Chapter 11 - The Man at the Sunflower
Hannah alerted hospital security, but Kells reached the courtyard first.
He wore stolen scrubs and kept his face lowered as he crossed toward the fountain.
The yellow car stopped beside the mosaic sunflower.
Kells bent down.
Before he could touch it, Detective Vale stepped from behind the fountain.
Kells turned to run.
Two officers blocked the path.
Vale arrested him without resistance.
“You were suspended,” Hannah said when she reached them.
“I was,” Vale replied. “That made Kells believe no one was watching the courtyard.”
“You let us think you were gone.”
“I needed him to move.”
Kells laughed bitterly.
“You still think this ends with Celeste?”
Vale tightened the handcuffs.
“It ends with everyone who helped her.”
Kells looked toward the hospital windows.
“You do not know who she was helping.”
The yellow car had opened a hidden compartment beneath the sunflower mosaic.
Inside was a weatherproof metal tube.
Michael’s real key was sealed within it.
The brass key Maren had given Hannah opened only the decoy box at Union Central.
The new key was black and unusually long.
A number had been engraved on its side.
714.
They returned to Michael’s protected room.
When he saw the key, he nodded.
“Northlake,” he whispered.
Vale arranged for a warrant.
Northlake turned out not to be a clinic.
It was an underground medical unit beneath an abandoned rehabilitation center thirty miles outside the city.
Police entered shortly before midnight.
They found eleven empty patient rooms, an operating theater, archived foundation files, and one secured chamber.
A man lay inside.
He was sixty-three years old, severely weakened, but alive.
Marcus Vale recognized his younger brother immediately.
Adrian.
The family had declared him dead twenty-two years earlier.
Medical records showed that he had suffered injuries in the hospital fire, but he had recovered enough to communicate within months.
Instead of releasing him, Celeste had kept him hidden.
Kells had maintained the false records.
“Why?” Hannah asked.
Michael managed to sit higher against his pillows.
“Adrian inherited voting control of the foundation from their father,” he said. “If he was alive, Celeste never legally controlled it.”
“She stole the foundation.”
“And everything built with it.”
Vale remained at Northlake with Adrian.
Hannah stayed beside Michael.
For the first time since the crash, Lily was allowed to sleep between her parents.
Near dawn, Michael told Hannah what happened on Blackthorn Bridge.
He had discovered Adrian’s patient number in the ledger.
He confronted Celeste.
She ordered him to surrender the files.
He refused.
At a family dinner, Kells placed the sedative in Michael’s coffee. Michael realized something was wrong while driving and called Maren, but his brakes failed before he reached a safe place to stop.
“The crash was planned,” Hannah said.
Michael nodded.
“By Kells?”
“I thought so.”
“You no longer do?”
Michael looked toward the hallway.
“Kells followed orders. Mother gave orders.”
“Then who caused the crash?”
Before Michael could answer, Vale called.
His voice sounded shaken.
“Adrian is awake,” he said. “He asked for Hannah.”
“Why me?”
“He says he knew your father.”
Hannah’s father had died when she was sixteen.
He had never worked for the Reed family.
At least, that was what she had always believed.
“What exactly did Adrian say?” she asked.
May you like
Vale paused.
“He said your father started the fire.”
