Chapter 3 - The Reconstruction
By 1:30 PM, Dr. Chen cleared me for discharge under strict concussion protocols, provided I had someone check on me every four hours. I didn't tell him that I lived alone and had no intention of going back to sleep.
I took a cab straight to my townhome. My skull felt as though it had been clamped in a vise, but the cold shower I took washed away the remnants of dried blood and stale vanilla frosting from my scalp. I dressed in dark jeans, a black wool sweater, and a low baseball cap to shield my light-sensitive eyes from the afternoon glare.
My home office was on the second floor, a modest room lined with metal filing cabinets and two wide monitors I used for reviewing multi-column spreadsheets.
I opened the floor safe beneath my desk.
The backup dossier was still there, pristine inside its heavy blue folder. But looking at the numbers now wasn't enough. Numbers could prove theft, but they couldn't prove who had stood behind that velvet curtain with a blunt weapon.
My phone rang again. It wasn't Marlene this time. It was Detective Vance.
"Lee," she said without preamble. "I need you to come down to the Third Precinct on North Parham. I’m in the interview rooms on the second floor."
"Did you find something at the venue?"
"I found three things," Vance said, her voice tight. "And you need to see all of them."
Twenty minutes later, I was buzzed through the heavy security doors of the county precinct. The air smelled of burnt coffee and commercial floor cleaner. Vance met me in the hallway and led me into a windowless conference room equipped with a wide flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall.
"First," Vance began, clicking a remote toward the screen. "Hawthorne House’s management was very cooperative. While they don't have cameras inside the main ballroom, their security system covers the exterior service docks and the secondary service corridor that runs behind the ballroom alcoves."
The screen flickered, displaying a grainy, high-contrast black-and-white video feed with a time stamp reading 8:42:15 PM.
The hallway was narrow, lined with stacked banquet chairs and stainless-steel warming carts. At 8:44 PM, a figure stepped out from an exterior emergency exit door and moved quickly down the corridor toward the service door leading directly behind the dessert alcove.
The person was wearing a catering server’s black apron and white button-down shirt, but their movements were hurried, awkward, and completely disconnected from the waitstaff carrying trays.
"Look at the hands," Vance said, pausing the footage and zooming in.
The person was wearing thin, black leather driving gloves. And gripped in their right hand, held tight against the seam of their trousers, was an eighteen-inch steel tire iron.
"Do you recognize the build?" Vance asked.
I stared at the screen, my pulse hammering against the fracture behind my ear. The figure was male, roughly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a distinct, slightly rolling gait that favored his right hip.
"That’s Garrett Hayes," I said, the air escaping my lungs in a cold hiss. "Kendra’s younger brother. He’s twenty-eight. He works as an estimator for an auto body repair shop in Mechanicsville."
"An auto body estimator," Vance repeated, making a note. "Which means an eighteen-inch tire iron is something he has in his trunk every day of the week."
"Garrett wasn't at the party," I remembered suddenly, the pieces clicking together with terrifying precision. "Marlene told Grandma that Garrett couldn't make it because he had a mandatory overtime shift down in Petersburg. She made a big show of apologizing for his absence during the first toast."
"He was there," Vance said grimly. "He entered through the kitchen loading bay using a service code that had been texted to him twenty minutes prior. We checked the kitchen manager’s phone logs; someone called in an anonymous report of a water leak in the basement to draw the head steward away from the back door right before Garrett slipped in."
She clicked the remote again, switching the display from the video feed to a high-resolution photograph of the crime scene floor taken earlier that morning.
"Second thing," Vance said. "The catering staff swept up most of the glass last night, but my patrol officers found this wedged between the baseboard and the heavy velvet drapery behind where you fell."
The photograph showed a small, torn scrap of blue paper, roughly two inches long, stained with grease and red punch. On the paper, clearly visible in faded carbon ink, was a partial vehicle repair ticket number and the logo of Hayes Collision & Performance.
Garrett had dropped an invoice stub from his own work coveralls when he reached through the curtains to strike me.
"That places him behind the curtain," I said.
"It establishes physical presence," Vance agreed. "Combined with the medical findings and the security footage of him entering with the weapon, we have enough for an aggravated malicious wounding warrant against Garrett Hayes."
"Then arrest him," I urged, my hands gripping the edge of the conference table.
"If I arrest Garrett right now," Vance countered, holding up a steadying hand, "Marlene and Kendra hire an attorney within sixty seconds. The attorney tells Garrett to shut his mouth, Marlene claims Garrett acted alone because he had a personal grudge against you, and the money trail gets scrubbed clean before we can even subpoena the bank records. Marlene is the architect here, Lee. Garrett is just the muscle."
"What was the third thing you found?" I asked.
Vance walked over to the corner of the table and picked up a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was the charred remnant of a manila envelope, burned down to its reinforced corners, along with several blackened fragments of printer paper.
"Found this in an outdoor fire pit behind the venue’s bridal cottage," she said. "Someone tried to incinerate your dossier before they drove away last night. They were in a hurry. They didn't realize that modern commercial laser toner doesn't fully disappear when paper burns at low temperatures."
She tilted the bag toward the overhead fluorescent light.
On one of the charred, curled slips of paper, clearly legible in raised, glossy black print, was a single corporate bank account number ending in 8841.
"That’s the Meridian Family Services account," I said. "Marlene thought she destroyed the only copy."
"She thinks she’s safe," Vance said with a slow, dangerous smile. "She thinks you're concussed, Garrett is untraceable, and the evidence is ashes. Which means right now, she’s moving to the final stage of her plan."
"Grandma’s power of attorney," I whispered.
"Exactly. If your grandmother finds out about the theft, Marlene goes to prison. But if Marlene can get Grandma declared legally incompetent or force her into an expedited conservatorship before you intervene, Marlene takes complete legal control of the entire estate—including the authority to dismiss any criminal restitution claims."
May you like
Vance pulled her car keys from her pocket.
"We have two hours before the banks close for the weekend processing cycle. You and I are going to have a little conversation with your grandmother. But we aren't going to the front door."
