Chapter 7 - Two O'Clock on a Thursday
Vivian left the house at 1:55. I watched from the upstairs window as she backed the car out, sunglasses on, purse over one arm. She looked like a woman with nothing on her mind but a haircut.
The second her car cleared the corner, my phone rang.
"She's gone," Victor said. "We're coming in."
I went down and opened the front door. Detective Ruiz came in first, then two officers, then a woman from the bank's fraud division named Kathleen Boyd. Harold brought up the rear and put his hand on my shoulder as he passed.
They moved through the house fast and without any drama. Kathleen Boyd set up a laptop at the kitchen table and started working through the account records Harold had authorized. One officer took the sitting room. The other went upstairs.
I stood in the hall trying to be useful by staying out of the way.
Twenty minutes in, the officer from upstairs appeared at the top of the staircase.
"Mr. Hargrove. Come up here, please."
I followed him to the bedroom. He'd opened the narrow closet by the window — not the main one, the little one Vivian kept locked, the one she said held her off-season clothes.
It wasn't clothes.
There was a small fireproof box on the top shelf. He'd opened it.
Three passports. Three different names. Three photos — all the same woman.
There was also a phone. A cheap one. The kind you buy with cash. He'd already bagged it.
And a manila envelope, unsealed, with more financial documents inside. I could see my name on the top page.
I looked at the passports. Three names. Three lives she'd built and thrown away.
"How many?" I said, though I already knew it was more than two.
"We'll need to go through everything before we can say."
Downstairs, Kathleen Boyd called out, "Detective. You need to see this."
We all went down. She turned the laptop around.
"The big transfer was set for tomorrow morning. Four hundred and twenty thousand out of the main investment account." She paused. "There's a second one, too. Smaller. Sixty-eight thousand from the household account. That one was scheduled for this morning but hasn't processed yet. If we freeze everything now—"
"Do it," Detective Ruiz said.
Kathleen typed for half a minute. "Done."
The room went quiet. Harold looked at me and didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
My phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Vivian: Running late, traffic's a mess. Home by 4:30. Want me to grab anything for dinner?
Detective Ruiz read it over my shoulder. "Answer normally. Tell her that's fine."
I typed: Don't worry about it. I'll handle dinner.
May you like
I set the phone down.
Forty minutes later her car came back up the drive.
