Chapter 6 - SARAH HAD BEEN INSIDE THE HOSPITAL
We tracked her through security cameras.
Parking garage.
Elevator.
Second floor.
Then the cameras lost her.
She never approached the emergency department.
Never came near maternity.
Why?
At 3:29 a.m., she reappeared.
Running.
She left through the garage.
Seventeen minutes.
Something happened inside our hospital.
We checked badge logs.
The second floor housed administrative offices and an overnight laboratory.
One door opened while Sarah was there.
Medical records.
Badge used:
Jonathan Reed.
He denied being in the hospital.
His badge had been in his office.
“Who had access?”
“Staff.”
“Sarah?”
“No.”
Security footage finally gave us another angle.
Sarah entered Jonathan’s office.
She knew the code.
She used his badge to enter records.
She printed something.
Then left.
What?
The printer queue had retained document titles.
Six pediatric birth records.
All from different years.
All amended.
Ethan looked at me.
“Daniel’s red book.”
Maybe Sarah had been verifying identities.
The six records shared one detail.
Each amendment had been prepared by the same notary.
Daniel Miller.
Except Miller wasn’t his real surname.
Investigators discovered Daniel had once been Daniel Price.
A document-preparation specialist who lost his notary commission after misconduct complaints.
He had spent years helping people create paper trails.
Some legitimate.
Some not.
Sarah knew because she had been one of his clients.
Then she became his partner.
That was the part Emma didn’t know.
Three years earlier Sarah had helped Daniel.
She handled calls.
Collected documents.
Communicated with desperate parents.
Not trafficking.
Not baby-selling.
Mostly custody evasion.
People running from spouses.
Sometimes for legitimate fear.
Sometimes simply to defeat court orders.
Sarah helped decide which stories to believe.
She had not merely been Daniel’s prisoner from the beginning.
She had helped build the machine that eventually trapped her.
That was why she feared the red book.
It implicated her too.
When Jonathan heard, he stared at the floor.
“She never told me.”
Nobody seemed to know Sarah completely.
Not Daniel.
Not Jonathan.
Not Emma.
Certainly not me.
Then Sarah’s abandoned vehicle was found.
Inside were bloodstained towels.
A hospital wristband.
Not ours.
A small urgent-care center thirty miles south had treated a woman for postpartum hemorrhage at 5:06 a.m.
She gave a false name.
Left against medical advice.
Alive.
Again.
Moving.
Running.
Why?
The answer arrived through Emma.
She remembered her mother’s final instruction.
“If I don’t come back, Rachel has to look in the blanket.”
“We found the note.”
Emma shook her head.
“Not that blanket.”
“What blanket?”
“The blue one.”
There had been no blue blanket.
Then I remembered the warming blankets we had removed from the wheelbarrow.
Under the dirty yellow one had been a thin faded cloth.
Blue-gray.
Hospital laundry had bagged it with contaminated belongings.
We recovered it.
Sewn into the hem was a microSD card.
On it were photographs of every page of Daniel’s red book.
Sarah had taken the evidence before she ran.
The final image showed a handwritten appointment.
August 8.
10:00 a.m.
J. Reed.
Hospital.
I looked at the clock.
9:42.
Jonathan wasn’t simply connected to Sarah because of the affair.
May you like
Daniel had been scheduled to meet him that morning.
Eighteen minutes from now.
