Chapter 4: The Attorney's First Move
I stepped into the hallway and called my own lawyer before Hale had finished his sentence.
Carol Briggs had handled my company's contracts for eleven years.
Family law was not her specialty, but she knew every specialist in Dallas, and when I told her what I needed, she didn't ask me to slow down.
"Emergency custody filing," she repeated.
"Ryan Calloway.
How long ago?"
"Forty minutes."
"Is the mother present and coherent?"
"Yes."
"Is there documented evidence of @buse?"
"A photograph with a date stamp, a written message on a burner phone, and a detective standing ten feet away who has already started the arrest process."
A short silence.
"I'm calling Judge Whitmore's clerk right now.
Don't let Emily sign anything, don't let anyone move Lily without a court order, and don't let Ryan's attorney near that hospital room."
She hung up before I did.
I went back inside.
Emily was sitting straighter now, watching me with the focused expression I remembered from when we were children and something needed to be solved.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"Carol Briggs is calling a judge.
Ryan filed for emergency custody."
Emily's jaw tightened.
"Of course he did."
"He's trying to get ahead of the evidence."
"He's been planning this," she said.
"He knew that if I ever surfaced, the first thing he'd lose is Lily.
So he made sure he'd have a legal position ready." She looked at her wrist brace.
"He's been planning this since the day he drove me out of the city."
Hale appeared in the doorway.
"Ms.
Carter — I need a formal statement.
Everything you told your brother, on record, as soon as you're able."
"I'm able now," Emily said.
"Emily—" I started.
"James." Her voice was quiet but firm.
"I have been waiting eight months to say this out loud in a room where someone will write it down.
I'm ready."
Hale pulled a chair to the side of the bed.
I stood near the window while Emily spoke, and I listened to my sister describe eight months of hiding in shelters across three states, changing her name twice, working cash jobs in diners and laundromats, calling Lily's school from payphones and hanging up when the secretary answered because she was afraid Ryan had told them to report her calls.
She described the night Ryan had driven her out of the city in detail that made Hale's pen slow down twice.
She described the name he had mentioned — a man named Greer, someone at the county records office who had, according to Ryan, done this kind of paperwork before.
She described the closed-casket funeral she had read about from a shelter common room in Tulsa, sitting beside a woman she didn't know, reading her own name in a death notice on a borrowed phone.
When she finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
Hale looked up from his notebook.
"Ms.
Carter, the name Greer — do you have a first name?"
"Dennis," she said.
"Ryan called him Dennis."
Hale wrote it down without expression.
But I saw his jaw shift.
My phone buzzed.
Carol.
I stepped into the hallway.
"Whitmore's clerk pushed it to the emergency docket," Carol said.
"Hearing is tomorrow morning at nine.
Ryan's attorney will be there.
You need Emily present, coherent, and with documentation.
The photograph, the phone, the written message, and Detective Hale's preliminary report if he can have it ready."
"He's already taking her statement."
"Good.
James, listen to me carefully.
Ryan's attorney is Martin Foss."
I knew the name.
Everyone in Dallas knew the name.
"He's going to walk into that courtroom tomorrow and make Emily look like a woman who abandoned her child and is now fabricating a story to regain custody.
He's going to use the eight months of absence against her.
He's going to use the shelter stays, the name changes, every single thing she did to survive — and he's going to reframe it as instability."
"She has a photograph dated three days before her own funeral."
"And Foss will say it's fabricated.
He'll say the date stamp was altered.
He'll say she staged it." Carol's voice was steady and precise.
"We need something he cannot reframe.
A witness.
Someone who saw what Ryan did to her, or who knew what he was planning.
Someone whose credibility he cannot attack."
I stood in the corridor and thought.
Then I remembered something Emily had said.
*He already had someone who would sign a death certificate.*
Dennis Greer.
If Ryan had used him once, Greer was either loyal or afraid.
Either way, he was a pressure point.
I went back inside.
"Emily," I said.
"Greer.
Did Ryan ever mention how he knew him?
How long they'd been connected?"
She thought for a moment.
"He said they went to school together.
He said it like it was a joke.
Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, having a friend who could make someone disappear on paper."
"Did he say anything else about him?
Anything Greer might want to protect?"
Emily looked at me carefully.
"Ryan told me once that Greer had done it before.
That I wasn't the first." She paused.
"He said it to frighten me.
To make me understand that he had done this before and gotten away with it."
Hale had stopped writing.
He looked up slowly.
"Ms.
Carter," he said.
"Did your husband use those exact words?
That he had done this before?"
"Yes," Emily said.
"He said, 'Dennis has handled this before.
Nobody came looking that time either.'"
The silence in the room had a different quality now.
Hale closed his notebook, stood up, and walked to the door.
He paused with his hand on the frame.
"I need to make another call," he said.
And then, almost to himself: "If there's another family out there who buried someone who wasn't d*ad—"
May you like
He didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't need to.
