Chapter 6 - A Murder with No Witness
Every camera in the lower ward had failed eleven seconds before Dr. Wren was shot.
Lucia stood barefoot in the doorway of her room, the pistol hanging from her right hand. Blood spread across the doctor’s white coat. Two officers ordered her to drop the weapon. She did not move until Elena spoke her name.
Then the gun fell from her fingers.
“I did not shoot him,” Lucia said.
The evidence disagreed. Her prints covered the grip. Powder marked her hand. The bullet recovered from Wren’s chest matched the weapon. No one else had been visible in the corridor.
Mara placed Lucia under arrest but refused to let the clinic’s lawyers take control of the scene. She found a maintenance hatch above the dead camera line and a thin cable running toward the ventilation system. Someone had triggered the blackout remotely.
The weapon had been stored inside Lucia’s room, hidden behind a loose stone. She admitted knowing it was there.
“Vanessa placed it two months ago,” Lucia said during questioning. “She said I might need protection.”
“Why would Vanessa have access to a secret ward?” Mara asked.
“Because she was raised inside this system. She knows how it hides.”
Elena sat across from her mother in a small interview room. Daniel watched through the glass. He could hear every word.
Lucia explained that Adrian Vale had discovered Gabriel’s trafficking network too late. Gabriel used charitable clinics, domestic staffing agencies, and private adoption foundations to move vulnerable children into wealthy homes. Some were sold as heirs to families unable to have children. Others were trained to become loyal household employees who could be controlled through forged documents and threats.
Vanessa had been Subject 17.
She was placed with a political donor and raised under a false identity. Years later, Gabriel arranged her marriage to Daniel. Vanessa believed she was chosen because she was beautiful and socially useful. She discovered the truth only after finding her childhood photograph in Gabriel’s archive.
Lucia had worked as Adrian’s nurse and secretly copied records. When Gabriel learned what she had done, he ordered Elena taken from her and assigned to another family. Adrian intervened, hid Elena, and paid Lucia to disappear.
“But you stayed with me,” Elena said.
“For nineteen years. Then they found us.”
Lucia described being abducted outside a pharmacy. Her death was staged. She spent years moved between Vale-controlled facilities, pressured to reveal where Adrian’s copied records had gone.
“Why didn’t they kill you?” Daniel asked through the speaker.
Lucia looked toward the glass. “Because I told them the archive would be released if I died.”
“Was that true?”
“No.”
Elena almost laughed from the cruelty of it. One lie had kept Lucia alive while another had kept Elena ignorant.
“Where are the copied records?” Mara asked.
Lucia looked at Elena. “I gave them to the only person Gabriel could not openly search.”
“Who?”
“His wife.”
Daniel’s grandmother, Margaret Vale, had been declared mentally incompetent for twelve years. She lived in a private residence on an island owned by the family trust. Daniel had not seen her since his father’s funeral.
Mara arranged transport at once.
Before they left, ballistics delivered a disturbing result. Dr. Wren had not been killed by the bullet from Lucia’s gun. That bullet struck his coat after death. The fatal projectile was smaller and had entered through the base of his skull.
Someone had murdered him silently in the darkness, then fired Lucia’s weapon into his body to create a visible story.
The same pattern as the necklace.
Plant the evidence. Stage the outrage. Control the witnesses.
Mara ordered a second search of the corridor. An officer found a narrow medical dart embedded in the wall beyond Wren’s body. It contained a fast-acting paralytic.
Attached to the dart was a strip of paper with one typed sentence.
May you like
VANESSA IS NOT RUNNING FROM YOU.
She is running from the woman on the island.
