Chapter 8 - What Vivian Knew
"Where are you," I said, my voice low so Ibarra could lean in and listen without alarming her into hanging up.
"I can't tell you that yet. Adam, please, just listen. I was at the hospital tonight. I'm not going to lie to you about that anymore. But I didn't touch Emily. I went there because I found out something two days ago that terrified me, and I panicked, and I made a stupid decision to try to see for myself instead of coming straight to you."
"Found out what?"
A shaky breath. "Halloway-Ferris isn't working alone on this. Rachel Voss isn't the one running this play — she's being used as much as I was. There's someone inside Reeves Capital feeding them information. Someone who's had access to your calendar, your family's schedule, your legal strategy, for months. I found financial transfers three days ago in a shared drive I wasn't supposed to have access to anymore — a payment structure that didn't match anything in our official retainer with Halloway-Ferris's counsel."
"Whose name was on the transfers?"
Another pause, longer this time. "Derek's."
I felt Derek go rigid beside me before I even processed the word. He grabbed for the phone. "Vivian, that's insane, you know that's insane—"
"I know how it sounds," Vivian said, her voice cracking. "I know I'm the last person anyone should believe right now, given — given everything else. But I have documents, Adam. I photographed them before I lost access. I was trying to verify it myself before I brought it to you, because I was scared of exactly this — of you thinking I was lying to protect myself by pointing at someone else."
Ibarra's hand came down gently on my arm, a signal to stay calm, to keep her talking. "Vivian, this is Detective Ibarra. I need you to come in. Whatever you know, whatever you did tonight, the way this goes better for you is if you walk through that door yourself in the next hour."
"I will. I promise I will. But I need you to protect those babies first, because if I'm right about what's happening, someone panicked tonight when the digoxin didn't kill Emily fast enough to matter, and panicked people make desperate moves. If Derek's been feeding information for months, he knows the nursery assignment. He knows the security rotation. He knows everything."
The line went dead again — not cut this time, just the ordinary end of a call, but somehow more frightening for its normalcy.
I turned to Derek. Sixteen years of friendship, business school roommates, best man at my wedding, godfather-to-be to the very children Vivian had just implied were in danger, standing three feet away from me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Adam," Derek said quietly, "you cannot possibly believe her over me."
"I don't know what I believe right now," I said, and meant it, which felt like its own kind of betrayal.
Ibarra's phone buzzed. He read the message, and his face changed in a way that sent ice through my chest.
"There's a security alert from the neonatal nursery," he said, already moving. "Someone attempted to access the triplets' room using a staff badge that doesn't match the person's face. Security's holding them now."
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We ran. I don't remember the elevator ride, or the hallway, only the moment we turned the corner and I saw hospital security flanking a figure in scrubs against the nursery wall, and the badge photo clipped to their chest didn't match the face at all.
The face belonged to Rachel Voss.
