Chapter 9
One bullet.
Upper chest.
Prescott dragged me toward the rear exit.
"We need to move."
I looked at him.
Something about Veer's last words burned in my mind.
Her father.
Genevieve's father had died before our twins were born.
Unless everyone had been wrong about that too.
We reached the vehicles.
Prescott climbed into the front seat.
I sat in the rear.
Then my phone vibrated.
A message from a number I didn't recognize.
DON'T TRUST HALE.
I looked at the back of Prescott's head.
He turned.
"Everything okay?"
I smiled without feeling anything.
"Fine."
For the next hour, I said nothing.
I had trusted Prescott with my life.
More importantly, I had trusted him with Genevieve's life.
He had arranged the security detail on the night she died.
He had reviewed the accident.
He had handed me the police report.
He had stood beside me at her funeral.
When we returned to Chicago, I sent him home.
Then I called an old associate named Miriam Vale.
Miriam ran security before Prescott.
She had left my company eight years earlier after a disagreement I had never fully understood.
She answered on the fourth ring.
"Lawson?"
"You once told me Hale would bury me."
Silence.
"I remember."
"Why?"
"Because he was never loyal to you."
"Who was he loyal to?"
Another pause.
"Genevieve's father."
I closed my eyes.
"He's dead."
"No."
I felt the room tilt.
"Explain."
"Your wife lied about her family."
By sunrise, Miriam was sitting across from me.
She brought files.
Real files.
Genevieve's father was Dr.
Adrian Valez, one of the original founders of Helixor Biomedical.
The man I knew as Charles Laurent, a quiet French Canadian investor who supposedly died from lymphoma, had never existed.
Genevieve had created the identity to hide her connection to her father.
"Why?"
Miriam folded her hands.
"Because Adrian Valez wasn't just a scientist.
He believed human genetics should be privately controlled by those wealthy enough to advance it."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning he thought governments and ethics boards slowed progress."
"Genevieve hated men like that."
"She hated him."
Miriam slid a photograph toward me.
Genevieve stood beside a tall silver haired man.
Adrian Valez.
I recognized him.
I had seen him once.
At my wedding.
He had been introduced as a university colleague.
"He used her fertility treatment to access the embryos," Miriam said.
My hands curled.
"He experimented on his own grandchildren."