Chapter 12 - THE INVESTIGATOR WHO FOUND NOTHING
The investigator’s name was Peter Sloane. Victoria remembered him as a sympathetic former federal agent who promised to pursue every lawful lead while respecting adoption confidentiality. He had given her regular reports for almost a year.
No verified location.
No reliable identity.
No evidence the child remained in New York.
One report suggested the adoption occurred overseas, a claim Rebecca now knew was false.
When confronted through counsel, Peter admitted Crosslight retained his consulting company but insisted the work concerned security and publicity risks associated with Victoria’s search. He denied fabricating reports.
Then David found overlapping invoices.
Peter billed Victoria for investigating Lily’s whereabouts on the same dates he billed Crosslight for “containment of family-origin inquiry.”
The words made Victoria feel physically cold.
She had paid a man to find her daughter.
Julian paid him to keep her from succeeding.
The apparent defeat came when Peter claimed most original field notes had been destroyed under his company’s retention policy. Bright Harbor challenged release of its records on privacy grounds. Crosslight threatened to sue Thomas Bell over allegedly stolen confidential material. Julian publicly maintained that the adoption was a painful but lawful decision made during Victoria’s medical crisis.
The evidence was substantial.
The system holding it remained difficult to penetrate.
Worse, the legal dispute was beginning to affect Lily directly. A reporter followed her school bus. Another approached Mara outside a grocery store. Lily stopped wearing the bracelet because classmates began asking whether it proved she was secretly famous.
Victoria saw the photograph of Lily covering her wrist and realized something.
The object that brought them together had become a public demand placed on a child.
She asked Rebecca to pause all optional interviews and withdrew from the remaining Bright Harbor gala appearances. The organization removed her from promotional materials. Industry commentators described the decision as proof she was becoming difficult to manage.
For the first time in years, Victoria did not care.
She went to meet Lily at a child therapist’s office, with Mara present and no cameras. Lily sat beside a shelf of board games, holding the bracelet in both hands.
“I don’t want to wear it every day,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” Victoria answered.
“Does that make you sad?”
“A little.”
Lily looked worried.
Victoria corrected herself. “That’s my feeling to handle. You can put it away whenever you want.”
The child considered that carefully.
Then she handed Victoria a drawing of three people beneath a large yellow sun. Mara stood on one side, Lily in the middle and Victoria on the other.
There was no hospital bracelet in the picture.
Victoria smiled.
The overlooked clue arrived later that evening when she studied an old photograph Nadia had preserved. It showed the original infant bracelet before Bright Harbor’s transfer. Beneath Victoria’s handwritten message was a small hospital barcode.
The barcode linked to an electronic neonatal file number.
Rebecca compared it with the agency’s official records.
The file numbers differed by one digit.
At first she thought it was a clerical error.
Then David found that the second number belonged to an infant transferred from the same hospital on the same day.
A different baby.
Bright Harbor had connected Lily’s adoption paperwork to another infant’s hospital identifier.
That explained why Victoria’s early requests for Lily’s original medical records produced incomplete or contradictory answers.
The paper trail was not merely sealed.
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It had been deliberately crossed.
And the other infant’s file might preserve the original movement log that Bright Harbor failed to destroy.
