“Are you coming into the shower with me?”
“Are you coming into the shower with me?”
Chapter 2
I didn’t call Agent Sorenson back right away.
Laura told me not to — not until we understood exactly what the FBI already had, because whatever they knew shaped what I could safely say.
“If you go in cold,” she said, “you’ll either sound guilty by accident, or you’ll accidentally protect the people who did this.”
We spent the next four hours at the dining table, Laura walking me through server logs like I was a first-year analyst instead of the man whose name was on the building. My hands, still faintly unsteady from the morning, grew steadier with each screen we opened.
At 1:40, the elevator chimed.
Nobody was supposed to be able to reach the penthouse floor without my assistant clearing them first.
Laura’s head snapped toward the door, the folder disappearing into her bag in one motion, years of instinct I hadn’t known she still had.
The door opened without a knock.
Warren Pace stood in the frame, still in his gray suit, his tie slightly loosened, a version of composure that looked, for the first time in eleven years, like something worn on purpose.
“Marcus.” His eyes moved to Laura, then back to me, cataloguing. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
“Laura’s helping me sort some personal matters.”
“At one in the afternoon.” Warren’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Must be important.”
“What do you need, Warren?”
He stepped further into the room, glancing at the dining table where, thirty seconds earlier, four company names had been laid out in plain view. My stomach dropped as I remembered we hadn’t cleared it.
Laura moved before I could react, sliding a coffee cup casually over the corner of the page still visible, the gesture so natural it looked like nothing at all.
“Rockford,” Warren said. “That’s what I came about.”
“What about it?”
“Legal flagged the renewal I pushed through last week. Said it should’ve gone through them first. I wanted to explain before it became a bigger conversation than it needed to be.”
“Explain, then.”
Warren’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the first genuine crack I’d seen in over a decade of watching him negotiate.
“It’s a good rate, Marcus. Best we’ll get this year. I moved fast because the offer had a window.”
“Eleven percent above market,” I said, watching his face carefully. “That’s not a good rate. That’s a markup.”
Something flickered behind his eyes — not confusion, which is what I’d have expected from an innocent man hearing an accusation. Calculation.
“Where did you get that number?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters a great deal, considering the FBI called my office this morning asking about the same account.”
The room went very quiet.
“They called you,” I said slowly, “before they called me.”
“They’re talking to everyone, Marcus. That’s how these things work.”
“Is it.”
Warren’s eyes went to Laura again, longer this time, and I felt the temperature in the room drop several degrees.
“I don’t believe we’ve met properly,” he said to her.
“Laura Hayes.”
“Hayes.” He repeated it like he was searching a filing cabinet in his memory. “Have we worked together before?”
“No,” Laura said evenly. “I don’t believe we have.”
But something in the way Warren said her name — slow, deliberate, testing — told me he already knew exactly who she was, or was trying very hard to find out.
“Marcus, a word alone?” he asked.
Laura excused herself to the kitchen without waiting for my answer, and I watched Warren’s shoulders relax slightly the moment she was out of the room.
“You need to be careful,” he said quietly, once we were alone. “Whatever you think you’re investigating, whoever you think you’re protecting yourself from — you’re going to hurt people who don’t deserve it. Including yourself.”
“Is that a warning, or a threat?”
“It’s advice, from someone who’s known you eleven years.”
“Someone who’s approved forty million dollars in fraudulent contracts over six years, apparently.”
Warren went pale, the mask slipping fully for the first time.
“Where did you get that figure?”
I said nothing.
He studied me for a long moment, then straightened his tie with two precise movements, composure sliding back into place like a door closing.
“Be very careful who you trust in that kitchen, Marcus. People aren’t always who they say they are.”
He left without waiting for a response.
The moment the elevator doors closed, Laura reappeared, her face bloodless.
“He knows,” she said. “He knows exactly who I am.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because fifteen years ago, before he was your CFO, Warren Pace consulted for the firm that audited my husband’s clients.” Her voice shook for the first time all day. “He was in the room, Marcus. Three years ago, before any of this. He was in the room.”
My blood ran cold.
“You’re saying he knew your husband.”
“I’m saying,” Laura said, staring at the door Warren had just walked through, “that the man who just stood in your living room may already know exactly how my husband died — because he might be the one who arranged it.”
Laura’s revelation sat between us like a live wire neither of us wanted to touch.
“You need proof,” I said. “Not memory. Not a feeling. If you’re right, and Warren’s connected to your husband’s death, we bury him with paper, not suspicion.”
“I know how this works, Marcus. I built cases for a living.”
“I’m not questioning your judgment. I’m questioning whether we can survive being wrong.”
Before Laura could answer, my phone lit up again — this time with a name I hadn’t seen in eight months, one that used to mean coming home to something other than silence.
Renata.
“Your ex-wife,” Laura said, reading the screen without apology.
“We haven’t spoken since the settlement.”
“Then answer it. Ignoring people today doesn’t seem to be working out for you.”
I picked up, bracing for the usual — a request for something, a complaint about the house, a lawyer cc’d on the next email.
“Marcus.” Renata’s voice was tight, rehearsed. “I need to talk to you. Today.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“I’m sure you are. It’s about to get a lot more complicated, and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of a reporter.”
My stomach dropped for the second time that day.
“What did you do, Renata?”
“I didn’t do anything. I sold an interview. About the divorce, about the house, about how distracted and controlling you’d become before I left. It’s running in three days.”
“Why would you do that now?”
“Because my lawyer said your company’s about to be all over the news anyway, and if a story’s coming about you either way, I’d rather it include my side before your people spin it.”
Laura watched my face carefully as I absorbed this, her expression unreadable.
