Chapter 5
"Maya!" I screamed into the receiver. "Maya!"
Nothing. Only the hollow, synthetic click of a disconnected cell tower signal.
"Miller! Trace that call right now!" Evelyn barked, her voice snapping the two remaining plainclothes officers into instant motion. "Get on the line with Maryland and D.C. Highway Patrol. We have a suspected intentional collision involving a freelance journalist, white Honda Civic, plate ending in Lima-Seven-Niner. Move!"
The officers scrambled toward the bank of elevators, shouting into their radios.
I stood in the center of Richard’s opulent executive suite, the room spinning around me. The smell of expensive leather, mahogany, and spilled single-malt scotch felt suddenly suffocating. For five years, I had walked through these halls as the devoted, silent spouse. I had attended every holiday gala, laughed at every dry joke, smoothed over every ruffled executive feather, and absorbed every sharp, condescending remark Richard threw at me behind closed doors—all because I believed he was a broken man struggling with past grief.
He had fabricated the entire thing.
Rebecca was an attorney too.
The phrase echoed inside my skull like an alarm bell. Ten years ago, Richard was a mid-level director at Halcyon, fighting his way into the executive suite. Rebecca had died just two months before his first major promotion. Just like me, she had the legal training to see the numbers that didn't add up. Just like me, she had lived inside his house, slept in his bed, and held the keys to his personal life.
"Clara, look at me," Evelyn said, stepping directly into my line of sight and gripping my wrists with firm, grounding force. "Panic is an amateur’s reaction. You are a senior forensic partner at the most lethal compliance firm on the eastern seaboard. If Daniel’s people wanted Maya dead, they wouldn't have bothered sending you the blackmail clip first. The video was leverage. The crash was an interception, not an execution."
"They took her," I whispered, the cold reality settling in.
"They intercepted her to force your hand before the midnight board meeting," Evelyn said, pulling her encrypted tablet from her leather briefcase. "Halcyon’s emergency board quorum convenes in three hours. They’re voting whether to turn over Richard’s private server archives to the Department of Justice or to invoke executive defense privilege and seal the records behind a national security firewall. If Daniel’s proxy on the board secures that vote, everything we seized tonight becomes legally inadmissible."
"Who is Daniel’s proxy?" I asked, my voice dropping back down to its courtroom baseline.
Evelyn tapped the screen, turning the tablet toward me.
A photograph of a distinguished, silver-haired woman appeared on the display. She was wearing a tailored charcoal suit and a string of pearls, smiling beside the Secretary of Defense at a charity gala in Arlington.
"Senator Eleanor Vance-Holloway," I read aloud, my chest tightening. "Your sister-in-law."
Evelyn’s jaw tightened. "My late brother’s wife. Eleanor sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and holds a seven percent voting block in Halcyon’s preferred stock. She’s the political umbrella Daniel and Richard have been operating under. She won't let Halcyon burn to save Richard, but she will gladly incinerate Richard to protect Daniel and herself."
My phone screen flickered to life again.
This time, it wasn't an encrypted text or a phone call. It was an automated notification from the smart-security system installed at our residence in Oakridge.
Motion detected: Master Study.Interior camera feed bypassed: Manual Override Key 01 used.
There were only two physical copies of Manual Override Key 01. One was on the keychain currently sitting in an evidence bag at the central precinct with Richard.
The other was hidden inside the antique grandfather clock in the foyer of our home.
Someone was inside the house.
"Evelyn, call Miller back," I said, grabbing my overcoat from the sofa and pulling it around my shoulders. "Tell him not to dispatch all units to the highway."
"Why? Where are you going?"
"Whoever intercepted Maya didn't get what they were looking for," I said, my pulse accelerating with lethal clarity. "Maya didn't tell me Rebecca’s death was forged to make me grieve. She told me because she knew where Rebecca left her original working files. Rebecca didn't leave them in Montpelier. She left them in the only place Richard never bothered to look because he considered it completely useless."
"Where?"
"In the family crypt at St. Jude’s cemetery, three miles from our house," I said. "And the access card to the crypt has been sitting inside Richard’s desk safe in Oakridge for ten years, disguised as an expired corporate security pass."
"You can't go there alone, Clara," Evelyn insisted, grabbing my arm. "If Daniel’s contractors are in that house, they’re armed."
"They're looking for paper," I said, pulling my arm free and stepping toward the private executive stairs. "They don't know the house has a three-way architectural panic system installed by the previous owner—a system I recoded two weeks ago when I started this audit. They think they’re walking into a trophy wife’s closet. They’re walking into a vault."
I reached into my handbag, unzipped the concealed lower compartment, and felt the cold, checkered grip of the snub-nosed .38 revolver I had inherited from my father—a licensed firearm Richard had repeatedly told me was "unbecoming of an executive’s wife."
May you like
"Meet me at the cemetery in forty-five minutes with federal marshals," I told Evelyn as I pushed open the heavy emergency exit door. "And make sure the media vans are already parked outside Halcyon’s headquarters. When this dam breaks, I want the whole world watching."
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