Hail wrote steadily.
“Someone with access to her medical records could have filtered what she saw,” he said. “Let her see the normal results. Removed the flagged ones.”
“From her brother’s IP address,” I said. “She documented that too.”
He looked up. “How thorough was she?”
“She was an accountant,” I said. “She knew a falsified pattern when she saw one. She just didn’t know how to survive it.”
He picked up the folder and sealed it into an evidence bag. Then he opened a drawer and put two empty bags on the desk.
“I can open a preliminary inquiry,” he said. “Financial trail, medical timeline, forensic connection to her symptoms. I’ll need next-of-kin consent for the records.”
“I’m designated next of kin,” I said. “She updated her paperwork two years ago.”
He didn’t ask why she had done that instead of listing a parent or her brother.
He understood why.
We signed the paperwork. He gave me a burner phone and a direct number and told me not to go back to Megan’s house that night. He told me not to respond to Mitchell if he reached out.
Mitchell had reached out nine times across the two days since the funeral. I had not responded to a single message.
When I finally sent him one line suggesting the Oakridge parking lot, his reply came back in under a minute. The speed of it told me everything about how badly he needed this conversation to happen before I spoke to anyone else.
It did not happen the way he had planned it.
I watched them climb out of their SUV in the yellow light of the parking lot: Beth first, composure already fraying at the edges, and Mitchell behind her, performing the controlled older brother routine he had probably rehearsed on the drive over. He wanted me to understand they were not the problem. He wanted me to understand that whatever I thought I was doing was going to damage people who cared about me. He wanted me to understand that the documents, the accounts, the medical questions, none of it needed to go anywhere it hadn’t already gone.
Beth said the sentence that ended the performance.
Whatever she had died with her.
Past tense had, present tense died. She heard herself say it and I watched her process that she had said too much. Mitchell tried to talk over it, but Hail’s mic caught every syllable in clean audio.
When they drove away, I sat in the empty lot and felt something settle.
Not peace, exactly. But resolution. The specific resolution of a thing that has been set in motion and is now traveling on its own momentum.
I did not go back to the house that night. I stayed in a hotel two miles away, a clean generic room with a desk lamp and a view of the parking structure, and I sat at the desk with her laptop open and worked for four hours through a cloud backup I knew how to access because she had given me the password during a visit three years earlier. We had been sitting on her couch after dinner and she had been mildly exasperated about a family group email chain where everyone was attaching enormous photo files and slowing down the thread, and she had handed me her laptop and said, here, let me just show you how I have this organized, and she walked me through the whole directory structure while I half-listened, and then she said the password out loud twice so I would remember it.
I had not thought about that moment in three years. I thought about it now.
See more on the next page
