Chapter 10 - The Best Man's Confession
Ibarra didn't wait for a warrant to ask Derek to explain the twenty minutes unaccounted for in a supply room forty feet from my sleeping children. He simply asked, in the plain, direct way of someone who has stopped pretending politeness matters more than answers.
Derek's face went through several expressions before settling on something I hadn't seen from him before — not the confident COO who closed deals over steak dinners, not the loyal friend who'd stood beside me at my wedding, but someone smaller, more frightened.
"I wasn't trying to hurt the babies," he said. "I swear to God, Adam, I would never touch your children."
"Then explain the twenty minutes."
Derek's hands were shaking now too, matching mine from hours earlier. "I found out about Vivian's meetings with Halloway-Ferris three weeks ago. The same way she apparently found out about mine — I saw a calendar invite that shouldn't have existed, dug into it, found emails that made no sense unless she was talking to the other side. I didn't tell you because I didn't have proof, and because I was terrified of what it would do to you and the company if I was wrong, or if I was right and it tore everything apart during the most important week of your life."
"That doesn't explain the supply room."
"I went there tonight to meet her. Vivian. She called me an hour before the badge alert and said she needed to talk somewhere private, away from cameras, because she was scared. She never showed up. I waited twenty minutes and left. That's it. That's the whole story. I know how it looks, standing here after everything else that's happened, but I didn't touch Emily's IV line and I didn't go near that nursery for any reason except waiting for a woman who never came."
Ibarra's expression didn't soften, but he made a note. "The financial transfers Vivian mentioned. Explain those."
Derek exhaled slowly. "Those aren't payments to me. They're payments from me — to a private investigator I hired eight weeks ago to look into who inside Reeves Capital was leaking information to Halloway-Ferris. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to accuse anyone, including Vivian, without solid proof. I have the invoices. I have the investigator's contact information. You can call him right now if you want, at six in the morning, and I promise you he'll confirm every word."
Ibarra called. The investigator, groggy but coherent, confirmed the arrangement within minutes — Derek Ambrose had hired him seven weeks earlier to trace an internal leak, paid him from a personal account specifically to avoid it showing up in company financials and tipping off whoever was responsible.
It didn't clear Derek entirely in Ibarra's eyes, not yet, but it shifted the shape of the night considerably. If Derek was telling the truth, someone had used his hiring of a private investigator, and possibly even manipulated Vivian into a supply-room meeting that never happened, specifically to make him look guilty at the exact moment suspicion needed somewhere else to land.
"Someone is playing all of you," Ibarra said slowly, thinking out loud. "Rachel gets set up looking like a kidnapper. Vivian gets set up looking like a poisoner who then vanishes. Derek gets set up standing near an empty supply room at the worst possible time. That's not chaos. That's choreography."
"Who benefits from all three of us looking guilty at once?" Derek asked.
I thought about it, and the answer, when it arrived, made the entire night's exhausting parade of suspects suddenly, horribly simple.
Someone who wanted every obvious suspect discredited or distracted at the same time — so that the real person, the one nobody was looking at, could walk in and finish what the digoxin hadn't.
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I thought of my mother, sitting quietly in the family lounge all night, largely ignored by everyone because who suspects a grandmother. I thought of Father Colby, the hospital chaplain who'd knocked on Emily's door uninvited. I thought of the four rotating nurses whose names I'd barely registered.
And then I thought of the one name on Ibarra's original list that no one, including me, had asked a single question about all night: Dr. Patel's newest resident, a young man named Caleb Winthrop, who had been shadowing Emily's care team for the last three weeks and whose file, when Ibarra finally pulled it at 6:45 AM, showed he'd started that residency exactly one week after Halloway-Ferris's takeover bid became public.
