The abandoned car changed the investigation from containment to pursuit.
For Anna, it did something more unsettling. Dererick was no longer fixed in a location she could imagine. He was not at work, not at home, not sitting in an interview room where she could trust walls and officers to remain between them.
He was somewhere.
Knowing that made every hallway sound important.
Morales arranged for Anna and Clare to move from the hospital guest room to another secure location. The decision was not discussed as optional. Clare packed while Anna stared at Dererick’s unsent message.
She knows everything.
The sentence frightened her less than it should have.
“I don’t know everything,” she said.
Morales looked at her. “That may be useful.”
“He thinks I do.”
“Or he wanted someone else to think you do.”
The unidentified recipient of the draft became another priority. The secondary phone contained few contacts and appeared to have been used almost entirely for encrypted messages. Several conversations had been deleted.
Forensics began trying to recover them.
Marcus remained in custody, but he refused to cooperate.
His lawyer described the equipment found in his black case as misunderstood professional supplies. The explanation was weak, yet the refusal mattered. Marcus would not identify Dererick, explain the hotel, or acknowledge the documents tying him to Clare.
Anna found the silence more disturbing than panic would have been.
“He’s protecting someone,” she said.
“Maybe himself,” Morales replied.
“Maybe Dererick.”
“Maybe.”
“Or the sender.”
Morales did not dismiss that.
The sender contacted Anna again before sunset.
This time the message contained no photograph.
Just an address.
Clare immediately said no.
Morales agreed.
Anna studied the address.
It belonged to a storage facility on the edge of town.
Beneath it came a second message.
Unit 218. Ask what happened to Elise.
Anna read the name twice.
Elise.
She searched her memory and found nothing.
Morales searched the copied records.
A woman named Elise Warren appeared in an old folder.
Her entries stopped abruptly seventeen months earlier.
That was enough for Morales to request records connected to the storage facility rather than send anyone blindly.
Unit 218 had been rented under an alias.
The payment card traced to the same commercial network connected to the courier company.
Investigators obtained emergency access.
Anna waited for updates with Clare.
Inside the unit were boxes.
Not medical equipment.
Personal belongings.
Photographs, notebooks, clothing, identification documents, old phones, and labeled envelopes.
Many belonged to different people.
One box contained items marked with Elise Warren’s initials.
A driver’s license.
A scarf.
A broken watch.
And a handwritten letter.
Morales did not allow Anna to see the full contents until they were processed.
The existence of the unit confirmed that the anonymous sender was providing genuine information.
Clare hated what that implied.
“They know too much.”
Anna agreed.
But she no longer believed the sender’s sole purpose was intimidation.
“Ask what happened to Elise.”
The wording sounded almost accusatory.
Not toward Anna.
Toward Dererick’s hidden history.
Morales located Elise’s public records.
Seventeen months earlier, she had moved away suddenly after telling friends she needed distance from a difficult situation. She stopped using most social accounts. She had not filed a missing person report because, officially, she was an adult who had chosen to leave.
But one friend remembered something strange.
Before Elise disappeared, she complained about episodes of lost time.
Anna felt cold when Morales told her.
The friend also remembered a man who had become unusually helpful after Elise’s breakup.
She knew him only as Derek.
Clare closed her eyes.
Anna did not.
She wanted every detail.
Elise had not vanished entirely.
She had been living under her middle name in another state.
Investigators found her alive.
That fact released a breath Anna did not realize she had been holding.
When Morales asked whether Elise would speak with investigators, she initially refused.
Then he mentioned Dererick.
She agreed.
The interview happened remotely.
Anna was not present, but Morales later shared the parts directly relevant to the investigation.
Elise described Dererick as someone who entered her life at the exact moment she needed help. He fixed a leaking sink. Brought groceries when she was sick. Recommended herbal tea for anxiety. She trusted him because he never seemed to demand anything.
Then she began waking with headaches.
Missing hours.
Finding objects moved.
Once, she woke in her bedroom wearing clothes she did not remember putting on.
