Chapter 5 - The Man I Trusted
I recorded the rest of the call.
“What did they find, Grant?”
Silence.
Then he laughed nervously.
“I don’t know.
You tell me.”
“You just told me to destroy it.”
“I meant whatever caused Natalie to lose her mind.”
I looked at Laura’s phone.
“Did Laura ever accuse you of stealing from the company?”
The line went completely quiet.
Finally, Grant answered.
“She was paranoid toward the end.”
That sentence hit me harder than I expected.
“Toward the end?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No.
I don’t.”
“Daniel, you’re exhausted.
Your kids have been through something horrible.
This isn’t the time to dig up Laura’s old theories.”
Theories.
He already knew what was on the recording.
I ended the call.
The next morning, I went to the office with two detectives.
Grant was waiting.
He looked genuinely wounded when he saw them.
“Seriously?”
I said nothing.
Detective Ruiz asked for access to our accounting system and building security archive.
Grant cooperated.
Too quickly.
The financial records from the year Laura died were incomplete.
A large server migration had supposedly erased several months of internal approval logs.
Then we checked old security footage.
Most of that archive was gone too.
One technician recovered a damaged still image.
It had been recorded three nights before Laura’s crash.
Laura was leaving our office at 10:47 p.m.
Behind her stood Natalie.
At the time, Natalie was not my wife.
She was Laura’s college friend and occasionally helped our company with event planning.
Twenty seconds later, another figure appeared.
Grant.
The three of them had been in the building together.
Grant stared at the image.
“I don’t remember that.”
I looked at him.
“Laura died three days later.”
“That was four years ago.”
“You carried her coffin.”
His jaw tightened.
“There wasn’t a coffin, Daniel.
There was a memorial urn.”
The room went still.
I had never said coffin.
I had only said funeral.
Detective Ruiz noticed too.
Grant realized his mistake.
Then my phone vibrated.
Unknown number.
One photograph.
Natalie standing beside a highway sign.
Her face pale.
Her message contained seven words.
May you like
Grant did not kill Laura in the crash.
He took her after she survived it.
