Nolan listened to the recovered audio with his attorney beside him.
When the woman’s voice appeared, he shut his eyes.
Morales paused the recording.
“Who is she?”
Nolan did not answer.
The silence was different from his earlier hesitation. Anna had learned to recognize it even through a screen. Before, Nolan delayed because he feared admitting his own conduct.
Now he looked afraid for someone else.
Morales played the fragment again.
A woman said, “She needs a hospital.”
Four words.
Then movement.
Dererick’s voice ordered someone to leave.
The woman answered, “No.”
After that, the recording became chaotic.
Anna listened from the secured room.
The voice sounded young.
Not familiar.
Yet Dererick had preserved records of nearly everyone connected to his operation.
Why had this woman vanished from them?
Morales asked again.
Nolan finally spoke.
“Her name was Emily.”
“Emily what?”
Nolan looked directly toward the camera.
“Price.”
Anna turned toward Clare.
Price.
Nolan’s surname.
“Your sister?” Morales asked.
“Yes.”
Nolan had never mentioned a sister.
Public records confirmed Emily Price existed. She was three years younger than Nolan and had lived in the same city during the period surrounding Rachel Boone’s death.
Then her trail became thin.
She changed her surname after marriage.
Moved twice.
Maintained almost no public social presence.
According to Nolan, that was deliberate.
Emily had not participated in Dererick’s operation.
She discovered it.
On the night Rachel died, Emily had gone looking for Nolan because their mother had been taken to an emergency clinic and nobody could reach him. She knew the address where he sometimes met Dererick.
She arrived at the worst possible moment.
Rachel was already unconscious.
Emily saw enough to understand something terrible was happening.
“She wanted to call police,” Nolan said.
“Why didn’t she?”
“Because I stopped her.”
Anna felt anger rise again.
Nolan had spent years making fear everyone else’s burden.
He explained that he told Emily Rachel had taken something voluntarily. He claimed they had panicked. He begged his sister to wait.
Then Rachel stopped breathing.
Emily demanded an ambulance.
Dererick finally called emergency services—but only after rearranging the scene.
“What did Emily know about the drug?” Morales asked.
“Nothing.”
“About earlier victims?”
“Nothing.”
“About the recordings?”
“She saw the camera.”
That was enough.
After Rachel’s death, Emily threatened to report both men.
Dererick responded differently than Nolan expected.
He did not threaten Emily directly.
He showed her information about Nolan.
Records.
Photographs.
Evidence of Nolan’s involvement with earlier victims.
“He told her if she talked, Nolan would go down for everything.”
Nolan stared at his hands.
“And you let her believe that?”
“Yes.”
Emily kept silent to protect her brother.
The same architecture again.
Trust.
Information.
Fear.
Control.
Dererick had turned Nolan himself into leverage.
Anna understood why Emily disappeared from the records.
“She was dangerous to him.”
“Yes,” Nolan said.
“Then why didn’t he target her?”
“He did.”
The answer chilled the room.
Not with drugs.
Not initially.
Dererick watched Emily.
Sent photographs.
Left evidence that he knew where she worked.
Called from silent numbers.
Once she found a photograph of Nolan asleep inside his apartment taped to her windshield.
Emily moved.
Dererick found her.
She moved again.
Eventually Nolan convinced Dererick that Emily had stopped caring and would never speak.
It was a lie.
Nolan secretly helped his sister leave the state.
For years they communicated only through an intermediary.
“Is she alive?” Morales asked.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I’m not telling you on camera.”
Morales arranged a protected method for Nolan’s attorney to provide contact information.
Emily agreed to speak after learning Dererick was missing and the Rachel case had reopened.
Her interview altered the history again.
Emily remembered Rachel still breathing when she arrived.
She remembered a syringe on the floor.
She remembered Nolan kneeling beside Rachel.
Most importantly, she remembered Dererick holding the camera.
Not helping.
Filming.
When Emily shouted at him to stop, Dererick calmly said the recording was necessary.
Necessary for what, she never understood.
Until investigators told her about the archive.
Anna listened to Emily’s statement later.
Her voice was older now but unmistakably the same voice on the recording.
“She was the first person who saw him from outside,” Anna said.
Morales nodded.
Nolan had been inside the system.
Rachel was incapacitated.
Emily walked into the room without preparation and recognized immediately that what Dererick called experimentation was abuse.
That recognition threatened him.
It also explained another clue.
The storage unit.
Some of the personal belongings there did not belong to victims Dererick had targeted.
They belonged to witnesses.
People he considered dangerous because they had seen, questioned, or noticed too much.
Peterson’s planned file belonged to the same category.
So did Morales’s photograph.
Dererick did not only catalogue people he wanted to control.
He catalogued threats.
Anna’s containment folder had marked the moment she crossed from one category to the other.
The distinction made his records easier to interpret.
Investigators reorganized the archive accordingly.
Subjects.
Access points.
Witnesses.
Liabilities.
Associates.
For the first time, the structure of Dererick’s system became visible.
Marcus belonged among associates.
Nolan had moved from associate to liability.
Elise began as a subject and became a witness.
Anna had been subject, access point, and eventually liability.
Clare had been selected partly because of her relationship to Anna and partly because of her hospital access.
That second element troubled Clare.
“What access?”
