Chapter 8
Police surrounded the motel before sunrise.
Ryan’s room was empty.
The clerk said he had left thirty minutes earlier with a baby and a woman wearing a hood.
A camera captured their vehicle.
Melissa recognized it immediately.
“That’s my mother’s old station wagon.”
Diane had reported the car stolen years earlier.
It had been stored inside Holloway’s warehouse under a false registration.
Police traced the vehicle toward an abandoned summer camp near the mountains.
I begged to go.
The detective refused.
“If Ryan sees you, he may panic.”
“I am that baby’s mother.”
“That is exactly why you cannot be there.”
So I waited in a command van two miles away with Sophie, Mara, and Noah.
Noah slept against Sophie’s chest.
Watching her hold him hurt, but it also brought a strange peace.
He had two mothers who would protect him now.
No more lies.
No more fighting over ownership.
A tactical team entered the camp.
They found Rebecca Mercer in the main lodge.
She surrendered immediately.
Ryan had forced her to help him, she claimed.
No baby was with her.
No Ryan either.
Then a gunshot echoed through the trees.
Every officer in the command van moved at once.
The radio filled with broken commands.
A man was running toward the lake.
He carried something wrapped in a blanket.
I saw him through the trees.
Ryan.
I jumped from the van before anyone could stop me.
Mara shouted my name.
I ran until my lungs burned.
Ryan stood at the end of a wooden dock.
He held the bundle against his chest.
“Stay back!” he yelled.
I stopped.
“Let me see him.”
“You ruined everything.”
“No. Your mother ruined you.”
His face twisted.
“You think this was her idea? She wanted a replacement for Melissa’s baby. I wanted freedom.”
“Freedom from what?”
“From all of you.”
He admitted he had planned to take Melissa’s money, give her a child, and disappear. But when I fought back, every crime he had buried began coming apart.
“What happened to Emily?” I asked.
Ryan looked toward the water.
“She discovered Mercer’s files.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No.”
“Where is she?”
The woman in the hood stepped from behind the boathouse.
She lowered her hood.
It was Emily.
Alive.
She had escaped Ryan seven years earlier and changed her identity. When she saw my story online, she contacted Holloway, believing he would help expose Ryan.
Instead, Holloway warned Diane.
Ryan captured Emily and forced her to assist him at the motel.
She had escaped again during the raid.
“Ryan doesn’t have the baby,” Emily said.
I looked at the bundle.
Ryan threw it onto the dock.
It contained only blankets and a speaker playing an infant’s cries.
He had tricked the police.
“Where is my son?” I screamed.
Ryan smiled.
“With the only person who can still finish this.”
Diane.
She had never left jail, but she did not need to.
Holloway had arranged everything from outside.
Police arrested Ryan on the dock.
He fought until three officers brought him down.
Emily told detectives Holloway planned to leave the country that morning.
His private plane was waiting at a small airfield.
We raced back to the command van.
The airfield was forty minutes away.
Officers reached it in thirty-five.
Holloway’s plane was still on the runway.
He was arrested beside the steps.
There was no baby aboard.
He claimed he did not know where my son was.
Then Noah began crying in Sophie’s arms.
His cries triggered a recording device hidden inside his stuffed rabbit.
Ryan’s voice played through the tiny speaker.
“One child opens the door to the other.”
Mara ripped the toy apart.
Inside it was a key and a strip of paper bearing an address.
Emily stared at it.
“That’s Diane’s childhood home.”
The house had been condemned for twenty years.
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When police arrived, smoke was rising from an upstairs window.
And from inside came a baby’s scream.
