Love Me In The Dark

CHAPTER NINE: The Brother

Eleven days into the investigation, I met someone I least expected. At the lobby of a coffee shop three blocks from Vael Industries' head office.

It was not a source meeting or a strategy session. Damien was meeting me there to hand over the communication logs, which his head of IT had extracted from the internal system after forty-eight hours.

This fellow just arrived…without warning.

Thirty-one, maybe thirty-two. Dark-haired. He had an air that took me a moment to identify. Then, I did. He was extremely easy to be in a space with. The warm ease of someone who makes strangers feel immediately at home, who has the gift of making the temperature of a place adjust to suit him without anyone noticing.

He smiled when he saw me, and it was a genuinely heartfelt smile. The kind that reaches the eyes rather than stopping at the mouth.

"Ms Voss," he said. "I've read almost everything you've written. I’m please to meet you in person."

I went still, very briefly, for reasons I couldn't immediately name.

"My brother, Rowan" Damien said. Not awkward about it. Not formal. The way you introduce someone who is simply part of your life. He must have noticed my awkward silence and stepped in to save the moment.

Rowan Vael smiled when Damien introduced us. The smile was warm and immediate and capable of melting snow.

I took his extended hand. As he placed his left hand to cover my hand, I noticed a wedding band tan line on his finger. I faintly recalled Damien saying something about Rowan’s marital crisis.

"The pleasure is mine," I said in a friendly tone.

"Damien says you're relentless."

"He said that," I inquired. Not a question.

"He said it like it was a good thing."

Rowan said this easily, no edge to it. I noted the ease because I take note everything. Then he excused himself to take a call and stepped away to the far end of the lobby. Damien handed me the envelope with the communication logs and we exchanged exactly twelve quick sentences about what I was looking for and how long it would take. Then, his phone rang too and he raised a hand in apology and stepped away to answer it.

I was standing alone in the lobby for approximately ninety seconds with the envelope in my hand when Rowan came back.

"About what you are investigating…Good luck with it," he said. To whatever Damien had told him, which was not the details but perhaps the shape of it. "He needs someone who won't stop."

"I don't stop," I said.

Damien returned sooner. The moment passed, and we all said goodbye on the pavement outside. I walked back to my car with the envelope. The abrupt appearance of Rowan at the lobby was fast receding in my mind. To me, he was just a brother to a man I’d been spending evenings with for nearly two weeks. Nothing more.

I filed him there and opened the envelope in the car and started reading. I looked up briefly to see Damian and Rowan driving off, one after the other. In different directions.

The communication logs were forty-seven pages. A car wasn’t the best place to wade through all that. So, I went inside the coffee chop, ordered coffee and started sniffing through the pages.

On page twenty-three, I found the phone number. The one Hale called at seven-eighteen the morning Dell's body was found. Traced now, through the logs and a cross-reference Damien's IT contact had helpfully included, to a logistics company registered in the south harbour district.

+++++++

The logistics company. I knew that name, instantly. It appeared three times in the dock manifests in Petra's notebook. It was listed as a vehicle registration prefix connected to two of the container movements. I brought out the notebook from my bag and checked. Yes. Three times. The same prefix.

I sat back in my chair.

Hale made a call to the logistics company on the morning of Dell's death. The company was connected to the south dock operations. That’s the thread I needed. The connection I’d been waiting eight days to make. There was still the question of where Hale was a week before his appointment as COO of Cirrus. I made a mental note to tackle that next. It may be relevant to the story or not. Afterall, there were already enough facts to nail him.

Hale called the operation's logistics contact four hours before Dell's body is publicly reported. Was he managing or directing response to the situation?

I called Damien from the car park. He picked, immediately.

"The phone call," I said, without preamble. "I've got it. The number traces to the logistics company in the dock manifests. He's connected directly to the operation. Not just the financial architecture. The physical operation."

A silence. Then: "You're certain?"

"I'm certain."

Another silence. Longer. "Then we publish, yeah?"

"Not yet," I said. Because, somewhere in my chest, was the professional reflex that had saved me from expensive mistakes before. "Forty-eight more hours. I want the Pemberton documents. The original Halcyon authorization filings. We need to have the whole architecture from origin to execution."

"I'll request them formally tonight," Damien said.

"On second thought, I think it’s better I do that, from a professional point of view. I know what to do," I said. He didn’t argue. The main reason I wanted to personally request the Pemberton documents was because at this point, even Damian was still, well, a suspect.

"Damien. In the meantime, don't say anything to anyone about where we are. Not your PR team, not your lawyers, not —"

"Not Rowan," he said. Quietly. As if he already knew that was what I was going to say.

"Not Rowan," I confirmed. Not because I had any reason to say it about Rowan specifically. Only because the anonymous phone call, the voice that said *the wrong man,* had left me with an unspecified wariness about loose threads. Rowan was a loose thread I had not yet examined. He was Damien's brother. With unfettered access to Damien. He knew the investigation existed. Those were not accusations. They were just facts I was keeping separate from my certainty about Hale.

"Understood," Damien said.

I drove to the warehouse that evening with the communication logs and Petra's notebook and a story in my head about Conrad Hale that was, by any reasonable measure, complete. The only missing piece was the original documents: The Pemberton filing. I wanted it because I was thorough, not because I expected it to change anything.

As I entered the warehouse, I made a mental note of the fact that I hadn’t noticed the grey sedan for some days. Could it be they were lying low? Or did they change strategy?

I wasn’t sure what was behind it.