Chapter 9: The Morning They Called Him In
The meeting with the DA's office lasted four hours.
The investigator assigned to the case was a woman named Sandra Okafor.
She was methodical and unhurried and she asked every question twice from slightly different angles, the way people do when they are building something that has to hold weight.
Nora went first.
I sat beside her.
She described how she had found the forum, how she had found Carol, how she had traced the clinic records to Dr.
Ellison's network, how she had eventually found my name.
She described Marcus Hale — the relationship, the pregnancy, his response, the legal letter he had sent to silence the forum members.
She spoke for nearly ninety minutes without breaking.
When she finished, Sandra Okafor set down her pen.
"You've been carrying this for three years," she said.
"Yes," Nora said.
"Thank you for not stopping."
Nora pressed her lips together and nodded once.
Then it was my turn.
I described the consent form.
The forged signature.
The 2002 procedure at Ellison's clinic — a routine biopsy, I had been told, nothing significant, in and out in forty minutes.
I described the attorney arriving at the hospital at five in the morning.
I described every word he had said.
Sandra Okafor wrote all of it down.
"The offer of financial support," she said.
"Did he name a figure?"
"He didn't get that far."
"Did he identify himself as acting on Mr.
Hale's behalf?"
"He said his client.
And he gave me his card."
I slid the card across the table.
She looked at it.
"Daniel Reeves." She wrote the name down.
"We know him."
After the meeting, Carol's attorney met us in the hallway.
Her name was Patricia Sohn and she had the focused energy of someone who had been waiting a long time for a case to be ready.
"They're moving," she said.
"Sandra called me while you were still in there.
They executed a warrant on Hale's financial records this morning.
His attorney is already filing motions, but the warrant is solid."
"When do they bring him in?" I asked.
"That's not something I can predict.
But the preservation order is active, the warrant is executed, and they have the server records, the emails, and now your testimony." She looked at me and then at Nora.
"He cannot make this go away."
We drove home in near silence.
Nora had Daisy in the back seat.
I watched the road.
"Are you all right?" I asked her.
"I think so." A pause.
"I kept waiting for them not to believe me."
"They believed you."
"I know.
That's — I've never had that before.
With anything involving him." She was quiet for a moment.
"He told me once that no one would ever take my word over his.
That I was nobody."
I looked at her in the mirror.
"You walked into a hospital room at three in the morning," I said, "with a three-day-old baby and a forged consent form and a name you'd been searching for for three years.
That is not nobody."
She didn't answer.
But in the mirror, I saw her look down at Daisy and almost smile.
Two days later, Patricia Sohn called.
"Marcus Hale was brought in for questioning this morning," she said.
"He arrived with two attorneys.
He answered no questions.
But they served him formally.
He knows the full scope of what they have."
"And?"
"His lead attorney contacted me this afternoon.
He's no longer proposing a civil settlement." A pause.
"He's asking whether the women involved would consider a cooperation agreement in exchange for Hale providing testimony against Ellison."
I sat with that for a moment.
"Ellison has been gone for twenty years," I said.
"She hasn't been gone.
She's been living in Arizona under her married name.
The DA's office located her last week."
I pressed my hand against the kitchen counter.
"He wants to give up Ellison to reduce his own exposure," I said.
"Yes."
"What do you recommend?"
"I recommend we let the DA's office decide what they need from him.
Our job is to make sure the women are protected regardless of what deal he makes.
The charges against him don't disappear because he cooperates.
They may be reduced.
But they don't disappear."
"All right," I said.
"There's one more thing." Her voice shifted slightly.
"The server records show forty-one cases.
Not nine.
Forty-one women whose biological material was used without consent over a six-year period."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Forty-one," I said.
"Yes."
I sat down.
May you like
"Then we find them," I said.
"All of them."
