Police reached the lake house before sunrise.
Dererick was gone.
Again.
But this time his escape had not been clean.
Blood marked the kitchen floor.
A chair lay overturned.
Broken glass glittered beside the fireplace.
One interior door had been forced open.
The scene looked less like another abandoned hideout and more like the aftermath of a confrontation.
Kenneth Vale was not there either.
His primary residence had been under surveillance.
Investigators discovered he had slipped away hours earlier using a service vehicle registered to his estate staff.
Harper swore quietly when she received the report.
Both men were now missing.
Anna understood what that meant.
The teacher and the student were no longer operating on parallel tracks.
They had met.
And something had gone wrong.
The blood in the lake house belonged mostly to Dererick. A second trace was found on the broken glass.
Testing identified Kenneth Vale.
Neither quantity suggested a fatal injury.
The metal originals case was absent.
Investigators reconstructed the likely sequence from the room.
Dererick entered voluntarily.
No forced exterior access.
He and Vale met in the kitchen.
At some point violence erupted.
Someone struck the glass cabinet.
Dererick bled near the counter.
Vale bled near the fireplace.
A vehicle left the property afterward.
The garage was empty.
Vale’s late wife had owned an SUV that remained registered but rarely used.
It was gone.
“Together?” Anna asked.
Harper shook her head.
“Or one took the vehicle.”
“Which one?”
“We don’t know.”
A search of the house produced more than blood.
The basement contained an old office.
Unlike Vale’s polished professional spaces, this room held material he had never intended colleagues to see.
Handwritten notes.
Participant photographs.
Cassette recordings.
Medication logs.
Several notebooks dated before Dererick’s involvement.
Susan Bell identified Vale’s handwriting.
The system’s ancestry lay on those shelves.
Anna did not need to read every page.
One photograph was enough.
A young woman sat in a clinical room with her eyes closed.
A camera timestamp showed the image had been taken fourteen years earlier.
On the back Vale had written:
Subject accepted corrected narrative after 3 prompts.
Anna stared at the sentence.
“Corrected narrative?”
Clare understood before anyone explained.
Vale had been testing whether a confused person would accept someone else’s version of what had happened.
Memory dependence.
Authority replacing recollection.
Dererick later did the same thing at breakfast.
You slept well.
You were exhausted.
The tea helps.
He had taken Vale’s clinical method home.
The realization made Anna feel contaminated by a history she had never known existed.
Investigators catalogued hundreds of pages.
One notebook documented Paul Mercer.
Not as a participant.
As a problem.
Mercer had noticed medication discrepancies.
Vale recorded meetings with him.
Arguments.
Threats to report.
Then one entry:
P.M. resolved.
No explanation.
The date was two days before Paul’s death.
Harper immediately treated the notebook as major evidence.
Another volume documented Rachel.
Vale knew she copied files.
He suspected she still possessed them.
Years later, he learned she was living alone after a difficult breakup.
The next entry referenced D.
Dererick.
Anna felt cold.
Vale had sent Dererick toward Rachel.
Not for research.
To recover what she had taken.
Dererick approached her using the method he later perfected with others.
Helpfulness.
Attention.
Trust.
He gained access to her home.
Then began using substances.
The night Rachel died was supposed to reveal where she kept Vale’s copied files.
Nolan had never known the true objective.
Dererick had told him they were testing a new mixture.
Rachel died while two men were trying to extract information from a woman whose memory and resistance they had deliberately impaired.
Anna closed her eyes.
The old accident now had motive.
The basement also contained material about Emily.
Vale knew she witnessed the aftermath.
Dererick had not acted alone when he terrorized her afterward.
Some of the surveillance photographs came from Vale’s private investigators.
Emily had been right to keep moving.
Nolan had underestimated the threat.
The past was becoming coherent.
But the present remained dangerous.
A search dog found Dererick’s blood leading from the kitchen to the garage.
Vale’s blood ended near the fireplace.
That suggested Dererick reached the vehicle.
He may have taken the SUV.
Highway cameras were alerted.
The vehicle appeared ninety minutes later traveling west.
One person visible.
Driver male.
Image unclear.
Then the SUV turned onto a road with sparse camera coverage.
Police aircraft searched.
No immediate sighting.
Inside the lake house, technicians found a compact recorder beneath the kitchen table.
It was recent.
Dererick’s.
The device contained the confrontation.
Harper listened before allowing Anna to hear selected sections.
Vale’s voice came first.
“You’ve made this impossible.”
Dererick answered, “You made it possible.”
Vale demanded the case.
Dererick refused.
They argued about Rachel.
Vale accused Dererick of killing her through recklessness.
Dererick accused Vale of selecting her in the first place.
Then Vale said something that made Anna’s skin prickle.
“You were supposed to retrieve the copies, not build a life around the method.”
There it was.
A direct acknowledgment.
Vale knew what Dererick had been doing.
Dererick laughed.
“You liked the results until they had my name on them.”
The recording captured movement.
A chair scraping.
Then Vale:
“You think Anna makes you different?”
Anna froze.
Dererick’s response came after several seconds.
“No.”
“Then why are you still talking about her?”
A crash followed.
The argument turned physical.
The recorder fell or was knocked sideways.
Voices became difficult to hear.
One phrase remained clear.
Dererick shouted, “She gets the truth if I don’t walk out.”
Then glass shattered.
The recording ended four minutes later.
Anna listened twice.
“He left it deliberately.”
Harper agreed.
The recorder was positioned where it would survive the confrontation.
Dererick had created insurance before meeting Vale.
Again.
Always leverage.
But this recording served another purpose.
