Chapter 4 - THE ARSENAL IN THE TRUNKThe search log from the Marion County Sheriff’s Department read like an inventory for a mercenary outfit.
Inside the trunk of Chloe’s luxury sedan, alongside the aluminum baseball bat still stained with our father’s blood, deputies had recovered a locked steel briefcase. Inside that briefcase were three burner phones, twenty-four thousand dollars in untraceable cash, two fake passports bearing foreign identities, and a detailed dossier on my father’s medical history—complete with forged psychological evaluations pre-signed by a disgraced, deregistered psychiatrist from three counties over.
They hadn't just planned to steal his money and put him in a home. They had planned to vanish across the border by noon today.
I stood in the evidence processing room, staring down at the blood-spattered baseball bat resting on the stainless-steel table. The forensic technician was carefully lifting fiber samples from the grip.
"Agent Vance," the technician said, looking up. "We've got skin cells and blood spatter matching your father on the barrel. But look at the handle. There are two distinct sets of DNA prints here. One belongs to Chloe Davis. The other belongs to Marcus."
My heart hammered against my ribs. Marcus hadn't just stood there and watched. According to the physical evidence, he had actively helped hold the bat, or wrestled it away after the strike. He was a direct accomplice to physical assault.
"Package all of it," I instructed, my voice hard as iron. "Chain of custody must be airtight. I want every digital file, every phone record, and every financial transaction backed up to three separate secure servers before morning briefing."
Just then, my secure military-issued cell phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out and flipped it open. It was a priority encrypted message from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where my father had been transferred for an emergency comprehensive trauma scan.
The text read: PATIENT STABLE. MULTIPLE RIB FRACTURES, SEVERE INTERNAL BRUISING, AND EARLY-STAGE COGNITIVE STRESS INDUCED BY PRESCRIBED SEDATIVES FOUND IN TOXICOLOGY SCREEN. HE WAS BEING SLOWLY POISONED.
The phone slipped slightly in my grip.
Poisoned.
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They weren't just trying to frame him as mentally unstable—they were actively drugging him over a period of weeks to make him appear senile. The memory lapses, the confusion, the physical weakness that doctors had recently noted during his routine checkups—it wasn't natural aging at all. It was slow-acting chemical manipulation administered right under his own roof by the people he trusted most.
The fury that surged through me then wasn't the cold, calculated anger of a federal investigator. It was the primal, terrifying rage of a daughter whose family had been systematically butchered from the inside out by parasites.
