Chapter 16 - The Shooter in the Trees
Detective Brooks’s team surrounded the hillside.
The shooter escaped on an off-road motorcycle.
Mark remained alive.
The bullet had struck a protective vest beneath his jacket.
He used the confusion to seize my arm.
Together, we fell behind the guardrail.
He pressed a knife against my side.
“Tell them to lower their weapons.”
“You planned this.”
“I expected Crane to clean the scene.”
“You used me as bait.”
“I used everyone.”
There it was.
The only honest sentence he had ever spoken.
I looked toward David’s notebook near the road.
Rain began darkening the pages.
Mark saw it too.
He dragged me toward it.
I drove my heel into his injured leg.
He lost his balance.
The knife fell.
Detective Brooks tackled him before he recovered.
This time, Mark did not escape.
Police recovered the notebook.
The final pages revealed that Senator Crane had approved funding for Acheron’s illegal research through a classified security program.
David planned to testify before a Senate committee.
Mark killed him before he could travel to Washington.
Crane then buried the investigation.
The motorcycle was found at a nearby cabin.
Inside, police discovered the shooter’s equipment and photographs of our family.
One photograph had been taken outside Hailey’s elementary school six years earlier.
Crane’s people had watched us long before Mark married me.
Mark was not the only predator who had entered our lives.
He was simply the one assigned to remain closest.
Senator Crane appeared on television that evening.
He denied knowing Acheron.
He called the allegations a politically motivated fabrication.
Then David’s notebook was authenticated.
A secret page inside the back cover contained account numbers.
The payments led directly to Crane’s family foundation.
But the strongest evidence remained inside Hailey’s body.
The engineered particles carried a manufacturing signature linked to a federal laboratory.
To prove it, doctors needed another blood sample.
Hailey agreed.
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Hours later, the sample vanished from the hospital laboratory.
Someone inside had stolen it.