“He wants me to hear Vale admit it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Clare answered.
“Because he still wants to control the story.”
Dererick had lost his house, archive, associates, and ordinary identity.
What remained was narrative.
He wanted Anna to see him as something other than Vale.
A corrupted student.
A man who had become attached.
Perhaps someone who could still expose a greater villain.
Anna rejected the invitation.
“Vale being worse doesn’t make Dererick better.”
Harper nodded.
That distinction would matter.
Especially if Dererick eventually tried to negotiate.
The missing originals case gave him exactly that possibility.
By noon, the SUV was found.
Abandoned near a railway crossing.
Blood on the driver’s seat matched Dererick.
Vale’s blood was absent.
Dererick had taken the vehicle.
Vale remained unaccounted for separately.
Two fugitives.
One case.
Possibly moving toward different objectives.
Harper believed Dererick’s injury would eventually force him to seek help.
Clare was less certain.
“He knows enough medicine to manage some wounds.”
“Nolan said Vale taught him monitoring, not surgery.”
“He also spent years around medical supplies.”
Anna listened.
Then remembered something.
The hidden room at the cabin contained supplies.
If Dererick needed treatment without a hospital, he might return to a stocked location.
But the cabin was under police control.
The warehouse too.
Where else had supplies been delivered?
Investigators revisited shipping records.
One address had been dismissed because it belonged to a legitimate rural veterinary clinic.
The shipments were addressed to a doctor there.
Harper contacted the clinic.
The veterinarian denied ordering them.
His account had been compromised.
Packages had been diverted to an exterior delivery locker.
Security records showed someone collecting them.
Dererick.
The locker sat near a farm road west of the abandoned SUV.
Police searched the surrounding area.
An old equipment shed stood half a mile away on leased agricultural land.
Inside they found bloody gauze.
A discarded shirt.
Medical adhesive.
Dererick had treated himself there.
He had also burned papers.
One fragment survived.
A handwritten list of names.
Kenneth.
Nolan.
Marcus.
Vanessa.
Clare.
Anna.
Some were crossed out.
Anna’s was not.
Neither was Vale’s.
Harper studied the list.
“Could be priorities.”
“Or people he intends to contact.”
Clare stared at her own crossed-out name.
“Why am I crossed out?”
No one knew.
Anna thought of the hotel plan.
Perhaps Clare had ceased being useful once Marcus was arrested.
Or perhaps Dererick had decided something else.
The shed contained a prepaid phone wrapper.
Investigators traced the activation.
The phone had made one call.
To a number registered to the journalist Rachel Boone had drafted an email to eight years earlier.
The journalist, Daniel Kerr, was now an investigative editor.
He remembered Rachel’s name.
She never sent the email, but she had called him once.
She sounded frightened.
They planned to meet.
Rachel canceled.
Days later she died.
Kerr had always wondered about it.
Dererick had called him that morning.
“What did he say?” Harper asked.
Kerr answered reluctantly.
“He offered me evidence.”
“Of what?”
“Medical research abuse, blackmail, homicide.”
“Whose?”
“Kenneth Vale’s.”
“What did he want?”
“A meeting.”
“Where?”
“He hasn’t said.”
Anna understood the strategy.
If Dererick could not safely bargain with Vale, he could bargain with publicity.
The originals case could become a weapon through a journalist.
“He wants Vale exposed.”
Harper nodded.
“And he wants something in return.”
Kerr confirmed it.
Dererick demanded that any meeting be recorded and that copies of the evidence be released if he was arrested or killed.
He wanted protection through dissemination.
Classic leverage, transformed for survival.
Harper instructed Kerr not to arrange anything independently.
Kerr agreed.
Then his phone rang.
Dererick.
Police began tracing immediately.
Kerr answered on speaker.
“You have five minutes,” Dererick said.
His voice sounded weaker than before.
“Where are you?”
“Not relevant.”
“You said you had evidence.”
“I do.”
“Then send it.”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“A public record.”
“Of what?”
“Everything Vale did.”
Kerr glanced toward Harper.
“And what you did?”
Silence.
Then Dererick laughed softly.
“That’s the problem with Anna. She taught everyone to ask the second question.”
Anna heard the recording live from another room.
For one impossible moment, the comment sounded like the husband she had known making an affectionate joke.
That familiarity was more disturbing than rage.
Kerr continued.
“If your evidence is real, you don’t need a private meeting.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because some of it isn’t digital.”
The case.
“Where?”
Dererick gave a location.
An abandoned railway depot west of the city.
Two hours.
He demanded Kerr come alone.
Nobody intended to honor that condition.
Harper mobilized teams.
Anna was moved again as a precaution.
The depot was surrounded discreetly well before the meeting.
Kerr entered carrying only approved equipment.
Officers waited.
Two hours passed.
Dererick did not appear.
Then Kerr found an envelope beneath a bench.
Inside was a photograph.
The metal originals case sat open.
Visible within it were memory cards, envelopes, sample containers, and documents.
Beside the case lay that day’s newspaper.
Proof of possession.
On the back of the photograph Dererick had written:
Ask Vale where he buried Paul.
Anna stared at the message.
Paul Mercer’s death had been ruled suicide.
Dererick was saying there was a body somewhere else.
Which meant the official account of Paul’s death might conceal something even larger.
Click here to continue reading: PART 16: The Search for Paul Mercer’s Hidden Truth Draws Vale Out of Hiding, While Dererick Offers Anna the One Bargain She Refuses to Make
The Cup Anna Refused to Drink Became the First Crack in a Marriage Built Around Secrets She Was Never Meant to See
Part 15 of 22
