Chapter 9 - The Truth About Rachel
"This isn't what it looks like." Rachel's voice was steady despite two security guards holding her arms, despite Detective Ibarra's hand resting near his weapon, despite the fact that she had, undeniably, been caught using someone else's badge to try to enter the room where my three-day-old children were sleeping.
"You have exactly thirty seconds," Ibarra said, "before I stop caring how it looks and start processing you for attempted kidnapping."
"I'm trying to protect them." Rachel's composure cracked for the first time since I'd known her, then or now. "Adam, listen to me. After I left the hospital earlier, I couldn't stop thinking about what you said — about the timing being too clean. So I went back to my office and pulled every communication Halloway-Ferris has had in the last month related to the Reeves acquisition. I found something I should have found weeks ago, and I am so sorry I didn't."
"Talk," Ibarra said.
"There's an internal memo from our managing partner, Thomas Halloway, dated six weeks ago, discussing what he called 'accelerating the timeline through a family event.' I didn't understand it then. I understand it now. He wasn't talking about a business event. He was talking about the birth. He had someone inside Reeves Capital tracking the pregnancy timeline specifically so an incident during delivery would create maximum legal chaos around the voting shares."
"Derek's name," I said.
"I don't know who his source is," Rachel said. "I swear to you I don't. But I know Thomas Halloway has been unusually confident for the last two months that this deal would close regardless of the mediation outcome, and tonight I understood why. I came back because I was afraid someone would try to finish what didn't work with Emily by going after the children directly, and I used a nurse's badge I found at the station because I panicked and didn't think anyone would let me in fast enough through normal channels. That was stupid. I know that was stupid. But I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was trying to stop something."
Ibarra studied her for a long moment, then turned to the nursery. "Get someone to physically verify every badge and every staff member on this floor right now. No exceptions, no matter how long anyone's worked here."
While hospital security scrambled to comply, Ibarra pulled me aside. "I still don't trust her completely. But panic and guilt look different from calculation, and she's showing me panic. I want to bring Thomas Halloway in for questioning immediately, and I want your COO's financials pulled the moment I can get a judge on the phone at six in the morning."
Derek, who had said almost nothing since Rachel's arrival, finally spoke, his voice tight. "Pull them. Pull everything. I have nothing to hide, and I'd rather clear my name in the next hour than stand here being looked at like a suspect for one more minute."
It was, I would later realize, exactly what an innocent man would say — and exactly what a very smart guilty man would say too. I genuinely didn't know, in that moment, which one I was looking at.
A nurse emerged from the nursery, her face pale. "Mr. Reeves. Your children are fine, all three of them, nothing's been disturbed. But I need to show you something on the visitor log."
May you like
She held out a clipboard. Under the sign-in sheet for the last hour, one entry stood out — a name I recognized immediately, signed in a handwriting I'd seen on a thousand memos and contracts over sixteen years of friendship.
Derek Ambrose. Timestamped forty minutes before the badge alert. Forty minutes during which, according to the log, he had been alone in a supply room adjacent to the nursery for nearly twenty minutes with no recorded reason.
