Chapter 8 - Someone Came Home
We made the drive back in twelve minutes.
It should have taken twenty.
By the time we reached Rachel's house, two patrol cars were already there. The back window was smashed. The officer assigned inside had been lured outside by a fake report of a prowler next door.
Noah and Lily were alive.
Noah had shoved Lily into a bedroom closet, locked the door, and hit the intruder with a lamp when he came upstairs.
"Did you see his face?" Ruiz asked.
Noah shook his head. "Mask. Gray jacket. He kept asking where the card was."
The microSD card was in Ruiz's evidence locker.
The intruder didn't know that.
He did take Claire's compass necklace from Noah's backpack.
And he left something behind.
A business card on the kitchen counter.
ELLIOT PRICE
Chief Financial Officer
Carter Meridian
On the back, someone had written: STOP BEFORE YOUR KIDS PAY FOR IT.
"Too obvious again," Ruiz said.
"Maybe Elliot wants us to think it's not him."
"Or someone wants you angry enough to make a mistake."
I was already angry enough.
That afternoon, our corporate attorney, Susan Bell, came to my house with copies of Claire's estate documents.
"There is something you were never told," she said.
Claire had changed her trust six weeks before she died.
If she died before Noah turned eighteen, all her voting shares in Carter Meridian passed to Noah. I would serve as trustee until his eighteenth birthday.
Combined with my shares, that would give me fifty-three percent voting control of the company.
"Why didn't this happen?" I asked.
Susan looked at the death certificate on the table.
"Because legally, Claire isn't dead."
I stared at her.
"The county has no filed certificate under her name. No probate. No death notice. Nothing."
"Then what is this?"
"A medical certificate. It was completed, but never filed with vital records."
Vanessa and Marcus had kept Claire dead in private and alive on paper.
Susan slid another folder toward me.
"And somebody has used Claire's digital signature eleven times since the night she disappeared."
The most recent signature was two days ago.
It approved the sale of a Carter Meridian subsidiary.
The buyer was a company I had never heard of.
May you like
Susan pointed to the registered agent.
Vanessa Carter.
