Chapter 14 - THE NAME IN THE RED BOOK
Officer Holloway was immediately removed from the investigation.
She surrendered her weapon and badge.
She did not argue.
She asked only to speak with me.
Agent Bell refused at first.
I insisted.
We met inside a federal office with two investigators watching.
Grace Holloway sat across from me without her uniform.
She looked smaller.
More tired.
“You think I bought a child,” she said.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Then why is your name in the book?”
“Because Lorraine sold me.”
I stared at her.
Grace told me she had been adopted as an infant.
Her parents said the adoption was private but legal.
She never questioned it.
When she became a police officer, she learned that her original records were sealed.
She had requested access twice.
Both requests disappeared.
“My adoptive father was a deputy.”
“He paid Lorraine.”
“He may not have known I was stolen.”
“Why didn’t you tell investigators?”
“I did not know until they showed me the page.”
Agent Bell placed a DNA report on the table.
Grace’s sample matched one of the unidentified family lines connected to the Mercer ranch.
Her biological mother was Catherine Webb.
One of the women in the photographs.
Catherine disappeared twenty-nine years earlier.
The red book listed Grace as female transfer one.
Officer Holloway looked at me.
“That porch pillar held the record of my life.”
“The same pillar where they tied you.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Our stories were different.
But Lorraine had treated both of us as property.
Agent Bell restored Grace to the investigation only as a cooperating witness.
She could no longer work the case officially.
She continued helping victims locate records.
The red book exposed fourteen illegal adoptions.
Three doctors.
Two attorneys.
A judge.
Several children were now adults.
Some did not want contact.
Some had spent years searching.
The network reached far beyond Daniel.
Lorraine had inherited it from her own mother.
The Mercer family had been selling children for decades.
Male infants connected to the Mercer bloodline were kept within the family.
Female infants were sold.
That was why daughters were worthless to Lorraine.
Not because they had no value.
Because she assigned them a price.
Samuel was never meant to be sold.
He was meant to unlock the trust.
The oil company offered to settle the land dispute.
The amount was more money than I could understand.
I refused to discuss it until the criminal trial ended.
Daniel sent me a letter from jail.
You think you won because you found the children.
You still do not understand the land.
There is something buried beneath the ranch that makes the oil worthless.
Nina advised me not to respond.
Then federal agents searching the south field found a concrete chamber beneath an abandoned barn.
Inside were medical files.
May you like
Personal belongings.
And human remains.
