Chapter 3 - The Unraveling of the Cold CaseFor four hours, I sat in the lab breakroom while Marcus and his team ran high-speed PCR amplification and automated fingerprint comparisons.
Five years ago, my cousin Adrian had been stabbed to death outside a charity benefit. The primary suspect had always been a mysterious blonde woman seen fleeing the scene in a dark sedan, but the murder weapon was never recovered and the case went ice cold.
At three o'clock in the morning, Marcus stepped into the breakroom, holding a thermal printout.
His face was pale, his eyes filled with profound, sobering intensity.
“It’s a direct match, Claire,” Marcus revealed, setting the chart on the table. “The dried blood inside the scissor hinge belongs to Adrian. And the latent partial print recovered from Adrian’s leather coat five years ago matches the fresh thumbprint Vanessa left on the scissor handles today.”
I sat back in the chair, exhaling a quiet, trembling breath.
Vanessa hadn't just been Daniel’s greedy mistress trying to humiliate me. Five years ago, before she met Daniel, she had been Adrian’s former business partner who had embezzled half a million dollars from his firm—and killed him when he threatened to go to the police!
She had stolen the heirloom scissors from my mother's home during the party to throw off suspicion, keeping them hidden in Daniel’s dressing room for years, believing the past was buried forever.
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“What about Daniel?” I asked quietly.
“We ran his financial records alongside Vanessa’s,” Marcus said, pulling up a secondary file. “Daniel didn't just meet Vanessa six months ago. He helped her launder Adrian’s stolen inheritance money through his company, Mercer Enterprises, three years before you two even married!”
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