Chapter Nine Part Two
Ana had been able to make an appointment with Dr. Williams for around ten that morning but they didn't see the doctor until well after eleven. At the beginning, the nurses had weighed Teddy, taken the usual measurements and then started new things like putting a sensor in his hand and getting him excited so he'd squeeze it. They also monitored his activity level when no one was looking at him. Christian found himself answering questions that he had never heard or even thought of, like what is your sleep schedule, do you feed him on a schedule or whenever he cries? With each questions Christian got slightly more worried and Ana was downright scared.
Ana was holding Teddy when the doctor entered the office. He smiled at both parents and shook little Teddy's hand. "Mr. and Mrs. Grey, I was so happy that you were able to make it in this morning. When you called and described Theodore's lack of development to my nurse, I knew that we needed to see him.
"I've gone over the test results and do have some concerns," he said as he sat down at his desk and opened the file in his hand. "Teddy is six months old but his motor and cognitive development is right around four months. My nurses tell me that he didn't react to the sensor test and he should be able to entertain himself an environment, especially in this environment, because it's new."
"I don't understand," Ana said, "When they put that sensor in his hand, he laughed and squeezed it, how did he fail?"
"I'm sorry, let me explain. When Diana put the sensor into Teddy's hand, Teddy did not react to it. He didn't look at it, he didn't reach for it on his other hand, and when she made the faces at him, he squeezed his hand as if it wasn't there at all. Children Teddy's age should be aware of their bodies especially their hands.
"Mrs. Grey, I don't want you to panic. Developmental setbacks happen all the time. Teddy's have been caught in time and I believe with the right stimulus and fitness training he can be back to where he should be in a couple months." The doctor smiled at the parents. "I'll have my nurse give you a copy of the recommendations I made and I'll see you back here in a few weeks. If anything should happen before than please give me a call."
Doctor Williams stood and shook hands with Christian before showing the parents to the door of his office. Diana, his nurse, was waiting outside with a folder of papers for the couple. She walked them to the doors of the clinic explaining, "If you have any questions, my phone number is printed at the top of each page."
Christian was driving to SIP as Ana read the paperwork. The first three pages were diet changes, the next four were about the effect parents have on baby's sleep schedule, two more after that were about interactions, and the rest were things that they could do to help Teddy with his motor functions.
"There's so much here, Christian. I know that we're not supposed to be experts but how could we have fucked this up so bad?"
"We didn't fuck up anything, Ana, we just didn't know. I mean, I know that I'm guilty of nightly feedings even though I knew that he shouldn't need them but I didn't know that it was going to cause a developmental issue."
"I'll give this to Gail so she can pickup these things while she is at the store. We need to look into getting him into swimming lessons; I can look at the community center's schedule later." Christian frowned at the thought and Ana must have seen it because the next thing that she said was "Christian, we agreed that Teddy would not grow up in a bubble."
The truth was that they had not agreed to anything of the sort, he had just wanted her to stop crying when she'd come home and found him researching home playground sets after an afternoon at the park. "Ana, I …. I just don't like the idea of him being in a pool where we don't know what chemicals are used to clean it or how often it's cleaned."
That seemed to give Ana a bit of thought as they made their way into the underground parking of SIP. "Are you coming up with me?"
"No, I'll stay here with him."
Ana looked in the back seat and saw that Teddy was asleep in his car seat. "Okay I'll hurry."
Christian smiled as Ana closed the car door and walked at a quick pace to the elevator. He opened his phone and found that it had shut itself off. He grumbled at the phone and held in the power button. There was the usual hourly email from across the company, a few from Ros letting him know that the company in Detroit was backing down, and a single email from his father at the very bottom between the read and unread mail that he nearly missed.
It simply stated "where are you?" No header, no footer, no signature.
Making a quick mental note to get a new phone, one that does not shut itself off, he turned on the cars blu-tooth and dialed Carrick.
"Carrick Grey, here" answered his father on the second ring.
"It's me."
"Are you headed into your office? Isabella's been trying to get you all morning."
"I don't have any voice or e-mails from her."
"I've called about a dozen times and it just tells me 'the voicemail box you are calling is not set up'."
Christian pricked the bridge of his nose and looked at the phone menacingly before replying, "I'll get it fixed. What's going on?"
"Isabella's team is in from New York and she says it's important. Apparently it's important enough to have been waiting in your office waiting room for the last two hours."
"You have got to be kidding me – Okay, I'll call Andrea and tell her to let them into my office. It's going to be a bit before I get into the office. Ana and I took Teddy to his doctor this morning and the news wasn't all that great, so I'll drop Teddy and Ana off at the penthouse and be over there in a moment."
"Ana's back in town?"
