Chương 5
“They were protecting my family.”
“You instructed them to confine a civilian.”
“I instructed them to hold the estate.”
“You used the phrase ‘take him alive.’”
“He had just beaten Mara.”
Nora removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Adrian, I am not your enemy.”
“You’re speaking like one.”
“I’m speaking like an attorney whose client is an organization, not a frightened father with a very expensive temper.”
Reyes looked out at the river.
Adrian sat at the head of the table. His open collar revealed a patch of bruising where Elliot had caught him during the struggle, though no one had seen Elliot strike him. He kept touching the dark wristwatch on his left arm, turning it a few degrees and then back.
“What did police take?” he asked Reyes.
“Video servers, control logs, the wineglass fragments, your radio traffic, Mr. Rourke’s phone, Mara’s phone, and clothing from all three of you. They photographed the table frame and left it under seal at the house.”
“Why leave it?”
“It weighs nearly two hundred pounds and is not going anywhere.”
Adrian looked at Nora. “Get Mara’s statement.”
“No.”
“She needs counsel.”
“I agree. Counsel who does not represent you.”
“She works for this company.”
“She is on medical leave.”
“She is my daughter.”
“That is exactly why you cannot direct her legal response.”
Adrian’s hand flattened on the table.
Reyes turned from the window. “She told you to come alone.”
He looked at her.
“When she called,” Reyes continued. “You put the phone on speaker for six seconds. She said she needed you and told you not to call police. You brought us anyway.”
“I did not bring you inside.”
“You placed us on the property.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
Reyes’s face did not change. “That question will not help you.”
“Would you have preferred I found her dead?”
“No.”
“Then stop speaking as though procedure mattered more than her breathing.”
Nora closed her folder. “Procedure is what keeps fear from becoming permission.”
Adrian stood.
The movement made Reyes shift her weight, not from fear but habit.
He noticed. For the first time since dawn, something like shame entered his expression.
“I need air,” he said.
No one reminded him that the windows did not open.
He left the room.
Nora waited until the door closed. “Will you cooperate with the county review?”
Reyes looked at the black radio on the table. It had been returned after officers copied its data.
“I will tell them exactly what happened.”
“Even if it hurts him?”
“Especially then.”
Adrian spent ten minutes alone in the executive kitchen, where a machine capable of making twenty kinds of coffee refused to recognize his employee badge. He pressed the screen three times. It displayed an error and asked him to contact an administrator.
A junior analyst entered, saw him, and backed out.
Adrian stared at the closed door.
He had built the company when people still carried paper maps in glove compartments. He had slept on warehouse floors, negotiated with men who arrived armed, and once repaired a truck radiator in the Nevada desert using drinking water and ground pepper. Now a coffee machine required authorization he apparently no longer had.
He pressed the screen again.
Nora found him there.
“The board voted,” she said.
He did not turn.
“You are on administrative leave, effective immediately.”
“Who voted against me?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“It shouldn’t.”
“That means you voted for it.”
“I am not a director.”
“You recommended it.”
“I did.”
The coffee machine hummed and produced nothing.
Adrian placed both hands on the counter. “You know what Rourke is doing.”
“I know what we can prove.”
“He married her to get inside this company.”
“You opposed the marriage before you had evidence.”
“I knew his father.”
“You knew the surname.”
“I knew resentment.”
Nora stood beside him. “You also know control. That does not mean every person you control is plotting against you.”
He looked at her then.
She held his gaze. Nora had worked for him for eighteen years. She had seen him fire men for lying and promote women who contradicted him. She had also seen him buy a competitor because its chief executive insulted Mara at a charity dinner.
“Go home,” she said. “Do not call investigators. Do not call the press. Do not send Reyes after anyone. Let your daughter choose her lawyer.”
“What am I allowed to do?”
“Be her father.”
His expression tightened.
“That is not an insult,” Nora said.
“It sounded like one.”
“Then perhaps you know why.”
Mara left the hospital Sunday afternoon through a service exit to avoid reporters.
Tess drove. They used her old blue Honda because Adrian’s vehicles had already been photographed. The passenger window whistled above forty miles per hour, and a paper cup rolled beneath Mara’s seat every time Tess turned.
No one followed them.
Mara still checked the mirror.
Tess lived in a narrow townhouse near Tarrytown with uneven floors and a kitchen drawer that opened only if lifted first. Adrian had offered a guarded apartment in Manhattan. Mara declined before he finished describing it.
At Tess’s house, she stood for several seconds in the entryway because she could not remember what people normally did upon arriving somewhere safe.
Tess put the hospital bag on the stairs.
“You can take my room.”
“No.”
“You have broken ribs.”
“You have work.”
“I can sleep on the couch.”
“You sleep diagonally. You’ll injure the cat.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“You’ll injure a hypothetical cat.”
Tess took the guest room sheets from the linen closet. “Good. Sarcasm survived.”
Mara sat carefully on the bottom stair.
The house smelled like laundry soap and the rosemary plant Tess kept forgetting to water. Cars passed outside. Someone in the neighboring yard ran a leaf blower despite the wet ground.
Mara listened to the ordinary noise until her eyes filled.
Tess returned and saw her.
May you like
Neither of them mentioned it.
That evening, Mara logged into an old personal cloud account from Tess’s laptop. Her hands shook when the security code arrived. She hated that her body reacted before her mind did. Elliot was not in the room. He was prohibited from contacting her. A county judge had issued a temporary protective order and released him on bond after his attorney argued that Adrian’s violence complicated the allegations.
