Chapter 6 - Grandma's Cup
Margaret did not blink.
"Choose your next words carefully, Anna."
Richard stepped between them.
"She doesn't have to. I was here yesterday morning. You gave Leo his cup."
Margaret's face hardened.
"And you think I drugged my grandson?"
"I think someone did."
"Then start with the woman whose room contained the medication."
Anna almost laughed.
"The bottle with Tom's fingerprint?"
Margaret turned to him. "Convenient."
Tom's jaw tightened.
Richard picked up his phone.
"I'm calling the detective back."
"Do that," Margaret said. "And when you're finished destroying this family in front of strangers, perhaps you'll remember who has spent thirty-five years protecting it."
She walked out.
Protection.
The word stayed in Anna's mind.
Julia had used the same word once.
Three weeks before her death, Anna had found her sitting on the nursery floor at two in the morning.
"Some people protect a family by loving it," Julia had said.
"Other people protect it by controlling it."
At the time, Anna thought she was talking about Richard's work schedule.
Now she wasn't sure.
The police took the breakfast cup from the kitchen cabinet. It had already been washed, but residue remained under the silicone rim.
Same sedative.
Richard requested the kitchen camera footage.
There was none.
The system had been disabled from 7:42 to 8:06 a.m.
Again using Richard's administrator account.
"Someone isn't just watching the house," Tom said. "They're rewriting it."
Richard looked at him.
"Can you prove who?"
"If they used the internal server, maybe. But I'd have to take the system offline."
"Do it."
They moved Leo to a hotel suite under private security while Tom copied the estate server.
Anna stayed with Leo.
Richard went to Dr. Elaine Porter's clinic with detectives.
The clinic had closed six months earlier.
Its paper records were supposedly destroyed in a water leak.
Its electronic records had been transferred to an archive company.
That company did not exist.
But one nurse remembered Julia.
She also remembered Vanessa.
"They argued," the nurse told Richard. "Mrs. Bennett accused Ms. Keane of accessing her chart."
"Why?"
"I don't know. But Mrs. Bennett asked for a blood test afterward. She said she felt foggy every time she visited the estate after seeing Dr. Porter."
"Did you tell the police after she died?"
The nurse's face changed.
"I tried."
"What happened?"
"A lawyer came to the clinic. Said the family wanted privacy."
"Which lawyer?"
She hesitated.
"Nathan Cross."
Richard called Nathan from the parking lot.
No answer.
He called again.
Straight to voicemail.
By the time Richard returned to the hotel, Tom was waiting with his laptop open.
"I found the device that used your admin account."
Richard took off his coat.
"Whose?"
"It isn't a phone. It's a security token. Physical hardware."
"Where is it registered?"
Tom turned the screen.
The token had been issued eight years earlier to Bennett Family Legal Services.
Nathan's office.
Richard exhaled.
Then Tom scrolled down.
"But that's not the part you need to see."
The token had been used from inside the estate seventy-three times in the last sixteen months.
The most recent access point was not the office.
It was Margaret's private guest suite.
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