Chapter 6 - The Crypt of Lies
The Mercer Pathology Institute sat tucked away in a sterile, nondescript industrial park outside Fort Lee, New Jersey. From the exterior, the squat concrete building looked like an ordinary medical laboratory. But behind its tinted shatterproof windows lay the secrets of Manhattan's wealthiest elites.
Daniel drove our black SUV through the security gate. The arm was broken, tilted awkwardly at a forty-five-degree angle.
"Look," Daniel muttered, pointing toward the front entrance.
The glass doors were unlocked, swinging slightly in the autumn breeze. A dark luxury sedan was parked erratically across two handicap spaces, its driver’s side door left hanging wide open.
"Stay behind me," Daniel warned, reaching into his coat and pulling a licensed compact firearm from his holster. I had forgotten that before Daniel was corporate counsel, he had spent a decade as a federal prosecutor.
We stepped into the reception area. The smell hit us instantly—a sharp, chemical stench of liquid nitrogen mixed with the metallic tang of fresh blood.
"Dr. Mercer?" I called out, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
No answer. The lobby was trashed. Filing cabinets were yanked open, paper files strewn across the linoleum floor like fallen leaves. Computer monitors had been smashed with blunt instruments, their internal hard drives violently ripped out.
We moved down the long corridor toward the back laboratory.
Inside the primary testing room, the sight made the room spin.
A man in a blood-splattered lab coat was slumped against a stainless-steel storage tank. It was Dr. Arthur Mercer, sixty-two years old, the Scott family’s personal physician for over a decade. His face was battered, his breathing a shallow, wet rattle.
Beside him, two cryogenic canisters lay overturned, hissing clouds of freezing vapor onto the tiles.
"Mercer!" Daniel rushed forward, dropping to one knee beside the dying doctor, pressing a hand against the man’s bleeding shoulder. "Who did this? Was it Richard?"
Mercer’s eyes fluttered open, milky and unfocused. When his gaze found me, a terrible, rattling sob escaped his chest.
"Clara..." he wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. "Victoria... sent her men. The wire... the wire failed."
"Where are the samples, Mercer?" I demanded, kneeling beside him, ignoring the freezing fog soaking through the fabric of my trousers. "The blood samples from my father! Where did you hide them?"
"She... she took the vault... took the primary tubes," Mercer whispered, his trembling hand clawing at his lab coat pocket. He pulled out a tiny, silver flash drive coated in a thin sheen of blood and pressed it into my palm. "Not... not all of it. Cloud backup key... the raw mass spectrometry data... Robert knew. Clara... your father knew she was doing it..."
My breath hitched. "What do you mean he knew?"
"He found out... two weeks before the end," Mercer gasps, his pulse fluttering erratically under Daniel’s fingers. "He couldn't save himself... the damage to his heart was irreversible... but he changed the will. He set the trap... Section Four-C... Robert designed it... to trigger when they moved against you..."
Tears burned my eyes. My father hadn't been blind. In his final, agonizing days, realizing he had been poisoned by his wife, he hadn't panicked. He had laid an inescapable legal web around his killers, waiting for them to expose their greed so that I could crush them.
"Where is Victoria now?" Daniel urged, shaking Mercer's shoulder gently. "Where did she take the physical evidence?"
"The... the estate," Mercer choked out, his eyes rolling back into his head. "Willow Creek... the old safe... she’s destroying... everything..."
His head lolled to the side. The shallow rattle in his chest stopped entirely.
Daniel checked for a pulse at the carotid artery, then looked up at me and solemnly shook his head. "He’s gone."
Outside, the distant wail of police sirens began to echo through the industrial park. Someone had tripped a silent alarm.
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"We have to go," Daniel said, pulling me to my feet. "If the police find us here over a homicide, Victoria buys the forty-eight hours she needs to incinerate every shred of physical evidence at the estate."
I tightened my fist around the silver flash drive, feeling the cold metal bite into my flesh. "Then we don't go to the police. We go to Willow Creek."
