Chapter 6 - The Account That Never ExistedWe left the office through the underground parking garage.
Daniel's investigator escorted Madison to a secure location while Daniel and I followed a separate route. The police were already responding to the security breach, but there was no guarantee that whoever had accessed the building's system had acted alone.
Jason had spent ten years cultivating people who owed him favors.
He had paid lawyers, doctors, consultants, security contractors, and executives. Some believed they were protecting a successful businessman from a bitter former wife. Others knew exactly what they were protecting.
I no longer cared which category they belonged to.
I wanted names.
By noon, Daniel had received confirmation that the hospital photograph was genuine. It had been taken in a private medical facility outside Milwaukee, but the image metadata had been stripped. The hospital had no record of a patient named Olivia Mercer.
It did, however, have a record of a woman admitted under the name Elaine Porter.
The admission date was six days earlier.
The patient had suffered injuries consistent with a serious fall, but she had left the facility before completing treatment. Someone had paid the entire bill in cash.
A nurse remembered the patient asking whether anyone had called Chicago.
She had not asked about her family.
She had asked about me.
Daniel contacted the hospital's compliance department and requested the preservation of the relevant records. He then arranged for a local investigator to inspect the address listed on the admission paperwork.
The apartment was empty.
The windows had been covered from the inside. A few items of clothing remained in a closet, and the kitchen contained several unopened packages of food.
Under the mattress, the investigator found a small metal box.
Inside were three photographs, a damaged USB drive, and a handwritten letter addressed to me.
The letter was dated eight years earlier.
Iris, if you're reading this, then Jason has finally decided you are too dangerous to leave alone.
I tried to tell you what happened, but he watches everything. I thought disappearing would protect you. Instead, it gave him time to rewrite the story.
The Sentinel was never the first project.
Remember the original prototype. Remember why your father died.
The letter ended abruptly.
I read the final sentence again.
Remember why your father died.
My father had died when I was nineteen, after complications during a routine surgical procedure. The hospital had attributed his death to an equipment malfunction, but the device involved had been manufactured by an unrelated company.
At least, that was what I had always believed.
I called Daniel.
"Can you find my father's medical records?"
"I can request them," he replied. "Why?"
I explained what Olivia had written.
He was silent for several seconds.
"Did you ever work on medical devices before founding Mitchell Medical Technologies?"
"No. Not professionally."
"What about research during university?"
I thought back to my final year of engineering school. My father had died during that period, and I had spent months gathering information about the equipment used in his operation. I had eventually abandoned the inquiry because the hospital said the relevant device had been examined and found to be functioning within specifications.
But I had kept copies of the technical documentation.
I had stored them in a box at my mother's house.
When I was ready to return to work, Jason had helped me move my belongings into our first apartment. He had seen the documents, asked questions, and encouraged me to pursue a career in medical technology.
I had thought he was simply interested in my work.
Now, I wondered whether he had recognized something in those pages.
"I need to see the box," I told Daniel.
My mother had died four years earlier, and the house had been sold. Most of her belongings had been distributed among relatives. I called my aunt in Indiana, who remembered that my mother had given her several boxes of family papers.
She found the box in a storage room that afternoon.
I traveled there with Daniel and opened it on the dining room table.
Inside were my university notes, copies of my father's hospital records, and a folder containing the technical specifications for the monitoring equipment used during his surgery.
I recognized the model immediately.
It was an early system designed to collect vital-sign data and relay alarms to a central monitoring station.
A handwritten note sat between two pages.
It was in my father's handwriting.
If the warning signal fails, the machine still records the data. The truth will be in the original logs.
I stared at the words.
My father had been a mechanical engineer. He had never worked in medical technology, but he had spent years repairing industrial control systems. Before his death, he had told me that equipment could fail in ways people found difficult to explain.
He had encouraged me to study engineering because he believed the world needed people who asked inconvenient questions.
What if his death had not been caused by a random malfunction?
I searched the folder again.
At the back, I found a photocopy of a technical manual. Several paragraphs had been underlined in blue ink. The manual described a prototype monitoring system developed by a small medical engineering laboratory.
