Chapter 7 - The Baby Rebecca Never Held
Rebecca refused to leave Emma’s bedside.
Detective Ortiz requested DNA samples from Rebecca, Marcus, and Emma. Testing would take at least twenty-four hours, even with emergency laboratory processing.
Twenty-four hours felt like a lifetime.
Emma slept beneath a heated blanket. The implanted transmitter had been removed from behind her ear and sent to federal technicians.
The device contained no manufacturer information.
Its memory held coordinates.
One set led to the Vale estate.
Another led to a closed maternity hospital outside Briarwood.
Rebecca remembered the name immediately.
St. Agnes Women’s Center.
The hospital where Emma had been born.
It had closed six months later after a fire destroyed part of the records wing.
Official reports blamed faulty wiring.
Detective Ortiz believed the fire had been deliberate.
At midnight, Rebecca stood near the window while Marcus sat behind her.
“You arrived forty minutes after she was born,” Rebecca said.
Marcus lowered his head.
“My father told me you had been moved to another operating room.”
“And when you found me?”
“Mom was holding Emma.”
“Which Emma?”
He had no answer.
Rebecca wrapped her arms around herself.
“I remember hearing two babies.”
“You had lost a lot of blood.”
“I told everyone there was another child crying. Your mother said it came from the room next door.”
Marcus stood.
“Whatever the test says, Emma is ours.”
Rebecca turned.
“What if the baby I delivered is alive somewhere?”
His eyes filled with pain.
“Then we find her.”
“And if she is dead?”
“Then we find out who took her.”
Josh entered carrying an old cardboard box.
“I went to my apartment,” he said. “There is something you need to see.”
Inside were photographs from Emma’s first birthday. Evelyn had asked Josh to take pictures while she prepared a private family blessing in the greenhouse.
One photograph showed Evelyn carrying Emma toward the fountain.
Another showed Harold opening the hidden platform.
Josh had captured the image accidentally through a window.
“I never noticed,” he said.
Rebecca examined the final picture.
A woman stood beneath the greenhouse arch.
She had the same scar beside her mouth as the attacker arrested at the hospital.
On the back, Evelyn had written a name.
Dr. Celia Voss.
Detective Ortiz searched the name.
Dr. Celia Voss had worked at St. Agnes Women’s Center as a neonatal neurologist. She disappeared after the hospital fire and was presumed dead.
She had been living under several aliases ever since.
The woman in custody refused to speak again.
Federal agents arrived before dawn.
Special Agent Samuel Reed took control of the medical trafficking investigation. He was tall, calm, and careful with every word.
“This organization may have operated for decades,” he explained. “We believe wealthy clients paid to obtain infants with specific genetic characteristics, while selected children were placed with monitored families.”
“Why place Emma with us?” Marcus asked.
Reed looked at Rebecca.
“Because of your mother.”
Rebecca stiffened.
“My mother was a librarian.”
“Before that, she worked for a government medical archive.”
Rebecca shook her head.
“She never told me.”
“Her name appears in sealed reports connected to an illegal behavioral research program known as Project Lullaby.”
Emma’s trigger song.
The blue rooms.
The microvalve.
Reed opened a file.
“Your mother, Anna Mercer, helped collect evidence against the program. Shortly before her death, she copied financial records and participant identities. Those records were never recovered.”
“And Harold thought she gave them to me?”
“We believe he thought the information had been encoded into an embryo or genetic sample.”
Marcus stared at him.
“That sounds impossible.”
“Most of what these people attempted was pseudoscientific,” Reed said. “But they believed memory could be passed through biological conditioning.”
Rebecca looked at Emma.
“They tortured a child because they thought she carried a secret?”
“They may believe she carries more than that.”
The laboratory called at 6:07 a.m.
The DNA results were ready.
Emma was not biologically related to Marcus.
She was not biologically related to Rebecca.
Rebecca sat perfectly still.
Marcus gripped the report until the paper tore.
Agent Reed continued reading.
“There is another match.”
Rebecca looked up.
“Who?”
“A child in the national missing-person database.”
The match was not to Emma herself.
It was to a sibling.
An identical twin.
The twin had been found alive two months earlier in an abandoned medical facility in Oregon.
Her name was listed as Elise Cross.
May you like
She was four years old.
And she had been asking for Rebecca.
