Chapter 3 - WHO HAD ACCESS
They did not let Emily go home.
They also did not arrest her.
Instead, they sat her in the back of a patrol SUV while bomb technicians surrounded her car under floodlights at the roadside.
Ryan stayed close to the bomb team. Every few minutes he looked toward Emily with the face of a man trying to think like both a cop and a human being at the same time.
Three hours later, at the station, he finally came to her.
“What was in the trunk?” Emily asked.
He held her gaze.
“A lockbox rigged to an incendiary trigger. Not a major bomb. More like something meant to ignite the contents if the trunk opened badly.”
“To destroy evidence.”
“Probably.”
“And me?”
Ryan did not lie.
“Possibly.”
She closed her eyes.
“There was also a bloodstained laptop bag,” he continued. “Forty-three thousand in cash. A handgun. Two burner phones. And a red file marked Willow Creek.”
Emily felt cold all over.
Every single thing that could ruin her was there.
The county detective, Nora Delgado, interviewed her for nearly two hours. Emily told the truth: about Peter’s warning, about the fake vendors, about the dinner, about Thomas handling her keys, and about the money she herself had quietly frozen when she saw suspicious transfers.
Nora listened without emotion.
“Have you moved money off company books?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Eight hundred thousand.”
“With whose authority?”
“My own.”
Nora leaned back.
“There it is.”
Emily stared.
“What?”
“The part that makes your story sound honest and guilty at the same time.”
Emily hated her for being right.
Near dawn, Valerie and Thomas arrived at the station with Carter Development’s outside lawyer, Evelyn Hart.
Valerie rose as Emily was led into the conference room.
“Oh, Emily.”
As if she were visiting a daughter delayed at an airport.
Emily stopped in the doorway.
“You put that in my car.”
Valerie did not blink.
“This is exactly the kind of emotional leap we feared.”
Thomas spoke calmly.
“You left this house upset. Your mother and I were home afterward. We have witnesses. We do not know what happened after you drove away.”
The lie was ready.
Perfectly ready.
Valerie folded her hands.
“We do know Peter Nolan has been unstable. We also know Emily has accessed company records without authorization and moved company funds.”
Ryan, standing just behind Nora, went still.
Valerie continued in the same controlled voice.
“When evidence is found inside a person’s own vehicle, ordinary explanations should not be ignored simply because those explanations are painful.”
Emily almost admired the sentence.
Almost.
Then Nora’s desk phone rang with a recorded voicemail from an unknown source.
A man’s weak, ragged voice filled the room.
“Emily, if this reaches you, don’t trust the warehouse report. And don’t let them erase what’s in Storage Unit 112.”
Emily stopped breathing.
“Peter?”
The message ended.
Ryan and Nora exchanged a look.
May you like
If Peter Nolan was alive enough to call, then the whole case had just become something worse than a simple frame-up.
It had become unfinished.
