Chapter 3 - THE BLOOD ON THE LEDGER
Victor fired twice through the doorway.
A man fell in the hall.
“Stay down,” Victor ordered.
Sadie crouched behind the desk as bullets tore through the wooden door. Glass exploded from a bookcase. Victor moved with frightening calm, returning fire only when he had a clear target.
Within thirty seconds, the shooting stopped.
Gabriel rushed upstairs with four guards.
“Two intruders dead,” he reported. “One escaped through the service tunnel.”
Victor looked at Sadie.
“Only seven people knew that tunnel existed.”
She stared at him. “I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because if you did, you would have used it to sneak out and reach your brother.”
Victor knelt beside the wounded guard. His name was Luis. Blood covered his uniform.
Sadie crawled closer.
“Press here,” she said, placing Victor’s hand over the wound. “Hard.”
She tore off part of her apron and packed the fabric against Luis’s side.
“Ambulance,” she shouted.
“No ambulance,” Gabriel said.
Sadie glared at him. “Then he dies.”
Victor didn’t hesitate. “Call one.”
Gabriel obeyed.
Luis gripped Sadie’s wrist.
“They knew her name,” he whispered. “They had a picture.”
Victor found a folded photograph in Luis’s pocket.
It showed Sadie entering St. Jude’s three weeks earlier.
On the back, someone had written:
THE BOOKKEEPER’S DAUGHTER KNOWS WHERE IT IS.
Sadie read the words twice.
“My father was an accountant,” she said. “But he died eleven years ago.”
Victor’s face became unreadable.
“What was his name?”
“Thomas Hayes.”
Gabriel swore under his breath.
Sadie looked between them. “You knew him?”
Victor walked to a locked cabinet and removed an old newspaper clipping.
ACCOUNTANT KILLED IN APPARENT HOUSE FIRE.
The photograph showed Sadie’s childhood home burning behind a line of firefighters.
Her father’s death had been ruled accidental. Sadie and Sam had survived only because they were sleeping at their aunt’s apartment that night.
Victor placed another photograph beside it.
Thomas Hayes stood outside a restaurant with Victor’s father.
“You lied to me,” Sadie said.
“I never spoke to you about your father.”
“You knew who I was when you hired me.”
“No. Your application said Sadie Miller.”
She had used her mother’s maiden name.
Victor studied the old picture.
“Thomas kept books for my father. Ten years ago, he found proof that several judges, police officers, and hospital administrators were being paid through fake charities. Before he could expose them, your house burned.”
Sadie felt the room tilt.
“My father didn’t die in an accident?”
“No.”
“Who killed him?”
“We never proved it.”
She pointed at the message on the photograph.
“What are they looking for?”
“A ledger your father stole.”
“I was thirteen. He never gave me anything.”
Victor turned the photograph over again.
“There’s only one reason they would come after you now.”
His phone rang.
It was the hospital.
Sam’s doctor spoke quickly.
Victor put the call on speaker.
“Mr. Costello, we found something sewn inside the lining of Sam Hayes’s old medical bag.”
Sadie’s skin went cold.
The doctor held a small brass key up to the camera.
A number had been scratched into its surface.
Victor stared at it.
“That’s not a locker number,” he said.
“What is it?” Sadie asked.
May you like
Victor’s answer came quietly.
“It opens a safe-deposit box registered in my father’s name.”
