The Day My Family Left Me to Die novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Recording

Millicent's POV

Nolan came out of the precinct at six in the morning with his tie loose and a paper cup of coffee he wasn't drinking.

Heidi and I were waiting beside his truck.

I had not slept.

I had sat in a plastic chair beside bay four while a doctor taped Seth's ribs, and he'd held out his split hand to me, and I had held it.

Heidi had the recorder in her coat pocket and had copied it to her phone twice.

"Penfield," Heidi said. "Two minutes."

My brother looked at her, then at me, and he stopped walking.

"I told you at the dock," he said. "I'm not doing this."

"Seth Draper walked into the mortuary man's apartment last night and got him to say it all on tape," Heidi said. "Chad. Blythe. The cabin. Who they paid."

Nolan set the coffee on the hood of the truck.

"Draper," he said. "The guard who lied to me about the transfer."

"He lied to protect her." She tipped her head toward me. "He's in a hospital bed with three broken ribs. Come look at him."

"Which bay?"

"Four."

Something moved in my brother's face and went away again.

"Heidi, I do this for a living," he said. "People bring me tapes. Somebody always has a tape. Twelve years, and every one of them is a story someone wants me to believe at the exact moment I'm weakest."

"Then listen to it."

"No."

He said it quietly.

I knew that voice. It was the one he used to talk a man off a rooftop, gentle and immovable.

"My sister died twelve days ago," he said. "My other sister is holding together by her fingernails. A week from Saturday she's going to stand up in front of this county and say my sister's name. And you show up with a voice on a recorder that says she did it."

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