Chapter 13 - The Gun Beneath the Broken Glass
“Put it down, Samuel,” Naomi said.
Her body-camera view shook slightly as officers spread through the conservatory.
Dr. Reed held the gun with both hands, but the barrel pointed past Naomi toward the burned documents.
His face was streaked with blood.
“I didn’t kill Henry.”
“Drop the weapon.”
“I signed the toxicology report because Elaine begged me to hide it.”
“Why?”
“Because the result would have exposed Clara.”
My breath stopped inside the ambulance.
Naomi kept her voice level.
“How would Henry’s poisoning expose his daughter?”
Dr. Reed looked directly toward the camera, as though he knew I was watching.
“The drug was dispensed under Clara’s medical identification.”
My chest tightened.
“I never had access to that medication.”
The paramedic beside me reached for the monitor as Noah’s heartbeat accelerated.
Dr. Reed continued.
“Someone created a record showing Clara ordered it through a Whitmore Medical research account. If police opened a homicide investigation, the forged trail would lead to her.”
“Who created the trail?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why hide the evidence?”
“Because Elaine received photographs of Clara sleeping in her apartment. A man standing beside her bed. The message said the next photograph would be taken after she stopped breathing.”
I remembered waking once during graduate school with my bedroom window open.
I had blamed myself for forgetting to lock it.
Naomi took one careful step forward.
“Where is Elaine now?”
Dr. Reed’s grip tightened.
“They moved her.”
“Who?”
“The person running Halcyon.”
“Name.”
A shot shattered the glass above him.
Dr. Reed fell.
For one horrifying second, I thought he had been struck.
Then officers dragged him behind a stone planter.
The bullet had come from outside.
A sniper.
The tactical team returned fire toward an adjacent rooftop, but the shooter disappeared behind the rain.
Naomi crawled toward Dr. Reed.
“Are you hit?”
“No.”
“Drop the gun.”
He released it.
Then he pulled a folded card from inside his shirt.
“Elaine gave me this before they took her.”
Naomi opened it.
A sequence of numbers filled one side.
The other displayed a biometric storage symbol used by Whitmore Medical’s most secure research division.
I recognized the project code.
Lazarus.
My father had canceled Lazarus shortly before his death.
The program developed predictive identity models capable of recreating a person’s face, speech, movement, and medical profile from fragmented data.
It was meant to help patients with degenerative neurological disease preserve communication.
In the wrong hands, it could manufacture a convincing human identity.
False medical records.
False videos.
False witnesses.
False deaths.
The copied Evelyn was proof the system worked.
Dr. Reed looked into Naomi’s camera.
“Henry discovered someone had restarted Lazarus using private patient data.”
“Who authorized it?”
“His authorization key.”
“But he was already dead,” I said.
Naomi heard me through her earpiece.
“Then his identity was reconstructed.”
Dr. Reed nodded.
“Every fraudulent transfer, medical order, and corporate instruction can be made to look as though Henry approved it.”
The conspiracy was not using my father’s fortune.
It was using my father.
A citywide alert sounded through Naomi’s radio.
The ambulance driver turned toward us.
“Movement at the hospital.”
My room at the first hospital had been attacked minutes after our decoy transfer.
Someone had searched the bed, ceiling vents, and medical waste containers.
They believed I still possessed Evelyn’s drive.
But the original drive was at the digital lab.
Naomi called the lab.
No response.
A second call went directly to voicemail.
Then the secure evidence system issued an automatic alert.
EVIDENCE ITEM CW-17 REMOVED BY AUTHORIZED SUPERVISOR.
The supervisor ID belonged to Daniel Cross—the former financial-crimes official tied to Arthur.
The man who had closed Naomi’s investigation into my mother.
He had taken the drive.
And security footage showed Evelyn walking beside him willingly.
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The real Evelyn, who had left the ambulance minutes earlier to meet Naomi’s officers, was no longer answering her phone.
📖 Discover whether Evelyn betrayed Clara or was forced to steal the drive—and where Daniel Cross was taking it in CHAPTER 14. 👇
