Betrayed Broken Husband Becomes a Billionaire Daddy

13: Unverified Truth

Lucien Legion called Donald Mccallister's office the next morning and told the assistant it was urgent, personal, and that he'd wait as long as he had to for a callback. The callback came within the hour, Donald Mccallister's voice carrying the same smooth caution it always did, though something underneath it sounded thinner than usual.

"Mr. Legion. I trust you received the results."

"I did." Lucien Legion sat at his kitchen table, the photograph from the anonymous sender pulled up on his laptop screen, sitting beside the scanned copy of his official paperwork. "I also received something else. A photograph of the original sample label."

Silence on the line, brief but unmistakable.

"I don't follow." Donald Mccallister recovered quickly, but not quickly enough.

"The intake number on that label doesn't match the number on the report your lab sent me." Lucien Legion kept his voice level, the same controlled tone he used delivering hard news to families in a hospital hallway. "It also doesn't match the number on the receipt I was handed the day I gave the sample. Two different numbers, Mr. Mccallister, for the same swab."

"There's likely a simple explanation." Donald Mccallister's voice smoothed back over, practiced and easy. "Administrative errors happen more often than people realize. Labs process hundreds of samples a week, numbers get transposed, forms get duplicated. I'll have someone at Ridgeline look into it, but I wouldn't read anything sinister into a clerical mix up."

"A clerical mix up." Lucien Legion repeated it slowly, letting the words sit in the air between them. "See, that's the part I keep getting stuck on. Chain of custody numbers aren't like a phone number somebody misdials. They're generated specifically so nobody can quietly swap one sample for another without leaving a mark. That's the entire point of the system, Mr. Mccallister. You told me that yourself, standing in that lobby, when you were the one insisting how thorough Ridgeline is."

"I'm aware of what I said." A flicker of something sharper slipped through the polish now, gone almost as fast as it appeared. "I'm telling you, systems fail. People make mistakes. It happens."

"Two numbers, both tied to my sample, both officially documented, and they don't match." Lucien Legion leaned forward, elbows on the table. "That's not a system failing on its own, Mr. Mccallister. Somebody has to touch a keyboard for that to happen. Somebody with access, and a reason."

"You're speculating." Donald Mccallister's tone hardened, defensive now instead of smooth. "You're building an entire theory out of a typo."

"Am I." Lucien Legion let a beat pass. "Funny, because a lab technician doesn't usually go through the trouble of manually flagging a file for an administrative hold over a typo either."

That landed exactly the way Lucien Legion intended it to. He heard it in the sudden stillness on the other end of the line, the absence of an immediate, practiced response.

"I don't know where you're getting your information." Donald Mccallister's voice had gone tight and careful, each word chosen like it might be recorded somewhere. "But I'd be very cautious about repeating unverified claims, Mr. Legion. Especially in the middle of an already contentious divorce. The last thing either of you needs is more noise in the press."

"There it is." Lucien Legion almost laughed, though nothing about the situation was funny. "Every single time I bring up the file, you find a way to steer it back toward the divorce. Back toward Stacy's exposure, Stacy's reputation, what's good for Stacy. I haven't once heard you say you want to know what actually happened to that sample."

"Because what actually happened doesn't change the outcome." Donald Mccallister's composure slipped further, his words coming faster now, less measured. "The test result is what it is. Chloe isn't your biological daughter. Whatever clerical issue exists in the paperwork doesn't alter that fact."

"Maybe not." Lucien Legion's voice dropped, quieter now, more dangerous for it. "But it does raise the question of what somebody was trying to change it into before it came back the way it did. And it raises a bigger question, one I keep asking myself every time I get you on the phone."

"And what question is that." Donald Mccallister asked it like a man already bracing for the answer.

"Why do you sound more interested in protecting Stacy than in finding out the truth?" Lucien Legion let the silence stretch after it, giving the question room to sit there, unanswered. "You're her lawyer, Mr. Mccallister. Fine. But somewhere along the way this stopped being about representing her interests in a divorce and started looking a lot more like covering for something. So which is it?"