Investigators searched her folder again.
The answer was not merely medical supplies.
Dererick had been interested in records.
Clare worked in a department with legitimate access to patient systems. She could not freely retrieve arbitrary information, but Dererick apparently believed proximity itself could be exploited.
“He wanted me to get information for him.”
“Eventually,” Morales said.
“About victims?”
“Possibly.”
The leverage system required knowledge.
Medical history could provide vulnerabilities, medications, emergency contacts, mental-health disclosures, and explanations for symptoms.
Clare looked physically ill.
“He wanted to turn me into Nolan.”
Anna understood.
Not simply harm Clare.
Compromise her.
Make her participate in one small act.
Then another.
Create evidence.
Create fear.
Create silence.
That was how Dererick built associates.
Nolan confirmed the method.
Dererick rarely began by asking someone to do something obviously criminal. He requested favors that seemed questionable but defensible.
Deliver a package.
Look up an address.
Lend equipment.
Hold a camera.
Change a date.
By the time the person understood the larger pattern, Dererick possessed evidence of their participation.
Marcus had apparently entered that way.
Investigators searched his financial records.
Years earlier, Marcus had been drowning in debt after a failed business. Dererick helped him.
Then asked favors.
The favors escalated.
Anna felt no sympathy for what Marcus had prepared to do to Clare.
But she finally understood the mechanism.
Dererick did not find monsters.
He manufactured accomplices from compromised people willing to make one more bad choice.
Nolan was the earliest example.
Marcus was the later one.
The question became whether there were others.
The archive suggested yes.
Three associate codes appeared repeatedly.
Nolan.
Marcus.
And someone identified only as V.
The third code dated back nearly five years.
V had access to addresses, account information, and background reports.
Unlike Nolan and Marcus, V never appeared in recorded procedures.
V supplied information.
Anna remembered the anonymous delivery company, shell addresses, aliases, and hotel bookings.
“V handled logistics.”
Morales agreed it was possible.
Finding V became urgent because Dererick was still moving through prepared locations.
Someone might be helping him.
Investigators traced several recent payments.
One led to a private investigative services firm operated by a woman named Vanessa Cole.
V.
Vanessa had performed background checks for Dererick under several business names.
She claimed she believed the work involved corporate due diligence.
Then Morales showed her the subject files.
Her explanation weakened.
Records showed she had searched Anna before the fundraiser.
Four months before Anna met Dererick.
Anna stared at Vanessa’s invoices.
Her life had been purchased in pieces.
Address history.
Employment.
Vehicle.
Public records.
Relatives.
Dererick had paid to know her before saying hello.
Vanessa denied knowing why.
Morales asked why she continued running searches after Dererick married Anna.
Vanessa had no convincing answer.
Then investigators found a payment made three days earlier.
Dererick had requested a location search on Nolan.
Vanessa knew Dererick was looking for him.
“Did you give him Nolan’s location?” Morales asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Vanessa hesitated.
“Because I knew something was wrong.”
“When did you know?”
No answer.
The familiar architecture appeared again.
Another person claiming late realization after years of convenient blindness.
Morales pressed.
Vanessa finally admitted Dererick had contacted her after disappearing.
He wanted three locations.
Nolan.
Anna.
And Emily Price.
She refused.
“Where is Dererick?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did he contact you?”
Vanessa provided the channel.
Forensics traced it.
The connection bounced through several services, but one session contained a location artifact.
A rural fuel station seventy miles east.
Security footage showed Dererick buying water, batteries, and food.
Alive.
Alone.
Driving a dark SUV investigators had not previously connected to him.
The vehicle belonged to the courier company.
Now they had a direction.
Highway cameras picked up the SUV twice.
Then it vanished near a network of county roads.
Nolan studied the area.
“There’s nothing there.”
Morales looked at him.
“You said that about the farmhouse.”
Nolan accepted the criticism.
Emily, however, recognized the region.
Years earlier, Dererick had mentioned hunting property owned by Rachel Boone’s family.
Investigators checked land records.
Rachel’s father had once owned forty acres there.
After his death, the property had been sold.
The current owner was a corporation.
Another shell.
Police moved toward the location.
Anna waited.
The property contained a derelict hunting lodge.
The SUV was parked behind it.
This time Dererick had not escaped hours earlier.
Officers found a warm cup of coffee.
A running laptop.
A jacket.
Fresh footprints led into the woods.
Search teams deployed.
Dogs followed the trail.
For nearly two miles it continued toward a creek.
Then stopped beside a road.
A second vehicle had collected him.
Someone was still helping Dererick.
Morales returned to Vanessa.
She denied involvement.
Marcus remained in custody.
Nolan had surrendered.
Emily was protected.
Who remained?
Investigators examined the hunting lodge.
On Dererick’s laptop they found an open map.
Three locations were marked.
Nolan’s temporary holding location.
Emily’s protected hotel.
And the building where Anna had been staying.
The first two were outdated.
Anna’s was not.
Someone had given Dererick her current location.
Click here to continue reading: PART 11: A Leak Inside Anna’s Protective Circle Sends Everyone Scrambling as Dererick Proves He Can Still Reach the People Guarding Her
The Cup Anna Refused to Drink Became the First Crack in a Marriage Built Around Secrets She Was Never Meant to See
Part 10 of 22
