Chapter 4: The Other Name
His name was Patrick Hale.
David's business partner of nine years.
Best man at our wedding.
The person who had called me — called me — four times during those fourteen days, asking if I was all right, offering to help with the funeral arrangements, telling me he was so sorry about Lily, that she had been a beautiful child, that he was there for whatever I needed.
I had let those calls go to voicemail.
Not because I suspected him then.
I hadn't.
Not yet.
I had let them go because I couldn't speak to anyone who knew David without feeling like I was standing at the edge of something I might fall into.
I needed those fourteen days to be mine alone.
It was on day nine that I found his name.
I had been working through the second laptop's files in a systematic grid — folder by folder, the way Reese had coached me in that first phone call.
Most of it was what I expected: shell company documentation, wire transfer records, the kind of financial architecture that takes years to build and looks completely legitimate until someone who knows what to look for examines the load-bearing walls.
Then I opened a subfolder labeled simply *PH.*
Forty-seven files.
I had called Reese at eleven-thirty that night.
He had answered on the second ring.
"I found a second party," I said.
A pause.
"Name?"
"Patrick Hale.
He's David's business partner."
Another pause, longer.
"Mrs.
Vance, I need you to stop opening files and step away from the laptop.
Don't touch anything else tonight.
I'll have someone there in the morning."
"Is he already on your radar?"
The pause that followed that question was its own answer.
---
Now, sitting in Carol's car, I thought about Patrick's voicemails.
The warmth in his voice.
The specific way he had said Lily's name — *she was a beautiful child* — as though she were already past tense before I had told him anything.
I had listened to those voicemails on day ten, after Reese's team had come and gone with a forensic copy of the laptop.
I had listened to them three times.
*She was a beautiful child.*
Not *she is.* Not *I can't imagine what you're going through.* Past tense, immediate, certain.
He had known she was gone before I told him.
Which meant David had told him.
Which meant that on the same night I was sitting beside my daughter's bed holding her cold hand, David had been on that yacht telling Patrick Hale that Lily had passed — and neither of them had called me back.
The front door of the house was still open.
I heard a new voice now.
Sharp, female, coming from inside.
Julianne.
"I don't know anything about any of this.
I want to leave.
You cannot keep me here."
One of the troopers said something I couldn't hear.
"I am not his wife," Julianne said, louder.
"I am not involved in any of this.
I came back from a vacation.
That is all I did."
Carol shifted in her seat.
"She's going to try to walk."
"She can't," I said.
"Reese told me she received two wire transfers from the Cayman account.
Forty thousand dollars, eight months apart.
He thinks she was a courier.
She carried documents across the border in that designer luggage."
Carol was quiet for a moment.
"The luggage in your garage."
"The luggage in my garage."
I had photographed every piece of it the week before the trip.
Reese had been very specific about that — photograph everything, touch nothing, document the condition and location.
I had done it at two in the morning with my phone flashlight, crouching in my own garage, while David slept upstairs.
Inside the house, Julianne's voice had gone quiet.
One of the troopers appeared in the doorway briefly, then stepped back inside.
My phone buzzed.
A text from a number I didn't recognize — then immediately recognized, because Reese had told me he would use this number for field communications.
*Second subject secured.
Cooperation likely.
Stand by.*
I showed the screen to Carol without a word.
She read it.
Looked up at me.
"What does cooperation likely mean?" she asked.
"It means Julianne is going to tell them everything she knows about Patrick," I said.
"In exchange for whatever she can get."
Carol looked back at the house.
"Will that be enough?"
I thought about the forty-seven files in the PH subfolder.
The wire transfer records.
The routing numbers.
The one document I had found on day twelve that I had not yet told anyone about except Reese — the document that had made him go very quiet on the phone and say, carefully, *Mrs.
Vance, I need you to understand that this changes the scope of what we're dealing with.*
"It'll be enough," I said.
My phone buzzed again.
This time it was a number I knew immediately.
Patrick Hale.
The screen lit up with his name and I stared at it for three full seconds before it stopped ringing.
Then a text arrived.
*Maya.
We need to talk before this goes any further.
There are things about David you don't know.
Things that will hurt you more than they hurt him.
Call me back.
Please.*
Carol read it over my shoulder.
"He knows," she said.
"Yes."
"What are you going to do?"
I set the phone face-down on my knee.
"I'm going to let Reese do his job," I said.
But I was thinking about that last line.
*Things that will hurt you more than they hurt him.* It was the kind of sentence designed to make a person hesitate.
To introduce doubt.
To suggest that the truth, fully known, would be a wound rather than a weapon.
David had used sentences like that for fourteen years.
I had learned, finally, not to stop moving when I heard them.
But Patrick's text sat in my chest differently than David's words ever had.
May you like
Because Patrick knew things David didn't.
And somewhere in those forty-seven files, I was fairly certain I had not yet found all of them.
