial Holdings.”
I knew the name.
Lena had testified at my trial.
She told the jury she saw me leaving the finance department late on the night the transfers were made.
Her testimony had placed me at the scene.
“She lied,” I said.
“She wants to explain why.”
Lena lived in a trailer park outside Bellweather, twenty miles from Mercy Grove. I found her in a faded blue trailer with curtains drawn over every window.
She opened the door only after I said Camden’s name.
When she saw me, she began crying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I stepped inside.
The trailer smelled of coffee and cigarette smoke. Boxes were stacked against the walls, as though she expected to leave at any moment.
“You helped send me to prison.”
“I know.”
“You swore under oath that you saw me.”
“I did see you.”
“Then why are you apologizing?”
“Because it wasn’t that night.”
She sat at a small kitchen table and pushed a flash drive toward me.
“Victor Hale showed me security footage of you entering the finance department. He told me it came from the night of the theft. I believed him at first.”
“At first?”
“Two weeks before your trial, I discovered the footage had been recorded four days earlier. You had come in to sign vendor documents.”
“Why didn’t you tell my lawyer?”
Her hands trembled.
“My daughter was eleven. Victor had photographs of her walking home from school. He said accidents happen to children whose mothers create problems.”
Anger rose inside me, but it had nowhere to go.
Lena had lied.
She had also been terrorized.
“What’s on the drive?”
“Original system logs. Copies of transfers Victor deleted. And audio from a meeting between Reagan, Carter, Victor, and Detective Briggs.”
I stared at her.
“Briggs was involved?”
“He buried evidence. Victor paid him through a consulting company owned by Briggs’s brother.”
“Why didn’t my father give this to the authorities?”
“He tried.”
She looked toward the covered window.
“Two days after he collected the files, he was attacked.”
“The poisoning?”
“That came later. First they forced his car off the road. He survived. Then someone entered his house and changed his medication.”
“Reagan?”
“I don’t know who administered it. But she signed the documents declaring him mentally incompetent.”
I picked up the flash drive.
“Where’s the Hawthorne ledger?”
Lena’s face drained of color.
“Who told you about that?”
“My father.”
She stood and locked the door.
“The Hawthorne ledger isn’t a book. It’s an encrypted account archive. Years ago, your father discovered Victor was moving stolen money through shell companies. Camden copied the transactions into a hidden server named Hawthorne.”
“Where is the server?”
“Only your father knew.”
“Carter said my father was hiding from me.”
Lena looked at me for a long moment.
“Carter lies when he breathes.”
“He also told me to ask about my mother.”
At the mention of her, Lena lowered her eyes.
“What do you know?”
“I joined the company years after she died.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
She walked to a cabinet and removed a newspaper clipping.
The headline read:
LOCAL BUSINESSWOMAN KILLED IN HIT-AND-RUN
Below it was a photograph of my mother.
Another man stood behind her.
Victor Hale.
“You knew Victor knew my mother?”
“He worked for her before he worked for your father.”
I read the article.
My mother had founded a small logistics company before marrying Camden. After her death, the company’s assets were absorbed into Dennis Industrial Holdings.
“Was the crash meant for my father?” I asked.
Lena shook her head.
“Your father believed it was meant for Victor.”
“Why would someone try to kill Victor?”
“Because he had stolen money from dangerous people.”
Before I could ask more, headlights swept across the curtains.
Lena turned pale.
“No one knows I live here.”
A vehicle stopped outside.
Car doors opened.
Lena grabbed my arm.
“Back window.”
“What about you?”
“I have a shelter beneath the floor.”
A fist pounded against the front door.
“Police!” a voice shouted. “Open the door!”
Detective Briggs.
Lena pulled up a section of carpet, revealing a trapdoor.
“You’ll be trapped down there.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
Another voice called from outside.
“Finnley Dennis, we know you’re inside. Come out with your hands visible.”
Lena shoved me toward the rear bedroom.
I climbed through the window as the front door splintered.
The trailer park was surrounded by open fields. I ran between abandoned vehicles while officers entered Lena’s home.
Then I heard a scream.
I turned back.
Smoke rolled from the trailer’s windows.
They had set it on fire.
I started toward it, but a hand grabbed me from behind and pulled me between two sheds.
I twisted, ready to fight.
The groundskeeper, Walter Boone, pressed a finger to his lips.
“Not unless you want both of you dead.”
“You followed me?”
“Camden asked me to keep watch.”
The trailer erupted in flames.
Briggs stood outside calmly, making no effort to save Lena.
Then the trapdoor burst open near the back steps.
Lena crawled out through the smoke.
Walter and I dragged her into the darkness.
As fire trucks approached in the distance, Walter drove us away in an old pickup.
Lena coughed until tears ran down her face.
I held up the flash drive.
“We have enough to clear my name.”
“No,” Walter said.
“Why not?”
“Because Victor owns the people who decide what counts as evidence.”
He turned onto a dirt road.
“There is only one person who can expose all of them.”
“My father.”
Walter nodded.
“You know where he is.”
“I know where he was taken.”
“Where?”
May you like
Walter looked at me through the rearview mirror.
“To the last place anyone would search for a dead man.”
