Chapter 8 - THE LAST WITNESS
Dana and I reached the bus terminal in eight minutes.
Miles was gone.
His phone lay beside a vending machine, spotted with blood. Security footage showed two men forcing him into a gray van.
One of them was a parole officer named Grant Mercer.
My parole officer.
Every meeting with Mercer had seemed wrong. He asked where I slept, who I spoke to and whether I planned to contact Reagan.
I thought he was being strict.
He had been tracking me for Carter.
Dana issued an alert for the van, but Mercer knew police procedures. He abandoned it beneath an overpass.
Inside, officers found blood and one of Miles’s shoes.
I returned to the rehabilitation center that evening.
My father was sitting by the window.
“I need the truth,” I said. “All of it.”
He didn’t ask what I meant.
He admitted that when I was arrested, he had doubted the evidence for one reason: the stolen money was transferred on my mother’s birthday.
“I knew you would never choose that date,” he said.
“Yet you testified against me.”
“Reagan showed me recordings of you arguing with Miles. She said you were desperate.”
“I argued with him because his books didn’t balance.”
“I know that now.”
“Knowing now doesn’t give me back three years.”
“No.”
He handed me a legal folder.
Before disappearing, he had rewritten his will. Reagan and Carter would receive nothing. The house and company shares were left to me.
“I don’t want your company.”
“I’m not asking you to run it.”
“What are you asking?”
“To decide what it becomes after the truth comes out.”
Dana called.
Traffic cameras had found Mercer’s car near an abandoned concrete plant outside Mason County.
I insisted on going.
“This is a police operation,” she said.
“Miles may only trust me.”
At the plant, officers surrounded the main building. I entered wearing a wire.
Mercer stood on a catwalk with a gun against Miles’s neck.
“You were easier to manage in prison,” he called.
“Let him go.”
“Reagan has money hidden outside the country. Enough for me to disappear.”
“She’s in custody. She can’t help you.”
Mercer laughed.
“You think Reagan is in charge?”
Carter appeared behind Miles.
He had escaped custody during a hospital transfer.
Blood stained the bandage around his head.
“My mother taught me one thing,” Carter said. “Never leave someone else holding your future.”
He shoved Miles over the railing.
I lunged and caught Miles by one wrist.
His body swung thirty feet above the concrete floor.
Carter raised his gun toward my head.
Then my father’s voice came through the wire hidden beneath my shirt.
“Carter, if you kill my son, you’ll never find the offshore account.”
Carter froze.
My father was listening from Dana’s command vehicle.
“What account?” Carter demanded.
“The one your mother kept from you.”
For the first time, Carter looked afraid.
That distraction gave Dana a clean shot.
May you like
She fired.
But Mercer stepped between them, and Carter vanished into the dark.
