Chapter 6 - What Emma Remembered
Emma stared at the photograph for almost a full minute.
“That’s Jake.”
Lena sat across from her.
“You know him?”
Emma nodded.
Rachel looked stunned.
“How?”
Emma touched the corner of the picture.
“He came to our house.”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
“How long?”
Emma shrugged.
“Before Mommy disappeared.”
Rachel covered her mouth.
“Emma, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I did.”
Rachel looked confused.
“When?”
Emma’s eyes filled.
“You said I had a dream.”
Rachel went still.
The truth was crueler than anyone expected.
Michael had brought Jacob to the Carter home once.
According to Emma, a man and woman had waited in the car outside.
Jacob entered with Michael.
The children played in the basement.
Emma remembered being fascinated because the boy had the same small dimple in his chin as Olivia.
She had asked Michael if he was their cousin.
Michael told her he was the son of a patient.
Later, Emma told Rachel.
Rachel had been exhausted that evening.
She had dismissed it as one of Emma’s imaginative stories.
Weeks later, she discovered Jacob’s existence independently.
Now she understood.
Michael had been testing something.
Perhaps whether Rachel recognized the child.
Perhaps whether Jacob recognized him.
Perhaps whether the twins could be manipulated into accepting him.
“Why would he bring Jacob there?” Daniel asked later.
Lena looked at the financial timeline.
“He may have planned to move him.”
“From the Blakes?”
“If Michael feared Rachel would expose the illegal placement, Jacob became evidence.”
Daniel frowned.
“A living witness.”
“Exactly.”
They interviewed the Blakes again.
This time Thomas admitted something he had initially withheld.
Michael had asked them twice over the previous year whether they had ever considered moving overseas.
“He said the country was getting unstable,” Thomas explained. “We thought he was making conversation.”
“Did he ask about Jacob’s passport?”
Thomas looked sick.
“Yes.”
Michael had been planning escape routes long before Emma entered the police station.
The pharmacy evidence grew worse.
Investigators discovered Michael had been using multiple dispensing locations, keeping individual quantities small enough to avoid raising suspicion.
There would be no detailed list released publicly.
The district attorney did not want copycats.
What mattered was simpler.
Olivia had been repeatedly given medication that doctors could find no legitimate reason for her to receive.
Rachel’s medical records showed a similar pattern.
Symptoms appeared after Michael took control of their medications.
Symptoms improved whenever access stopped.
Michael was not merely lying about illness.
He was manufacturing dependence.
By afternoon, prosecutors announced additional charges were expected.
The story hit the news.
A physician.
Two children.
A wife legally declared dead but found alive.
A secret third child.
Every station in the state carried Michael’s photograph.
That made hiding harder.
It also made him more dangerous.
Daniel was assigned temporary security outside the hospital floor.
At 6:22 p.m., Emma came into the hallway.
“Officer Reed?”
He crouched.
“What’s up?”
“Can you arrest somebody for stealing a birthday?”
Daniel blinked.
“What?”
“My birthday.”
“When?”
“Last year.”
He smiled faintly.
“I don’t think birthdays can be stolen.”
“Daddy did.”
Her seriousness stopped his smile.
“What happened?”
Emma leaned against the wall.
“Mommy always made pancakes shaped like our age.”
“Okay.”
“When we turned six, Mommy was gone.”
Daniel nodded.
“Daddy said birthdays were babyish.”
“I’m sorry.”
Emma scuffed her sneaker against the floor.
“But there was a cake in the basement.”
Daniel looked at her.
“What cake?”
“I found it in the freezer.”
“When?”
“On our birthday.”
“Did it have writing?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
Emma thought.
“Happy birthday, E and O. Mommy loves you.”
Daniel stood.
“Did your father see it?”
Emma nodded.
“What did he do?”
“He threw it in the trash.”
“Anything else?”
“He went downstairs and yelled at the wall phone.”
Daniel called Lena.
They returned to the Carter basement.
The freezer had already been searched for medication.
No one had examined its physical construction.
Daniel pulled it away from the wall.
Behind it was a narrow ventilation grate.
One screw did not match the others.
Inside the duct, wrapped in plastic, they found an old digital recorder.
Daniel stared at it.
“Rachel?”
Lena nodded.
“Maybe.”
The recorder contained fourteen files.
Most were short.
Rachel speaking dates.
Names.
Account numbers.
Statements.
She had begun secretly documenting Michael before her disappearance.
File fourteen was different.
It lasted eleven minutes.
Rachel’s voice came first.
“If you find this, Michael knows about Jacob.”
Then Michael.
Distant.
Entering the basement.
“What are you doing?”
Rachel answered.
“Calling Rebecca.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Get away from me.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Enough.”
A struggle.
Something hit the floor.
Rachel said, “If anything happens to me, she has copies.”
Michael’s voice became quiet.
“Then something will happen to her too.”
Daniel and Lena looked at each other.
The recording continued.
Rachel accused him of falsifying Jacob’s death.
Michael denied nothing.
Instead, he said, “You had everything. A house. Children. Money. Why couldn’t you leave the past buried?”
Rachel answered, “Because my son isn’t the past.”
Then came the sentence that transformed the investigation.
Michael said:
“You think Jacob was the first?”
Silence.
Rachel whispered, “What does that mean?”
The recording ended.
Lena replayed the final sentence.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Daniel felt sick.
“If Jacob wasn’t the first…”
“We reopen every patient file.”
The seven adults found in Michael’s garage were no longer merely victims of questionable competency proceedings.
Investigators began examining their families.
Their estates.
Their children.
Their medical histories.
By midnight, a pattern emerged.
Three patients had relatives who believed newborn babies had died under Michael’s care early in his career.
Two families had never seen the bodies.
One death certificate contained Michael’s signature.
Another had been signed by a doctor who died years earlier.
Lena stared at the board.
“This is bigger than Rachel.”
“How big?”
“I don’t know.”
Then an analyst called.
One of the supposedly deceased infants had a DNA connection inside a consumer genealogy database.
The child was not dead.
She was seventeen years old.
Living three states away.
Adopted.
Daniel sat down.
Michael’s secret might not have begun with Jacob.
Jacob might simply have been the first child Rachel discovered.
At 1:14 a.m., hospital security reported a suspicious vehicle circling the parking garage.
Police stopped it.
The driver was not Michael.
It was David Sloan.
Michael’s longtime attorney.
Inside Sloan’s trunk were two boxes of shredded records and a portable hard drive.
Sloan demanded counsel.
Lena smiled without humor.
“Good idea.”
The hard drive was encrypted.
Forensics began working on it.
Before sunrise, they opened the first partition.
Folders appeared.
Patient names.
Financial records.
Adoption files.
False death certificates.
Then one folder labeled:
CARTER — CONTINGENCY
Inside were surveillance photographs of Emma and Olivia.
Schedules.
School routes.
Hospital details.
And one document created three days earlier.
Emergency relocation plan.
The final page contained two possible destinations.
One was the hunting cabin where Rachel had been found.
The other was a residential address in coastal Maine.
Police checked it immediately.
The home belonged to Michael Carter’s mother.
Judith Carter.
According to every statement Michael had ever made to neighbors, colleagues, and even Rachel, Judith had been dead for eleven years.
She was very much alive.
And when Maine police reached the house, they found the front door open.
Blood on the kitchen floor.
A chair overturned.
No Judith.
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On the wall beside the telephone, written in black marker, were six words:
MICHAEL WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO KNOW.
