Chapter 10 - The Person Behind J
Investigators traced the J number through three relays.
The registered owner was fictional.
The billing address belonged to an abandoned warehouse.
The device had been activated seven years earlier.
Someone had worked hard to remain invisible.
But people make mistakes.
Three months earlier, the phone connected briefly to public Wi-Fi at a luxury hotel in Santa Fe.
Security records from that date narrowed possibilities.
One hundred twelve guests.
Fourteen private events.
Hundreds of visitors.
Not enough.
Then Vargas compared Carmen’s credit-card history.
Carmen had stayed at the same hotel.
Same night.
She booked two rooms.
One under her name.
Another under the name Jonah Reed.
Zayden stared.
“Who is Jonah Reed?”
No one knew.
Yet.
The hotel still had identification from the reservation.
The license was fake.
The photograph was real.
A man around sixty.
Dark hair going gray.
Tall.
A scar along his jaw.
Zayden had never seen him.
Until Jessica walked into the room.
She dropped her coffee.
“That’s him.”
Zayden turned.
“Who?”
“The man from Denver.”
“What man?”
“I forgot him until now.”
She stared at the photograph.
“At the fundraiser. He argued with my aunt.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Seventeen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
Jessica closed her eyes.
Music.
Crowded ballroom.
Teenage Jessica waiting impatiently near a hallway.
Rachel speaking angrily to a man.
A sentence surfaced.
“You don’t get to claim him now.”
Jessica opened her eyes.
“That’s what she said.”
Zayden felt the room change.
“Claim who?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at Jonah Reed’s photograph.
Dangerous biological father.
Returning when Zayden was seventeen.
Could it be him?
DNA comparison would be needed.
First they had to find him.
Federal investigators became involved once the adoption fraud and interstate financial transactions were uncovered.
The case grew rapidly.
New Horizons records had not vanished completely.
A former accountant retained backups.
Twenty-three questionable adoptions were identified in the first review.
Seven contained altered paternal information.
Three families had paid hidden fees routed through companies connected to Carmen.
One case contained a handwritten notation:
47 protected by R.F.
Raymond Ferris.
Zayden’s father had protected him.
Against whom?
The answer seemed obvious.
Jonah.
Then came another discovery.
Raymond’s death.
Or staged death.
The unidentified remains exhumed from his grave finally produced a DNA database match.
Paul Dane.
Zayden recognized the surname.
P. Dane appeared in the blue ledger.
Paul had been a private investigator.
He disappeared four years earlier.
The same night Raymond supposedly died.
Zayden sat inside Vargas’s office staring at the report.
“So Paul Dane died at my parents’ house.”
“Yes.”
“And someone made everyone think it was my father.”
“That’s what the evidence suggests.”
“Who?”
“Still under investigation.”
“Was my father part of it?”
“We don’t know.”
“He disappears. Another man dies. My mother provides dental records. You think that happened accidentally?”
“No.”
Jessica asked, “Could Raymond have killed Paul?”
Vargas did not answer immediately.
“It is one possibility.”
Zayden’s stomach turned.
His father alive was one shock.
His father capable of murder was another.
Then a fingerprint result returned from the Flagstaff cabin.
One unidentified set belonged to someone whose prints were already in a federal database.
Not Raymond.
Jonah Reed.
Except that was not his real name.
His name was Jonathan Crane.
He had been arrested twenty-nine years earlier for aggravated assault.
Charges dropped.
Later investigated for extortion.
Never convicted.
Then he became a private security contractor.
His record ended abruptly eighteen years earlier.
Just before New Horizons collapsed.
Zayden stared at Jonathan’s photograph.
“Is he my father?”
“We need DNA.”
“Find him.”
“We are.”
They did not need to wait long.
That night, at 11:06, a black SUV stopped outside the rental house.
Security cameras captured one passenger.
Jonathan Crane.
He did not approach the door.
He simply sat inside the vehicle.
Watching.
Police converged within minutes.
The SUV was gone.
But something remained on the curb.
A padded envelope.
Inside was a DNA test.
Jonathan Crane.
Zayden Ferris.
Probability of paternity:
99.998 percent.
Beneath the result, Jonathan had written:
May you like
Carmen stole thirty-four years from me.
Now she is trying to steal your daughter from you.