When she confronted Dererick, he convinced her she was under severe stress.
For several weeks she believed him.
Then she found a camera.
Anna sat very still as Morales told the story.
Elise did something Anna had nearly done.
She confronted him.
Dererick cried.
He claimed the camera was part of a private concern about Elise’s sleep. He said he had been afraid she was sleepwalking and hurting herself. He apologized for violating her privacy.
Elise wanted to believe him.
So she stayed.
Three nights later, she woke in a parking lot inside her own car.
She had no memory of driving there.
That ended everything.
Elise left without telling Dererick.
She abandoned furniture and changed her phone number. She stayed with a cousin, then moved again when she received photographs of her new apartment from an unknown number.
Anna’s stomach tightened.
“The same sender?”
“We don’t know,” Morales said.
“What did the messages say?”
Mostly nothing.
Just photographs.
Then one warning.
He keeps records.
Anna looked at Clare.
Seventeen months earlier.
The anonymous person had tried to warn Elise too.
“Did she find the records?”
“No.”
“Then whoever sent that knew before I did.”
“Yes.”
The timeline shifted.
The sender was not reacting to Anna’s discovery.
They had been watching Dererick for at least seventeen months.
Maybe longer.
“Why not go to police?”
Morales said Elise had wondered the same thing. She had assumed the anonymous messages came from Dererick himself, designed to frighten her. She never responded.
Anna understood why.
The sender’s method created confusion instead of trust.
Yet someone had been trying to expose him.
The next breakthrough came from Dererick’s recovered phone.
Forensics restored fragments of deleted messages.
Most were between Dererick and Marcus.
The tone resembled the encrypted correspondence Anna had already seen.
But a third contact appeared intermittently.
No name.
Just a symbol.
The messages were brief and tense.
Stop.
Too visible.
Leave her alone.
Not again.
Anna read the excerpts Morales showed her.
“That’s the sender.”
“Possibly.”
The exchanges revealed conflict.
Dererick sometimes responded with mockery. Other times with anger.
One restored message from months earlier stood out.
You don’t get to pretend you’re better because you stopped.
Dererick had written it.
The unknown contact replied:
I know exactly what I was.
Anna felt the room contract.
This was not merely an observer.
The sender had been involved.
Clare understood at the same moment.
“They used to help him.”
Morales nodded. “That is one interpretation.”
Anna reread the line.
I know exactly what I was.
A former participant.
Someone who had knowledge of the archive, access to plans, awareness of Elise, and perhaps enough familiarity with Dererick’s operation to follow Anna’s discovery in real time.
“Why not identify themselves?”
“Fear,” Clare said.
“Guilt,” Morales added.
“Or they’re still protecting themselves.”
That possibility made the warnings darker.
A person could regret what Dererick had done without being innocent.
Anna wanted a name.
Forensics found one indirect clue.
The unknown contact used a device that, during a brief period months earlier, connected to Wi-Fi at a rehabilitation center.
Morales obtained a list of staff and long-term patients associated with the facility.
One name intersected with Dererick’s past.
Nolan Price.
Anna knew it immediately.
Not personally.
From photographs.
Nolan had been Dererick’s closest friend in college.
Dererick told Anna they fell out years before the marriage. He rarely explained why.
“He said Nolan had problems,” Anna remembered.
“What kind?” Morales asked.
“Drugs. Drinking. Something like that.”
The rehabilitation-center records placed Nolan there during the period the unknown device appeared.
Morales found no obvious criminal history.
He found something else.
Nolan had worked in medical equipment distribution for nearly a decade.
Clare exhaled slowly.
Access to supplies.
Knowledge of devices.
A history with Dererick.
The pieces were not proof.
They were enough to investigate.
Morales contacted Nolan.
No answer.
His listed apartment was empty.
A neighbor said he had left two days earlier carrying one suitcase.
Anna almost laughed at the bitter symmetry.
Dererick gone.
Nolan gone.
Two men disappearing after Anna opened the archive.
