Chapter 11 - The House on Greenwood
Police moved quickly after the threat.
Megan took Ellie and Owen to a protected location.
For the first time in my life, I had to say goodbye to my children without knowing exactly where they would sleep that night.
Ellie hugged me at the door.
“Are you coming tomorrow?”
“I’m going to do everything I can.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I knelt.
“Yes.”
I forced myself to believe it.
“Yes, I’m coming.”
Ruiz obtained a warrant for Peter’s Greenwood property.
The house looked abandoned.
Inside, most rooms had been stripped.
No furniture.
No photographs.
No paperwork.
But the basement told a different story.
There were old medical supplies.
A wheelchair.
Empty medication bottles.
And scratches around the inside of one locked door.
Forensics found traces of Laura’s DNA on a blanket.
I stood in that basement and imagined her there.
Alive.
Calling my name.
Less than an hour away from the home where I was putting our children to bed and telling them their mother was gone.
I had believed the police report.
I had believed the fire.
I had believed people I trusted.
That belief had cost Laura whatever chance she had to reach me.
Ruiz found something else in a floor drain.
A broken piece of a gold necklace.
I recognized it.
Laura’s mother had given her that necklace on our wedding day.
There could no longer be any argument about whether she had been there.
Peter’s lawyer insisted the property had been rented to Grant during that period.
Grant’s lawyer blamed Peter.
Each man pointed at the other.
Then a forensic accountant called.
The stolen money had not simply disappeared.
A portion had been moved into an account opened in my name after Laura vanished.
Someone had spent four years building a case that would make me look like the architect of the entire fraud.
That evening, the board of my company suspended me.
By midnight, local news stations were reporting that I was under investigation.
Grant appeared on television.
He looked devastated.
“I considered Daniel a brother.”
May you like
Then he delivered the line designed to destroy me.
“None of us imagined what he might have been hiding.”