“Renata, if there’s an active federal investigation and you go public with a story painting me as unstable right now, you’re not just embarrassing me. You’re handing ammunition to people who may have committed actual crimes inside my company.”
There was a pause.
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t explain it over the phone.”
“Marcus, if there’s something real happening, and it comes out that I sold a petty divorce story the same week, that makes me look —”
“Complicit. Or stupid. Neither is good for you.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I can try to pull it. I don’t know if I can pull it in three days.”
“Try.”
She hung up without saying goodbye, which had become, somewhere in the last year of our marriage, the only way either of us knew how to end a conversation.
Laura was still watching me.
“She’s not part of this,” I said. “She’s just bad timing.”
“Are you sure?”
“She wants money and headlines. She’s never wanted anything more complicated than that.”
“People who want money are exactly the kind of people other people use,” Laura said quietly. “Did it occur to you that someone could have approached her? Encouraged the timing? Made the offer more attractive than it should have been?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Now I couldn’t stop thinking of it.
Before I could respond, a second call came through — this one from a blocked number, the kind I usually let go to voicemail.
I answered anyway.
“Mr. Caldwell.” A woman’s voice, clipped and professional. “This is Agent Sorenson. I left a message earlier.”
“I got it.”
“We need to schedule an interview. Given the volume being moved through several of your subcontractor accounts, this has moved from a routine inquiry to an active investigation. I’d strongly recommend having counsel present.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, at our field office.”
I looked at Laura, at the folder still resting on the table, at everything we hadn’t finished tracing yet.
“I’ll be there.”
“One more thing, Mr. Caldwell.” Sorenson’s voice shifted, just slightly, into something almost careful. “We’re aware of a woman named Laura Hayes currently associated with your address. Given her late husband’s professional history, we’d like to speak with her as well. Is she available?”
Laura’s eyes met mine across the room, and for the first time since that morning, I saw real fear in them — not for herself.
For what the FBI already knew, and how long they might have known it, and whether that meant someone inside the investigation had been watching this apartment long before I ever walked into it.
Neither of us slept much that night.
We sat at the table until nearly two in the morning, Laura walking me through every server log, every login timestamp, cross-referencing them against the shell company filings until a pattern finally sharpened into something undeniable.
Every fraudulent transfer had been authorized within forty-eight hours of a login from an IP address registered to a small office suite in Rockford — an office, property records showed, quietly owned through a holding company that traced back, three layers deep, to Julian Reyes.
“He never gave up access,” I said, staring at the screen. “Nine years, and he never actually let go.”
“Neither did Warren,” Laura said. “Look at the approval trail. Julian moves the money. Warren clears it internally so it never gets flagged.”
“Two men who hate each other, technically, running this together.”
“Men who hate each other make excellent business partners in fraud,” Laura said. “Neither trusts the other enough to talk. Which means neither one can turn on the other without exposing himself.”
I rubbed my eyes, exhaustion settling into my bones.
“Your husband’s notes — do they mention Julian anywhere?”
Laura hesitated, and for the first time that night, her composure cracked.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said quietly.
“What?”
She reached into the very bottom of her bag and pulled out a small item I hadn’t seen before — a worn USB drive, taped shut, a strip of masking tape across it with three words in faded handwriting.
For Laura only.
“He gave me this the morning he died,” she said. “Told me not to open it unless something happened to him. I never opened it. I couldn’t. For three years, I told myself it was because I wasn’t ready.”
“And the real reason?”
Her hands trembled slightly as she turned the drive over.
“Because as long as I never opened it, some part of me could still believe it really was an accident.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound cheap against what she was holding.
“I want to open it now,” she said. “With you here.”
I brought my laptop over, and Laura plugged the drive in with the careful, controlled movements of someone defusing something that might still explode.
A single folder appeared, named with a date fourteen months old.
Inside: financial records, the same flower diagram we’d already found, and one file that made Laura go rigid the moment she opened it.
A short audio recording, timestamped eleven days before he died.
She hesitated over the play button for a long moment before finally pressing it.
Her husband’s voice filled the room, warm and steady, nothing like a man who suspected what was coming.
“If you’re hearing this, something happened to me, and I need you to understand I wasn’t careless. I found something bigger than a client audit. Two men, one company — Caldwell Urban Development — moving money through shells registered under names connected to Julian Reyes and signed off by a CFO named Warren Pace. I met with Pace once, informally, to ask about an inconsistency. He seemed calm. Too calm. Three days later my car started making a sound it had never made before. I’m having it serviced tomorrow. If anything happens after that, Laura, don’t trust the official explanation. Trust the number. Eleven percent. Follow the flower.”
The recording ended.
Laura sat frozen, both hands pressed flat against the table, staring at nothing.
“He knew,” she whispered. “He knew, and he still went to have the car serviced anyway, because what else could he do? Cancel his life on a hunch?”
I reached over, slowly, and put my hand over hers — not romantic, not calculated, just human, the only thing I had to offer in that moment.
“This isn’t a hunch anymore,” I said. “This is a recording naming both of them, timestamped before his death. This is exactly what Agent Sorenson needs.”
Laura looked up at me, eyes wet but fierce.
“If we hand this over tomorrow, Warren and Julian will know within hours that we have it. And a man who arranged one death to protect forty million dollars won’t hesitate over a second, or a third.”
“Then we don’t wait until tomorrow,” I said. “We call Sorenson tonight.”
As if summoned by the thought itself, my phone buzzed on the table between us — not a call this time, but a text, from a number that wasn’t saved, wasn’t Warren’s, wasn’t Renata’s.
May you like
Three words, nothing else.
We know. Careful.
