Chapter 56 The Complete Confession
Molly hesitated at the door. Her research, her life's work, was founded on the principle that people could change, that accountability was possible, that even the worst human beings could potentially transform. She had to know if Victor's transformation was genuine, even if it meant hearing the complete truth about his crimes.
She sat back down.
"Tell me everything," she said. "And do not omit anything, not even if you think it will make you look worse."
Victor took a deep breath and began to speak.
"The hit-and-run was not my direct action," he said. "I did not drive the car myself. But I ordered it. I orchestrated it. I am fully responsible for David's death."
He paused, his hands trembling.
"At that time, I was working with the adoption agency," he continued. "We had discovered that Marcus Wellington had made contact with Dorothy Chen, that he was beginning to reconnect with the past, with the woman who had given birth to your daughter."
"Why would that matter to you?" Molly asked, though she was beginning to understand.
"Because Marcus was valuable to us," Victor said. "He had connections in the criminal underworld that we could exploit. And we had deliberately kept him separated from his past, from his family, specifically to keep him vulnerable and dependent on us for connection and meaning."
"When we discovered that he was reconnecting with Dorothy, we saw it as a threat. We saw it as something that might give Marcus a new focus, a new reason to leave our organization. So we decided to eliminate that temptation."
"By killing a six-year-old child," Molly said, and she could barely contain her rage.
"Yes," Victor said quietly. "We thought that if we killed Dorothy's child, it would traumatize her, it would make her unreachable to Marcus. It would ensure that Marcus would remain isolated and dependent on us."
"And did it work?" Molly asked bitterly.
"Yes," Victor said. "It did. Marcus withdrew from Dorothy. He became even more entangled in organized crime. He did exactly what we had planned for him to do."
Molly felt sick. She felt like she was going to vomit. She stood up and walked to the corner of the room, pressing her forehead against the cold concrete wall.
This was not just about Victor's crimes. This was about how her entire family had been manipulated, how her separation from Marcus had been deliberately engineered, how his entanglement in organized crime had been deliberately orchestrated, how innocent people had been killed to maintain that system of control.
"Why are you telling me this now?" she asked, turning back to face Victor.
"Because I am dying," Victor said. "Because I cannot die knowing that I allowed you to believe that my transformation was genuine when I had hidden the most important crime I committed. Because I realized that true accountability means telling the complete truth, even when that truth makes you look unforgivable."
"You are unforgivable," Molly said. "You killed a child. You manipulated my father. You destroyed my mother's life. You are not worthy of publication. You are not worthy of redemption."
"I know," Victor said, and he seemed relieved by the finality of her statement. "I know that I do not deserve redemption. I know that my crimes are so severe that no amount of accountability will balance the scales. But I am telling you this because you deserve to know the truth. And because there may be other information that you need, other truths that need to be exposed about the adoption agency and the criminal networks that controlled it."
"What other information?" Molly demanded.
"There is someone else who was involved in David's death," Victor said. "Someone who has never been publicly identified, someone who has been living in secret since the incident. Someone who is still alive, someone who is still powerful, someone who is still continuing the same work of the adoption agency even today."
Molly felt her heart rate accelerate.
"Who?" she asked.
"I cannot tell you," Victor said. "Not because I want to protect them, but because I do not want to cause harm to innocent people who might be connected to them. But I can tell you who to contact who might be able to provide that information."
Victor provided her with a name: Margaret Holloway, a former social worker who had worked at the adoption agency and who had helped facilitate David's death.
"Margaret has been suffering from the knowledge of what she did," Victor said. "She has been living in isolation, and she is dying. She has indicated to me through a letter that she wants to provide a full confession of her role in the crimes of the adoption agency."
Molly was processing this information, trying to understand the scope of what she was learning.
"I am going to ask you something," she said, "and I want you to answer completely honestly. Was the hit-and-run accident that Ben was accused of being framed for—was that connected to David's death? Was it connected to my family?"
"No," Victor said without hesitation. "That was a separate situation, orchestrated by a different network. But I can see how the coincidence might suggest a connection."
Molly felt some small relief at that revelation. At least that tragedy had not been part of a long-term plan to harm her family.
"I am going to leave," she said. "And I am going to decide what to do with your information. But I want to be clear: I no longer believe in your transformation. I no longer believe that you deserve publication or redemption. You have lied to me repeatedly, and you have hidden the most damning information about your crimes."
"I understand," Victor said. "And I accept that judgment. I simply ask that you use the information I have given you to expose the remaining corruption in the adoption agency system and to find the people who are still harming children."
Molly left the facility without responding.
She drove directly to Agent Mitchell's office.
"I need to find Margaret Holloway," she said, and she explained everything that Victor had told her.
Agent Mitchell was shocked but not entirely surprised.
"We have a file on Margaret Holloway," she said. "She has been on our radar for years as a potential witness in adoption agency crimes. But we could never locate her. If she is willing to provide a confession, that could open up entire cases that we thought were closed."
Over the next several days, Agent Mitchell worked through channels to locate Margaret Holloway. She was found living in a small town in upstate New York, in a modest house under an assumed name.
Molly requested permission to be present when Margaret was contacted, and Agent Mitchell agreed.
The drive to upstate New York took eight hours. As Molly drove, she reflected on her journey. She had started her career studying transformation and redemption. She had built her life's work on the belief that people could change, that understanding could lead to accountability, that restoration was possible.
But each revelation had added another layer of complexity to that understanding.
She had discovered that people could commit terrible crimes and still claim transformation. She had discovered that transformation could be incomplete or even false. She had discovered that the systems that she had been studying were far more corrupt than she had initially understood.
When they arrived at Margaret Holloway's house, she was waiting for them. Margaret was an elderly woman, in her eighties, with white hair and a face lined with decades of guilt and suffering.
"I have been waiting for someone to come," Margaret said immediately. "I have been waiting for someone to ask me to finally tell the truth."