Chapter 6: Everything on the Drive
There were eleven files.
The two videos.
Three photographs.
A scanned document.
Four audio recordings.
Marcus put on a pair of reading glasses and went through them one by one, methodically, without hurrying.
Graham stood behind him.
I sat beside Marcus and watched the screen.
The photographs were timestamped across eight months.
Vanessa and Daniel at a restaurant.
Vanessa and Daniel outside a law office.
Vanessa and Daniel in what appeared to be a notary's waiting room, both of them looking at something on Daniel's phone, both of them smiling.
"That's six weeks before my divorce was finalized," I said, pointing to the date on the second photograph.
Marcus noted it.
The scanned document was twelve pages.
Marcus read it slowly.
Halfway through, he stopped and went back to page two.
He read that page again.
"This is the asset release agreement," he said.
"Pages one through ten are standard.
Page eleven is the deed transfer authorization." He turned to page twelve.
"Page twelve is a notarized confirmation of transfer, dated the day after your divorce was finalized."
"I never saw pages eleven or twelve."
"No." He looked at the signature on page twelve.
"But your name is on both of them."
Graham leaned closer to the screen.
"That's not the same handwriting as the signature on page one."
Marcus looked at him.
Then back at the screen.
"No," he said.
"It isn't."
He moved to the audio recordings.
The first three were phone calls between Vanessa and Daniel — fragments, partial conversations, the kind of thing a tablet records when it picks up voices from another room.
Enough to establish a pattern.
Enough to show they had been coordinating for months before the divorce was even filed.
The fourth recording was different.
It was clearer.
Closer.
The tablet must have been in the same room.
Vanessa's voice: "She's going to sign today.
Daniel has the full packet ready."
A man's voice — not Daniel.
Older.
Careful.
"And she hasn't spoken to anyone?"
"She doesn't have anyone to speak to.
Her friends are gone, her marriage is over, her mother is—" A pause.
"Her mother understands the situation."
"The notary is confirmed?"
"For three o'clock."
"And the second signature?"
"Daniel will handle it.
He's done it before."
Silence on the recording.
Then the older man's voice again: "This needs to be clean, Vanessa.
If it comes apart, it comes apart on you."
"It won't come apart."
Marcus stopped the recording.
The room was very quiet.
"Do you recognize the second voice?" he asked me.
I shook my head.
Graham had gone very still behind us.
"I do," he said.
Marcus turned to look at him.
"That's my father," Graham said.
Nobody spoke for a long moment.
Eleanor, who had been sitting quietly near the window, stood up.
She walked to the table and looked at the laptop screen — at the file names, at the timestamps, at the scanned document still open on the page.
"Robert," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Graham said.
"How long has he known Vanessa?"
"He introduced us." Graham's voice was entirely level.
"He said he'd met her through a colleague.
He said she was exactly the kind of woman I should be with." A pause.
"He was very insistent about it."
Eleanor sat back down.
Marcus closed the folio.
He looked at Graham directly.
"I need to ask you something now, and I need you to answer carefully.
Did your father have any financial involvement in your relationship with Vanessa?
Any shared accounts, any property arrangements, anything that connected him to her before tonight?"
Graham was quiet for a long moment.
"He co-signed the lease on her apartment," he said finally.
"Before we got together.
I thought it was a favor to a colleague's contact.
He said she was new to the city."
"She wasn't new to the city," I said quietly.
"She grew up twenty minutes from here."
Marcus picked up his pen.
"I'm going to need your father's full name," he said to Graham.
Graham told him.
Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed.
The sound carried through the empty ballroom — the guests all gone now, the flowers beginning to droop at the edges, one of the ivory roses dropping a petal onto the marble floor.
Lily stirred in her chair.
May you like
She didn't wake up.
But her hand tightened around the strap of her little white purse, even in sleep.