"Yeah, she got here last night; we're at her office right now."
"Well, great, I'll see you at your office then."
Christian wasted no time calling Andrea and instructing her to let Isabella and her team into his office along with supplying them with anything they needed until he could arrive. After he was done issuing orders to Andrea, he sent a text message to Ana asking how much more time she needed and then called Dr. Greene. Dr. Greene had not been available at the time but her nurse had been able to tell him that the DNA results hadn't arrived yet but that they were due back any second.
Christian had gotten a text message back from Ana explaining that she had gotten stuck on a conference call.
*I have to go to the office. Do you want me to call Sawyer and have him bring you over later?*
*That would be fine.*
Christian had a feeling that it wasn't "fine" but sitting in the middle of a parking garage was not how he wanted to spend his afternoon, especially when there were answers two miles away. He glanced back at Teddy and then his phone.
He texted Ana one more time, *Are you sure?*
*Yes* was her almost immediate response.
Christian took a deep breath and was about to get out of the car to go talk to her when an email icon took over the front of his phone. It was from Isabella explaining that they were setup and waiting for him. He look at the email and then at the elevator and made the logical choice. Ana was in a meeting and would not like him and Teddy interrupting it. He sent a text to Sawyer to ensure that he was at SIP to pick up Ana and bring her to GEH before he started the car again.
"Oh thank goodness you're here," was the first thing that Christian heard as he stepped out of the elevator. Isabella was standing in front of Andrea's desk with her cell phone in her hand. Her hair was pulled back into a fashionably high pony tail and she was smartly dressed in a white blouse and formal knee length skirt but the purple tinted bags under her eyes and lack of foundation were evidence of her sleeplessness the previous night. She took Teddy's car seat and ushered them quickly into Christian's office.
The sight that greeted him was not in the least bit professional and not at all what he had expected of Isabella's team. Two young men, twins, sat on the couch with their heads tilted back, sunglasses covering their eyes; they were snoring softly. The neon shirts and black jeans they wore would have had Gail cringing at the wrinkles; this was not the first time they'd been slept in. He was pulled from his initial thoughts by Isabella leading a young woman out from behind a double sided presentation board.
"Mr. Grey, this is Clara. Clara, please meet Christian Grey."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Grey." The young woman was petite with long black hair. She held out her hand and Christian took it in a gentle handshake. She smiled but kept her head tilted down.
Isabella walked away from the pair as they exchanged greeting to wake the other members of her team and set Teddy in his playpen. Both men came awake and stood up to shake hands with Christian. It was at that time that Christian realized that they were identical twins and that he had no hope of remembering which one was Kurt and the other one Kyle.
"Okay, enough with the pleasantries." Isabella picked up several files off the coffee table and handed them to the team. "Clara, you take the lead, and boys, you jump in as needed. Grey, take a seat, and for God's sake, don't interrupt too much."
Christian walked around his desk and took a seat while the twins rolled the white board in front of him. On the board were four photos. "Mmhmm, well, we started tracking Sara's movements since she returned back to the United States with the child.
"Until six months ago, she was pretty boring. Society galas, art exhibits, and work. She worked for Northwest Medical Research Hospital as a researcher. Then six months ago, she – well, she became very un-boring. She sold her condo in the city, quit her job and moved back into the manor house with the child. She fired her whole staff and, for lack of a better term, imported a whole new one from the London town house.
"Now, for a woman who just found out that she was dying – moving home, wanting to be surrounded by people she's known all her life, all this makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the 2.2 million dollars she spent on a complete gutting of the inside. The renovation took less than two weeks and when I started asking around – let me put it to you this way, 24 hours with a black AmEx card and wouldn't get them talking."
"I actually got that –" the twin to Christian's right cut in. "Sorry."
"So Sara lived in the home with her daughter and staff; Ophelia Scott was a nanny, Nancy and Edgear Hamilton were the house keeper and butler, and personal security was handled by Clint Face.
"Six weeks ago Clint Face got called away; he brought in a private security firm – thirty men and women for around the clock, seven days a week protection. Protection for a woman and child that had not left the grounds in over three months; it doesn't make sense.
"But once I started poking around the security firm, everything shut down. I mean I couldn't even get onto the grounds to take a look around."
"This is where I take over." The twin to Christian's left stood up and took Clara's spot next to the white board as she moved to stand beside Isabella. "I followed up on the staff and Sara's job.
"Sara worked at Northwest Medical Research Hospital. She worked in their research department and she was loved by her co-workers. She was described as a great person with a big heart but none of her co-workers could tell me what she was working on. Northeast is a huge hospital and research facility. It's not uncommon for co-workers to have no clue what the other is working on but Sara was beyond that.
