Chapter 3 - Unit 17I wanted to drive to the storage facility that night.
Claire refused to go without speaking to a lawyer first, and this time I listened.
Leah Park had handled contracts for my construction company for twelve years. She had never represented the foundation or Celeste. At seven the next morning, she sat at Claire’s kitchen table with Daniel’s letter laid flat between us.
Emma was asleep upstairs. Claire’s small house smelled of coffee and the cinnamon toast she had left warming for her daughter.
Leah read the letter twice.
“The handwriting looks like Daniel’s,” she said. “We’ll have it examined. Keep the envelope, the key, and every message exactly as they are.”
“Can we go to the unit?” I asked.
“You can ask the manager to let you in. If there’s a dispute over who rented it, call me before you enter.”
Claire slid her phone across the table. “I received a message too.”
Hers showed the same picture. The words beneath it were different.
You had your chance to leave town.
Leah photographed the screen. “Did you recognize the number?”
“No.”
“You’ll tell Detective Torres when she calls you back,” Leah said.
Claire had already contacted the detective who had handled the original fraud complaint. Maria Torres had moved from that assignment, but Claire remembered her as the one person who had asked questions before the case was closed.
At nine, we drove to a storage facility west of the river. Leah followed in her own car. I had asked Rosa to stay with Emma, and Claire had made Rosa promise she would not let anyone from the foundation through the door.
The manager, a young man named Owen, checked the key and Daniel’s name on the rental record.
“You’re his father?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
His expression changed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d died.”
Claire went still. “The payments never stopped?”
“They’re automatic. Same card every month.”
Daniel’s card had been closed after his death. Leah asked Owen to print the payment history. The last six months had come from a bank account neither Claire nor I recognized.
Unit 17 was at the end of an outdoor row. Its padlock was new.
The brass key did not fit it.
Owen examined the rental log on his tablet. “A new lock was put on this morning. Tenant request, five twelve a.m.”
“Who made the request?” Leah asked.
Owen turned the screen toward her. The signature read Daniel Mercer.
Claire made a sound I had never heard from her before.
Owen’s eyes widened as he looked from the signature to Daniel’s death notice on Leah’s phone.
“Don’t open it,” Leah told him. “Show us the camera footage.”
At five twelve that morning, Elliot had arrived in a gray SUV. His right wrist was bandaged. He signed the form with his left hand, waited while an employee cut off the old lock, and went inside Unit 17. Twenty minutes later, he carried out a flat metal case.
“What else was in there?” Claire asked Owen.
“I didn’t see. He asked me to stay at the office.”
Leah called Torres. While she spoke, Owen unlocked the new padlock and lifted the door with us watching from outside.
The unit was almost empty. A shelf ran along the back wall, and pale rectangles on the concrete floor marked where boxes had stood.
We waited for Torres to arrive before anyone went in.
She came with another detective, photographed the unit, and asked Owen to preserve the footage. Then she stepped aside and let Claire and me look around.
I had expected to find Daniel there somehow: a jacket, his handwriting, evidence that he had known his life was nearly over. There was only dust and the smell of cardboard.
Claire crouched beside the shelf.
“Daniel made this,” she said.
“How can you tell?”
“He hated wasting good wood. That board came from a kitchen cabinet we replaced.”
She ran a finger beneath it and found two small screws. Torres brought a screwdriver from her car. When she removed the board, a folded sheet slipped from the hollow space behind it.
It was a copy of a foundation invoice.
Harbor House had supposedly paid $486,000 for temporary beds during a winter renovation. The invoice named forty-eight rooms. At the bottom, Daniel had written:
Ask how many keys the building has.
Torres studied the page. “Do you know?”
“Harbor House has twenty rooms,” Claire said. “I helped plan the renovation. Half were closed that winter.”
Leah took a photograph before Torres bagged it.
It was one invoice. Elliot had taken the case, and he could already be across the state. Still, the page gave Torres a reason to request the complete Harbor House accounts.
Outside, Claire leaned against her car.
“I found invoices like that a year and a half ago,” she told me. “I told Daniel. He thought Elliot had coded expenses under the wrong property. We fought because I wouldn’t let it go.”
“I knew he was asking questions.”
“You knew?”
“He came to me twice. He didn’t have the records with him, and I sent him back to Elliot.”
Claire looked toward the row of storage units. “You could have asked him why he was afraid.”
“I should have.”
Her phone rang before she could answer.
The caller introduced himself as Ben Harker. He owned the garage that had inspected Daniel’s car after the crash.
“I saw your name in the news this morning,” he said. “They’re saying you stole from the foundation again.”
Claire switched to speaker. “Why are you calling me?”
“Because Daniel came to my shop the day he died. I gave him a ride to pick up a loaner car from your foundation’s motor pool.”
Torres, standing a few feet away, raised her hand. Claire told Ben the detective was with us.
“I gave a statement back then,” Ben said. “A man from Mercer security came by after. He told me I had my cars mixed up.”
“Did you?” Torres asked.
“No. And last week I found the picture I took when Daniel left. I knew it was his loaner. I can read the vehicle number in it.”
“Can you bring us the original?” Torres asked.
“I’m at the shop until six.”
He hesitated.
“There’s something else. I looked at the crash report after they sent that security man. It lists the wrong vehicle.”
Claire gripped the phone.
“What vehicle was Daniel driving?” she asked.
“A silver foundation sedan,” Ben said. “Fleet number forty-two.”
May you like
Torres wrote it down.
The official crash report said Daniel had died in his own black SUV.
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