Chapter 5 - The Chase Begins
While death closed its fingers around Leah’s throat in the dark farmhouse, Grant Mercer was tearing through the winding back roads of Stamford at eighty miles an hour, his black SUV kicking up clouds of amber dust along the tree-lined shoulders.
His phone was mounted to the dash, displaying the live GPS tracking data of Leah’s cell phone.
Or rather, the data from where her cell phone had been abandoned.
At 9:00 a.m., following a frantic call to local police that yielded no immediate results due to the mandatory twenty-four-hour missing persons waiting period for adults, Grant had taken matters into his own hands. He had contacted his head of private security—a former military intelligence specialist named Vance—and accessed the cell tower triangulation logs for Leah’s personal device.
The phone hadn't been lost in a supermarket parking garage as Sloane claimed.
It had been pinged for the last time at 2:15 a.m. near an abandoned logging road ten miles north of the estate—an area known locally as the Blackwood timber tract, filled with crumbling nineteenth-century mills and rotting farmsteads.
Grant’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel. His heart hammered a violent, frantic rhythm against his ribs. Every memory of the last ten years flashed through his mind with agonizing clarity—Leah setting his coffee down without a word when he was drowning in stress; Leah standing by him in the silent kitchen after his father’s funeral; Leah laughing at his dry jokes when the rest of the world treated him like a corporate machine.
“You’re not a thief,” he muttered aloud to the empty cab of the truck, his voice thick with a mixture of rage and terror. “I know you’re not a thief.”
His phone buzzed violently on the dash.
It was Vance, his security director. Grant hit the speaker button with a swift swipe of his thumb.
“Talk to me, Vance,” Grant commanded, his voice sharp as steel.
“Mr. Mercer, I’m pulling up the satellite imagery of the Blackwood sector now,” Vance reported, the sound of typing clicking in the background. “There’s an old homestead registered under a shell corporation linked to... wait. Hold on.”
“What is it?” Grant demanded, his tires screeching as he took a sharp turn onto a narrow gravel track that cut deep into the dense pine forest.
“The shell corporation that owns the property,” Vance said, his voice dropping in disbelief. “It’s a subsidiary of Whitmore Holdings. The title was transferred to Sloane’s personal trust six months ago.”
Grant’s foot slammed down harder on the gas pedal. The engine roared, the heavy SUV fishtailing slightly on the loose gravel before straightening out.
Sloane.
Every terrifying piece of the puzzle slammed into place with the force of a physical blow. The missing ring. The convenient witness statement. The rehearsed sorrow. The rush to condemn a woman who had spent ten years keeping his life together.
“Where is the exact coordinate, Vance?” Grant asked, his voice dropping into a lethal, terrifying register that made even his hardened security chief pause.
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“Three miles ahead, at the end of the old logging trail,” Vance replied. “Mr. Mercer... what are you planning to do?”
Grant hung up without answering. He killed the call, cut the headlights to avoid being seen through the distant trees, and drove blindly through the gray morning shadows, guided only by the screaming instincts of a man whose world was about to be burned to the ground.