"She was renting her lab and work space from the board of directors and the day she took the lease was the day that the seventh floor got a state of the art security alarm upgrade. Whatever she was working on, it was guarded by an electric key that changed every four hours, two around the clock security guards, and six inches of bullet proof glass.
"At this point in the investigation, I was escorted out of the building by the Chief of Staff and two very large men and I was forced to drop this angle and move on to the staff.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton were brought in from London. They've worked for the Andersons since before Sara and her sister were born. They were more than happy to move to New York and help her raise her daughter."
"So what's the problem?" Christian asked as he reached for his coffee cup.
"They're missing. Three or four days after Face left they got a call from their daughter, the lovely Lady Catherine, the wife of Viscount Ian Macgil, that she is expecting and would like them to come for a visit. Now I've been speaking with Lady Catherine and she is not expecting and did not call her mother. In fact, the fact that she is not expecting was a rather touchy subject and I ended up on a three hour call about in-vitro procedures and hormone shots. "
"Back on track, Kurt," Isabella warned.
"Okay, okay, so I was able to track the Hamiltons to JFK Airport but no further. They didn't board a plane, ferry, or trans-Atlantic ship and there's been no activity on their visas, credit cards, or cell phones.
"I don't need to tell you what that typically means. I mean people like the Hamiltons don't just disappear." There was a heaviness in the office as everyone thought about the implications.
"I think I should take it from here," Kyle said. He stood next to his brother, a sad look about him. "I took up the odd-end search. What was the renovation for, what was she working on, what happened in this house and to this family?
"To do that I had to work backwards. I started looking for the one member of the staff that was available. Ophelia Scott had moved on to a new family on the upper west side of New York City. It took me a while to convince her to talk to me but what she told me blew my mind.
"She said that Ms. Anderson was terrified of someone. The renovation to the house was an interior safe-room that spans three floors. It's a custom build with two foot thick concrete walls, air and water filters installed in the unit, and it is fire proof. You could put a pound of C-4 on the door and it may make a dent."
No one said a word. Isabella and Cara had read his report but to hear him say it out loud was stunning. Sara Anderson, the beautiful, brilliant billionaire was scared for her life. "So, Ms. Scott was not with the family the weekend that Sara passed away and when she returned to the manor Sunday night she wasn't permitted back on the grounds. They flipped her their badges, told her that her employer had passed and that she needed to find new employment.
"What they didn't count on was Ophelia having a backbone and demanding to see the child. When she was refused, she called a lawyer in L.A. He flew down there to help but when he arrived there was no need. Rather than having Ophelia push the issue into a courtroom, they reunited her with the child but not before trying to strong arm her into giving her up. You should have met this woman, Isabella, you would have liked her."
"So did Ophelia ever get back into the manor?" Cara asked. **
"No, but she did say that when she arrived back from her weekend away, there were fire trucks parked in the backyard, out of sight. The only reason she saw them was because she tried sneaking onto the property through a boat house that was never used."
Christian looked around the room as everyone thought about the newest puzzling fact. "No police cars or medic personnel?" Kyle shook his head. "Lights on or the engine running?" Again a head shake no.
"What does a fire truck have but police and medical workers don't?" Isabella asked.
"A lot of things."
"Fire trucks have the Jaws of Life and are authorized to carry a small amount of explosion material. If you need to get someone out from behind two feet of concrete, who would you call?" Isabella looked at the room's perceive faces.
"Wow."
"Okay, so at this point have we thrown out the thought that she died of natural causes?"
Isabella stepped out from around the desk. "New scenario; Face, the personal bodyguard of Ms. Anderson, goes away on some project, maybe he has a lead on the threat or whatever. Hires a private firm to secure the residence but there's a bad egg or two; either they're part of it or they are just lazy but someone didn't do their job and someone got into the house. Kyle, give me the diagram that Ms. Scott drew you of the house." Isabella set the paper on the desk and began to run her figure along the hallways and bedrooms. "Sara and the child are asleep but are awakened by something. Being a parent, the natural reaction is to get to the child, add on her paranoia, and she's running for the nursery." Christian followed Isabella's finger down a hallway. "She gets there and grabs the child, not worried about blankets, toys, or clothes; she pulls the child from her bed and heads to the safe room." She tapped her finger against a large box in the middle of the paper. "But something happens along the way, something stops Sara from getting into the room. She manages to get the child in the room but not herself and she's killed."
In a somber voice Isabella said, "Taking into account that Clint Face and the Hamiltons are missing and presumed dead, we are looking at the organized killing of Sara Anderson."
I would like to thank everyone who has continued to visit, read and review this story! I will be posting more in the future and again thank you!
