Chapter 5 - Rebecca’s necklace
Margaret Vale was alive.
That fact reopened seventeen years of questions.
State police traced the vehicle used during the delivery.
Stolen plates.
Abandoned car.
No fingerprints.
Professional.
But underneath the driver's seat was something almost too convenient.
One of Arthur Thorne’s business cards.
Ortiz didn't believe it.
Neither did I.
“Someone wants Arthur blamed.”
Audrey frowned.
“Maybe because Arthur did it.”
“Maybe.”
But good investigations die when investigators fall in love with the obvious answer.
Arthur was corrupt.
Julian was dangerous.
Miriam had helped cover what happened to Audrey.
None of that meant they controlled everything.
Then Rebecca’s necklace produced our first genuine lead.
It was custom-made.
Inside the clasp was a microscopic serial number.
Margaret couldn't have bought a duplicate.
She possessed Rebecca's original.
Which meant either she'd obtained it after Rebecca's death…
Or Rebecca had given it to her.
Audrey searched her mother's cloud backups.
We found an email draft.
Never sent.
Margaret—
Daniel still trusts you.
I don't.
If anything happens to me, Audrey must never marry into the Thorne family.
I stopped reading.
Audrey looked at me.
“Mom knew Julian?”
She couldn't have.
Julian was seventeen then.
Unless Rebecca wasn't referring specifically to Julian.
She meant the family.
Then we found an attachment.
A photograph of Arthur and Miriam at a political fundraiser.
Behind them stood Margaret.
Beside Margaret was another man.
Judge Nathan Cole.
The same people were connected decades earlier.
Audrey's ledger wasn't documenting a new corruption ring.
She had rediscovered an old one.
Then Ortiz called.
The black ledger had been fingerprinted.
Audrey's prints.
Julian's.
Arthur's.
And one unidentified set.
The unknown prints matched prints recovered from Rebecca’s car seventeen years earlier.
“Who?”
Ortiz hesitated.
“The database returned a sealed identity.”
“Sealed by whom?”
“Federal authority.”
That made no sense.
Then she gave me the name attached to the restricted record.
Thomas Hayes.
I sat down.
Audrey stared at me.
“Hayes?”
I had no brother.
No son.
No relative named Thomas.
At least none I knew.
Then I remembered my father's last words before he died thirty years earlier.
If anyone ever asks about Thomas, you never had a brother.
May you like
I had spent three decades believing morphine had made him confused.
Apparently, it hadn't.