The inventor listed on the cover was Dr. Samuel Vale.
I recognized the name.
Samuel Vale had been Jason's first major investor and the company's original chief scientific adviser. He had left Mitchell Medical Technologies shortly before the Sentinel project began. The company had claimed he retired for health reasons.
According to an obituary published seven years earlier, Vale had died while traveling in Switzerland.
But a handwritten note on the manual contained an address in Chicago and a telephone number.
Daniel photographed the page.
"We need to find out whether this address is still connected to him."
He made several calls. By evening, we had learned that Samuel Vale had once served as a consultant for the manufacturer of the equipment involved in my father's surgery.
We also learned that his departure from Mitchell Medical Technologies had been followed by a confidential settlement.
The amount was not disclosed.
There was, however, a reference to a dispute involving intellectual property rights.
I turned another page and froze.
The original prototype described in the manual was not merely similar to the system I had designed years later.
It used the same unusual method for cross-checking inconsistent sensor data.
The approach had been the foundation of my company's success.
I had believed the idea came from my university research, developed through years of independent experimentation. But the manual described a working version decades earlier.
"Did I steal this?" I asked.
Daniel shook his head.
"Finding a similar design doesn't establish that. You need to understand the history."
"What if Jason knew?"
"Then we need to establish what he knew and when he knew it."
I returned to the letter from Olivia.
The Sentinel was never the first project.
Remember the original prototype.
Remember why your father died.
The words connected like pieces of glass.
My father had questioned the equipment involved in his surgery.
Samuel Vale had worked with that equipment.
Vale later became connected to Jason's company.
And Olivia believed the truth about the fire was tied to something that existed long before I met my husband.
Daniel's phone rang.
He listened, then looked at me.
"The investigator has found a current address for Samuel Vale."
"Where?"
"He is registered at a private residence in Lake Forest. He appears to be alive."
I felt a strange mixture of relief and anger.
Another person declared dead.
Another convenient disappearance.
"Can we speak to him?"
"Not tonight. We need to approach carefully. If Jason learns we're looking for Vale, he'll move."
I placed the old technical manual back in the box.
Then I noticed a sheet of paper folded behind the cover.
It was a letter addressed to my father, dated three weeks before his death.
The sender was Samuel Vale.
The first paragraph was harmless. It thanked my father for reviewing a piece of equipment and acknowledged his concerns about a faulty alarm circuit.
The second paragraph was different.
You were correct to ask why the original data cannot be accessed independently. The company has chosen to suppress the problem rather than fix it. I have retained a copy of the raw logs, but I cannot safely provide them through normal channels.
The final paragraph contained a sentence that made the room seem suddenly cold.
If anything happens to you, tell Iris that the numbers never lied.
I had never seen the letter before.
My father had been murdered, or at the very least, his death might have been connected to a technical failure someone had knowingly concealed.
And Jason had built an empire on technology descended from the same research.
I looked at Daniel.
"Find Samuel Vale."
He nodded.
Then his phone rang again.
This time, he answered on speaker.
The caller was one of the local investigators.
"We found the residence," the man said. "The house is empty. There are signs someone left in a hurry, but the place wasn't abandoned long ago."
"Any evidence of where he went?" Daniel asked.
"Only one thing. A message on the kitchen table."
"What did it say?"
The investigator hesitated.
"It was addressed to you."
Daniel's expression hardened.
The man continued.
"Three words."
"What words?"
"Ask Iris about Boston."
I felt the blood drain from my face.
Boston.
The city where Madison had used my identity to book luxury hotel rooms.
The city where Jason claimed I had secretly traveled during our marriage.
The city where one of the largest investors in Mitchell Medical Technologies maintained an office.
And the city where my father had attended a medical equipment conference shortly before he died.
I had spent ten years believing Jason's greatest secret was the night he left me behind a locked laboratory door.
I was beginning to understand that the fire might have been only the final step in something much older.
Something that had begun with my father.
May you like
And if Samuel Vale was telling us the truth, Jason had never been afraid of the scars on my body.
He had been afraid of the memories beneath them.
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