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“Those notes are the ones we couldn’t connect to anything suspicious, but we kept them just in case.” Logan pushed them aside and opened a second folder. “These tell a clearer story. It was one of these that caught my eye and made me wonder what was up—that made me keep reading.”
The assortment of papers looked very similar to the first pile. I knit my brow. “What’s so different about these?”
Logan started pawing through the notes, pulling out one and then another and shoving them in front of me with a tap of his forefinger. “They show he was looking into something when he died that wasn’t part of any of his official research. I looked through his published work and what the hospital has on file, and none of it connects. There was something called “the Baldwin file” that he seemed to think was important—we’re still not sure what that is—and there are a lot of references to needing to be careful and making sure his research isn’t noticed. And the ones that have dates in them are all from the last six months before he died. He was obviously onto something he thought was important—and dangerous.”
I wasn’t sure it was all that obvious. I had trouble wrapping my head around any of this. “I don’t think that proves he was murdered.”
“There’s more. In both sets of notes, he mentions journals he kept at the hospital—more detailed records. Those disappeared after he died. Your mom doesn’t have them, and the hospital doesn’t have them either. I think they were stolen from his work office shortly after his death before anyone else could dig through them.”
“Or maybe the hospital just threw them out.”
Logan shook his head. “Everything else from his office, including reference books and burned CDs, was in boxes in your basement that the hospital handed over to your mom. Why would they toss out his journals?”
My stomach started to knot. “That is a little weird. But it could have been a mistake. Those things happen.”
“Yeah? And how often do medical researchers who just happen to have been investigating something big that they feel they need to keep secret end up getting deathly ill with a sickness no one can identify? The doctors who tried to save him knew him as a colleague, even a friend. They’d have pulled out all the stops to help him, and they still couldn’t pinpoint it?”
“What are you saying?”
He rapped his finger against the table. “It could have been poison. Some toxin designed to look like an illness.”
My mind snapped back to my memories of Dad’s death. “No. The doctors told us they’d checked for toxins and found nothing.”
“There are poisons that are subtle and can’t be picked up on the usual tests. It’s impossible to cover everything in one go. And some dissipate from the body too quickly to be caught unless you know to look for it right away. Don’t you think it’s odd that there wasn’t more of an investigation after he died when they didn’t even know why he did? It’s almost like it was hushed up, like someone who had the power to do so made sure no one dwelled on the incident for too long.”
I shivered. “Now you sound crazy.”
Logan held my gaze. “Do I? It all adds up. The mysterious death out of the blue. The lack of inquiry afterward. The missing journals. The notes that suggest he was looking into something major that he felt he had to be careful about. And now on top of that, there’s that box of his. Your car randomly gets stolen, and the gang that took it swipes that one object out of it? Someone must have caught on that it was his and might contain something incriminating.”
“Like that address,” I murmured, my mouth going dry.
“Exactly! Why would he have hidden away the address to some warehouse off in the middle of nowhere? It must have connected to his investigation. And look at what kind of people were hanging around there for security. The one guy tried to kill me—the other attacked you. Those weren’t typical security guards.”
No, they hadn’t been. And when my stepbrother laid it all out like that with so much vigor in his voice, it was hard to deny his claims.
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. All of the evidence was circumstantial, nothing definite. It didn’treallyprove anything. Which shouldn’t surprise me, because if Logan had discovered a smoking gun, surely he’d have turned it over to the police.
The Vigil had been conducting their own investigation—since right before Logan had left for college?—because they knew they didn’t have enough to convince professional detectives to take on the case. But… that didn’t mean Logan was wrong, either.
The idea that Dad could have been murdered—that his death could have had nothing to do with my stormy night plea—jarred in my head. I’d believed in the story I’d known for so long, I wasn’t sure how to let go of it.
How much should I buy into this conspiracy theory? What if Logan was just grasping at straws? He obviously liked having a mystery to pursue. He could have convinced himself that the evidence meant more than it did just to give himself an excuse to go on this epic quest.
One totally separate factor of this situation was still gnawing at me. “You believed in this theory all this time, and you never mentioned it to meonce. Obviously you didn’t tell my mom either, or I’d know about it from her.”
“I told you why I stayed quiet,” Logan said roughly. “I wanted to keep you safe. If someone murdered your dad for poking around in whatever business he’d started to uncover, there’s no reason they wouldn’t decide to kill anyone else who poked around too. Including you. Maybe especially you, since they have no idea what else of his you might have access to that they don’t know about. Why do you think I’ve been trying so hard to get you to stay away from us?”
Was that it? All the horrible things he’d said to me, all the times he’d acted like I meant nothing to him—it was all part of some scheme to shield me from the Vigil’s other investigations? The thought set my stomach churning.
Logan had taken up the quest and turned himself into my champion all over again, at least in his mind. Defending me from enemies much more shadowy than the junior-high bullies he’d once taken down a peg on my behalf. But I hadn’t asked him to act as my guardian.
“Maybe Ishouldbe in danger,” I said. “He was my dad. It’s my responsibility to figure out what happened to him. You didn’t even know him. Why should you and Slade and Dexter put your lives on the line digging into this?”
Logan’s face hardened. “You’re not prepared for that kind of danger. We are. We already were when I stumbled on those notes and started piecing things together.”
“How could you be prepared to be hunted down by a murderer?”
He shook his head. “You have no idea what we’ve faced since we got started with the Vigil. It didn’t really begin here at the university, you know. We were taking on cases all the way back in high school, and a lot of them weren’t just finding missing objects.”
