Page 50 of Twisted Empire

Finally, he sagged back against the sofa cushions. “They’re all gone—all of the original records that Dr. Evancho photocopied and drew data from.”

I swallowed thickly. “Does it matter? We still have the photocopies.”

“Yeah, but without the proof that those are real hospital records themselves, it could look like we madethoseup to try to prove our case. Fuck!”

Slade looked sick. “Someone deleted them from the system?”

“They must have,” Logan muttered. “And no prizes for guessing who that someone must have been.”

“But—Doom’s Seed left them there for so long,” I protested. “The whole time we’ve been investigating. We didn’t go anywhere near the hospitals the records came from ourselves—it was all through Beckett’s connections. Why would Doom’s Seed have suddenly—” My pulse stuttered. “Dr. Evancho. If someone was keeping an eye on him and realized we’d gotten to him…”

Logan was already tapping at the keyboard again. He brought up a list of search results and clicked on the top one. I’d already braced myself before my eyes caught on the text.

It was an obituary, posted just a couple of hours ago.Dr. Steve Evancho, survived by his son, Jason Evancho, and his wife, Mary Evancho.

Logan scowled as his gaze darted over the screen. “It claims he died of a heart attack in the middle of the night.”

Slade made a scoffing sound. “Unlikely.”

“Doom’s Seed arranged his death like he did my dad’s,” I said with a shiver. Only a much faster health crisis. I had no doubt at all that the heart attack hadn’t been provoked by natural causes.

Yet another death in the long list that should have been on Doom’s Seed’s conscience, not that I believed he cared the slightest bit.

“He must have found out the doctor had been compromised somehow,” Beckett said in a rough voice. “Now he’s launching an even broader cover-up than before.”

A sense of hopelessness settled over me that I saw reflected on all of the guys’ faces. Logan pushed away his laptop and raked his hand back through his hair.

“Those source records were the cornerstone of our evidence,” Dexter said quietly. “Without the originals to prove they’re real, they’re worthless.”

I groped for any possible solution. “The real originals were paper records—the ones Dr. Evancho photocopied. Could those still be at the hospitals?”

“I doubt it,” Logan said. “They were almost definitely destroyed after being digitized—that’s part of the point of digitization, to free up physical storage space. And if they weren’t, what are the chances Doom’s Seeddidn’tmake sure those vanished too?”

He was right, of course. Slade looked at the floor and then around at the rest of us. “So what do we do now?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? We could still try to approach the police, but it felt almost pointless when the veracity of our most key evidence would immediately be called into question.

Beckett’s phone rang. He ignored it for a moment, lost in a pensive daze, before he pulled it from his pocket. My stance stiffened even more as he brought it to his ear. We couldn’t take any more bad news.

“Beckett here,” he said, and then paused. Whatever the person on the other end said, it brought a shadow across Beckett’s face, his brow knitting. He sucked in a breath. “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

He hung up and turned to us. “I have to go. Hopefully it won’t take long.”

My eyebrows leapt up. “Go? Right now?”

“It’s—it could be important. I can’t just ignore it. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

With those words hanging in the air, he hurried out of the room.

CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE

Beckett

Irushed across the house as fast as my feet could carry me without looking outright panicked in front of the guards stationed nearby. The door to my father’s home office was closed, but he knew I was coming, so I pushed right inside without knocking.

He was the one who’d summoned me, after all.

I stopped just over the threshold with the door thumping shut behind me. Dad looked up at me from his office chair, his hands folded on top of the desk in front of him.

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