Page 59 of I’ll Be Watching You

“Okay, I’m struggling with this whole thing,” Tess admitted, exhaling hard. “It’s messing with my head.”

Luisa sometimes struggled as well. She was surprised she’d shared so much with Margo last night. It felt good to say it out loud, but she didn’t know if anything would change. If anything could change. She would always be the much younger sister of a close-knit clan. They couldn’t change who they were any more than she could change how she felt. She had to accept it.

Instead of going into all that with Tess, who would understand less than Margo and also take it personally, Luisa said, “I saw Nate out there. You banished him from the house?”

“No,” Tess muttered, “he banished himself. Took over the pool house, turned it into a full-on surveillance center. It’s like some kind of war room back there with security feeds, cameras, whatever else he needs. He can see the whole street, every inch of the yard. It’s 24/7 overwatch. I don’t think he sleeps.”

That explained how he knew she’d arrived. He’d watched her drive up, yet still decided to sneak up on her.

Her irritation flared again.

“I’ll check it out before I go,” Luisa said, though the last thing she wanted was more time with Nate. He always made her feel . . . off-balance.

And she knew why.

When she was a senior in high school, Nate had pulled her out of the worst night of her life. She’d gone out with the wrong people to Lake Pleasant. She didn’t completely understand why. Maybe a streak of rebellion. Definitely seeking adrenaline. It nearly killed her. She hadn’t called her parents. They thought she was perfect, the golden child with straight A’s, varsity letters, and hundreds of volunteer hours.

They didn’t know the truth. That night, she’d nearly drowned in it—in the truth, in her lies, in the lake itself.

Nate had been home on leave after his dad’s heart attack, and by some miracle he found her after she called him in hysterics. He hauled her out of a bad situation, chewed her out like no one else ever had, then kept her secret. For over seven years, he had never said a word.

Never told her parents. Never told Jack. Never threw it back in her face.

She’d always been grateful. Furious too because he knew her at her worst. And because in some twisted way, that night had saved her. It made her realize she didn’t want the path her parents had laid out for her. The neat, polished life. And she didn’t want to throw it all away by being an adrenaline junkie constantly chasing highs.

She wanted to earn her strength. Prove herself.

That night was the reason she enlisted.

And to this day, no one—not her parents, not her brothers or sisters, not even her high school boyfriend—knew that.

No one knew, except Nate.

Tess led her to the library, which had also become a war room in its own right, with a computer humming on the desk, a laptop full of numbers on the coffee table, and stacks of paper everywhere. A whiteboard had been rolled in and blocked one of the bookshelves. Tess had written a timeline of the Neurovantix drug trials and a list of everyone who might have been involved.

“Speaking of not sleeping,” Luisa said. “You did all this?”

“Gabriel helped last night before he had to go to bed. He left early for a scheduled surgery.”

“Did you sleep?”

She bit her lip and stared at the leather couch where there was an afghan blanket and pillow. “For a few hours when the numbers started blurring together.”

“Show me what you have so far,” Luisa said. She pulled out her laptop and put it on the coffee table next to Tess’s.

Tess took her to the whiteboard and gestured to the timeline. “You know most of this already, but I like to see it in front of me when I’m working. When the Phase 1 trial started, when it finished, when Dr. Klein noticed the missing data, his murder, and when Dad confessed. We don’t have much more information yet, other than the names of two patients who may have been affected.”

The clinical trial lasted, start to finish, six months; Klein was killed two weeks after the official end of the trial, a week after he noticed the missing data. He had spoken to Nadine Pierce two days after the discovery.

“We can assume he saw the clinical trial results posted on the public website, so I printed them out—” Tess waved to one of the stacks on the desk “—but they look legit. No one can tell that something is missing simply by reading the report. They would have to have known specific details during the trial.”

Luisa noted that Tess had added Jim Novak to the board as Patient One and Christina Aberdeen as Patient Two. Novak was listed as MIA because they didn’t know where he was, and next to Aberdeen was the date she died. A printout from the computer was posted next to her name. On closer inspection, Luisa noted it was her obituary. The photo they included was her official military headshot.

“According to your interview with Klein’s assistant,” Tess said, “there were ten people excluded from the final results, but we only know about Novak and Aberdeen. I haven’t been able to locate Novak.”

“Margo is going to Honor House to see if they have a current address,” Luisa said. “He could have left Phoenix. The name is common, so I don’t have anything on his family yet, but I have my computer running a program based on his age, service, and birthplace and I might be able to narrow it down.”

Tess started writing on the board. “If we take what Dr. Pierce said at face value, that Dr. Klein was going to blow the whistle on the trial, whoever killed him must have figured that out in this three-day window.” She circled the days.