The Fire Alarm With No Battery
Chapter 07 - The Fire Alarm With No Battery
Detective Brooks drew her weapon.
Elias pulled Mason behind a stone column as the footsteps moved between the wine racks. A door slammed at the far end of the cellar.
Security searched the building but found no intruder.
Near Locker 17, Dana discovered a fresh cigarette ash. Vincent did not smoke, but his private driver did.
The driver, Cal Mercer, had worked for the Moretti family since before the fire. He had transported Elias to the hospital and Vincent to Saint Catherine’s that night.
Dana brought him in for questioning.
Cal claimed he remembered nothing unusual. When shown the transfer form, he asked for an attorney.
Mason and Elias returned to the townhouse.
The next morning, a woman named Nora Bell called the police tip line. She said she had worked as a neonatal nurse at Saint Catherine’s thirteen years earlier and knew what happened to the unidentified baby.
Before Dana reached her apartment, Nora vanished.
Her kitchen table held a newspaper article about Mason and the DNA result. Beside it was an old photograph of Ruth Grant.
Ruth and Nora were sisters.
Mason had never known Ruth had any family.
A search of Nora’s apartment revealed letters between the sisters. Most were ordinary until the night of the fire.
Ruth,
I did something terrible for the right reason. A baby arrived sedated, wearing a Moretti bracelet. A man said the child had to disappear before sunrise. I took him. I could not call the father. They were watching him.
Keep the child only until I return.
Nora never returned.
Ruth had raised Mason in secret for thirteen years.
Elias read the letter with both hands pressed against the table.
“She saved you.”
“She lied to me.”
“Both can be true.”
Mason walked outside and sat on the steps.
He had spent years blaming Ruth for never telling him where he came from. Now he imagined her waking every day knowing powerful men might take him if she made one phone call.
Elias sat beside him.
“I am angry too,” he said. “At her, at myself, at everyone who decided we could not handle the truth.”
“Would you have found me?”
“I would have burned the world looking.”
Mason looked at the scar.
“Maybe that is why she stayed quiet.”
Dana joined them with a new report.
The original fire investigator had died five years earlier, but his archived notes contradicted the official conclusion. He had written that the apartment door showed signs of forced locking from the hallway and that the smoke detector battery was removed before ignition.
Those pages were missing from the final report.
The investigator had also collected a restaurant matchbook from the hallway. On the inside cover were the initials V.M.
Vincent claimed the matchbook belonged to thousands of customers.
Then Dana showed them a security photograph from a neighboring building.
At 2:07 a.m., eleven minutes before the fire, Vincent’s car stopped outside Elias’s apartment.
May you like
Cal Mercer was driving.
Someone in the back seat wore Vincent’s coat.
