Chapter 7 - Going Home
The private jet touched down at Portland International at 11:22 AM local time, the rain coming down in sheets just like it always did in the Pacific Northwest in late autumn. Marlow was waiting for us on the tarmac, leaning against a black SUV, her auburn hair plastered to her neck, the scar over her eye standing out pale against her rain-pink skin. She didn't say anything when I stepped off the plane. She just opened the passenger door. She knew. She'd read the note. She'd seen the change in me.
Astoria was two hours west. We drove in silence for most of it, the forests of the Oregon Coast Range passing by in a blur of green and gray, the rain drumming on the roof. I held my father's note in my lap, unfolded, rereading the words for the hundredth time. The crash wasn't an accident. It was them. The same people who want what your mother and I found.
What had they found? My parents were marine biologists. They worked at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Studied ocean acidification. Plankton blooms. Boring stuff. Nothing that should have gotten them killed. Nothing that should have attracted the attention of people powerful enough to arrange a car crash and then cover it up for over a decade. People powerful enough to have Evelyn Strickland in their pocket.
"Talk to me, Sarah," I said finally, as we crossed the Youngs Bay Bridge into Astoria. The town looked exactly like I remembered. Gray. Wet. Clinging to the side of a hill where the Columbia River met the Pacific. "You ran the records. You talked to the retired cops. What aren't the files telling us?"
Marlow glanced at me, her hands loose on the wheel. "The official report is airtight. James Mercer, 48, and Clara Mercer, 46, killed on impact. Driver of the other vehicle—one Donald Riggs, 52, fisherman out of Warrenton—blood alcohol three times the legal limit. Died on scene. Open and shut. Except—" She paused. Fished a folded paper out of her jacket. Tossed it to me. "Riggs didn't drink. At all. His widow swore it. His friends. His doctor. Man was a devout Baptist. Teetotaler his whole adult life. And yet somehow, that night, he slammed half a bottle of bourbon and drove his F-150 head-on into your parents' sedan at seventy miles an hour."
I unfolded the paper. It was Riggs' autopsy. BAL: 0.31. Impossible.
"More," Marlow said. "The first officer on scene? Retired now. Lives in Seaside. I talked to him yesterday. Said he remembered two things. One—your dad's car had been shot. Bullet hole through the front driver's side tire. Clean entry. No exit. Never made it into the report. And two—there was a black sedan. Unmarked. Parked half a mile back, watching. By the time backup got there? It was gone. The officer mentioned it to his sergeant. Told him to put it in the file. Next day? He was transferred to a desk job in Tillamook. Never worked a road again."
The pieces were clicking. Slowly. Horribly. "So the crash was staged. Riggs was set up. Cops were paid off. And whoever did it had enough pull to make it all disappear. But why? My parents studied algae, Sarah. Who kills two scientists over algae?"
Marlow turned onto the road that led up to the old house. The Mercer house. It had been sold years ago, renovated, repainted, but I'd have known it anywhere. White siding. Red door. The big oak tree in the front yard I'd climbed a thousand times. We stopped across the street. Sat there, idling, watching the new family move about their morning.
"Maybe they didn't study just algae," Marlow said quietly. "I pulled their old research grants. Most of it was NOAA. Standard stuff. But three months before they died? They got a private grant. No university affiliation. No foundation name. Just a numbered account out of Zurich. For two point seven million dollars. To study—deep ocean bioluminescent microorganisms in the Cascadia Subduction Zone."
I stared at her. "That's not science. That's a cover. Two point seven million doesn't buy plankton samples. That buys—weapons research. Or surveillance. Or something the Navy doesn't want anyone knowing about."
"Exactly," Marlow said. "And guess who was on the board of that numbered shell company back in 2014? A newly minted Pentagon procurement officer named Evelyn Strickland."
The world tilted.
Evelyn. She'd been there. All along. Eleven years before I ever met Grant. Before I ever became Morgan Hale. Evelyn Strickland had been connected to my parents' death. She'd known who I was from the very beginning. She'd let me marry her son. Let me into her family. Let me build Black Iris right under her nose—because she'd known exactly who I was the whole time. She'd been grooming me. Using me. Waiting for the day she could pull the string and destroy me.
And I'd never. Suspected. A thing.
"She played me," I whispered. The realization was worse than any blow she'd ever landed. "For eleven years. She knew. She always knew. She let me think I was the puppet master. But she was holding the strings the whole time. The marriage. The divorce. The clearance revocation. All of it. She wanted me to fight back. Wanted me to expose her. Because when I did? She'd drop the Lila Mercer bomb and take me down with her. And my parents' murder would stay buried forever."
Marlow's hand closed over mine on the console. Tight. "Then we dig it up. Whatever they were researching. Whatever got them killed. We find it. And we finish what your parents started. And Evelyn? She doesn't just go to prison for fraud and Elena's murder. She goes down for three counts of murder in the first degree. And everyone who helped her. Everyone."
May you like
I looked at the house. At the ghost of a seventeen-year-old girl running out that red door, backpack slung over her shoulder, laughing, with no idea the world was about to end. Lila Mercer had died that night. But Morgan Hale had been born from the ashes. And now Morgan Hale was going to finish the fight Lila's parents had started.
"Let's go to the cemetery first," I said, opening the door. The rain hit my face. Cold. Familiar. "I want to visit their graves. And then? We're going to the science center. We're going to find that research. And we're going to find out exactly what my parents died for."