Then her phone rang.
Unknown number.
Not a message.
A call.
Morales activated recording and placed the phone on speaker.
Anna answered.
For several seconds no one spoke.
Then a male voice said, “You shouldn’t have stayed in that house after the tea.”
Anna’s entire body tightened.
“Who is this?”
“You know the name by now.”
“Nolan?”
Silence.
Clare covered her mouth.
Morales gestured for Anna to continue.
“Why are you helping me?”
The man breathed out slowly.
“I didn’t help soon enough.”
“What did you do?”
Another pause.
“Enough that you should hate me.”
Anna closed her eyes briefly.
“Did you help him drug people?”
“Yes.”
The directness shocked her.
“Did you help him record them?”
“Yes.”
Clare turned away.
Anna’s voice changed. “Did you touch me?”
“No.”
“Were you there?”
“Once.”
Anna gripped the phone.
“When?”
“The night connected to the code you found.”
02:17.
The older date.
The blank in Anna’s memory.
“What happened?”
Nolan did not answer immediately.
Then he said, “That was the night I stopped.”
Anna felt her pulse in her throat.
“Why?”
“Because Dererick wasn’t experimenting anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“He had decided what the system was for.”
Morales leaned closer.
Anna asked, “What system?”
Nolan’s voice dropped.
“The files aren’t trophies. They’re leverage.”
Anna stared at the phone.
“For what?”
“Control. Blackmail. Access. Whatever he needs.”
Dererick’s kindness, routines, cameras, drugs, recordings, personal disclosures—it was not one obsession.
It was infrastructure.
Nolan continued.
“He doesn’t just collect people. He learns what makes them afraid to speak.”
Anna remembered the vulnerable notes. Relationships. Work problems. Medication. Loneliness.
“Why Clare?”
“I don’t know.”
“You knew about the plan.”
“I knew Marcus had been assigned.”
Assigned.
The word landed heavily.
“Assigned by Dererick?”
“Yes.”
“Where is Dererick now?”
Silence.
“Nolan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why are you running?”
“Because if he thinks I gave you the archive, he’ll come for me.”
“You did give it to me.”
“No.”
Anna froze.
“You told me about it.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t put it there?”
“No. Dererick created it.”
Anna looked at Morales.
“Who sent the photo of my house?”
“I did.”
“The storage unit?”
“Yes.”
“The hotel warning?”
“Yes.”
“Why all the riddles?”
“Because I didn’t know if your phone was clean. I didn’t know who was reading.”
“Then tell me where you are now.”
Nolan gave a small, humorless laugh.
“No.”
Morales wrote something on a pad and turned it toward Anna.
Ask about Elise.
Anna did.
The line went quiet again.
Finally Nolan said, “Elise is why I left.”
“You helped with her too?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“He nearly killed her.”
Anna felt the air leave the room.
“How?”
Nolan’s voice broke for the first time.
“The dose was wrong. Dererick knew it. He filmed anyway.”
Anna closed her eyes.
Nolan continued.
“I kept her breathing until she woke. Then I told her to disappear.”
“You were the one sending her warnings.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you go to police then?”
“Because I would have had to admit everything.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m tired of people paying for my fear.”
The sentence hung there.
Morales pointed to another question.
Where is Dererick likely to go?
Anna asked.
Nolan hesitated.
“There’s a place he uses when he needs time.”
“What place?”
“A cabin.”
“Where?”
Nolan gave an area northwest of the city, near an old reservoir.
Morales was already moving.
Anna heard papers, doors, another officer being summoned.
Before the call ended, Nolan said one more thing.
“Anna.”
“Yes?”
“If they find the cabin empty, don’t assume he ran.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s another room.”
The line disconnected.
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: The Search for Dererick Reaches the Cabin Nolan Feared, Where One Hidden Room Reveals Who Was Meant to Become His Next Source of Control
The Cup Anna Refused to Drink Became the First Crack in a Marriage Built Around Secrets She Was Never Meant to See
Part 7 of 22
