Chapter 4 - The Child Behind the Glass
The woman in the reflection was named Rachel Bell.
Marcus identified her through facial recognition and old NexusCore employment records.
Rachel had worked as Matthew’s executive assistant for three years.
She disappeared from the company eighteen months earlier.
Her resignation announcement claimed she had accepted a job in Europe.
She had never left New York.
Her apartment lease was paid by one of Matthew’s shell corporations.
The baby was a ten-month-old boy named Caleb.
I stared at the photograph until the edges blurred.
The tiny blue sock beneath Matthew’s car seat had not belonged to a coworker’s baby.
It belonged to his son.
At least that was what Matthew wanted everyone to believe.
“Lauren knows about Rachel?” I asked.
“She was with them.”
Marcus placed surveillance photographs across the hospital table.
Lauren had visited Rachel’s apartment twelve times.
Sometimes she brought groceries.
Sometimes she stayed overnight.
The arrangement made no sense.
A mistress did not usually help her lover hide another woman and a baby.
My father watched me study the images.
“You are thinking like a wounded wife.”
“What should I be thinking like?”
“The woman who designed NexusCore’s predictive engine.”
I looked at the dates.
Lauren’s visits increased before quarterly earnings announcements.
Rachel’s apartment was not only a secret home.
It was a meeting place.
Marcus enlarged one photograph.
A man leaving the building wore a baseball cap and dark glasses.
I recognized his jawline.
Samuel Pierce.
The director who had blocked Matthew’s suspension.
Rachel was hiding more than a child.
She was coordinating the people protecting Matthew.
That afternoon, Detective Elena Ruiz returned with news from the Brooklyn storage unit.
It had been emptied before the warrant arrived.
However, security footage showed Lauren removing twelve archive boxes.
She loaded them into a van registered to Pierce Consulting.
Samuel’s company.
“What was in the boxes?” I asked.
“We do not know.”
My father did.
He told us NexusCore had maintained physical backups during its first four years.
The servers contained source code, investor communications, and access logs.
They also contained the original development history proving I had created the company’s core technology.
“They are destroying the ownership trail,” I said.
“Or moving it somewhere we cannot subpoena,” my father replied.
I asked for my laptop.
My mother objected.
The doctors objected.
My father did not.
He understood that lying helplessly in bed would frighten me more than the investigation.
I accessed an old cloud account using a password I had not entered in years.
Most folders were empty.
One remained.
It was labeled QUEENS DEMO FAILURE.
Inside was a thirty-second audio recording from the night NexusCore’s first prototype crashed.
Matthew’s voice spoke first.
“If Clare discovers where the training data came from, we lose everything.”
A second man answered.
“Then make sure she never discovers it.”
The voice belonged to Samuel Pierce.
A third voice followed.
Older.
Calm.
Familiar.
“You handle the girl.”
“I will handle Adrian Sterling.”
My father went pale.
I had heard that voice at every childhood birthday, every holiday dinner, and every Sterling board retreat.
May you like
It belonged to Victor Dane.
My father’s closest friend and general counsel.
