Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 11

The Envelope

Dorian camquestionat noon.

Mara heard his car on the gravel drive and watched from the bedroom window as he stepped out and stood for a moment in the cold air looking up at the house the way he sometimes did, as though reminding himself of something. He was alone. No driver today. He had taken his own car, which meant whatever he had gone to do this morning, he did not want anyone to know where he had gone.

She met him in the entrance hall.

He looked at her and something in his face told her immediately that whatever he had found out this morning was not good news and was not small news and was going to require them to sit down.

They went to the study on the second floor. Not Vincent's study. Dorian's own. Smaller, warmer, with books that had actually been read and a desk that looked like work was happening at it rather than a performance.

He sat. She sat across from him.

"Phillip Hartwell had a daughter," he said.

She had not known that. "I didn't know that."

"Neither did I," he said. "Until this morning. She is twenty-nine years old. Her name is Anna. She was raised by her mother in a different city entirely. Hartwell paid for everything quietly. Her education. Her apartment. Her life. No public connection between them."

"Why hidden," Mara said.

"Because her mother," Dorian said carefully, "was someone my father paid to disappear eleven years ago."

The study was very quiet.

"The document," Mara said. "The agreement. The thing Hartwell knew was that your father had been paying him to stay silent about it."

"Yes," Dorian said. "Hartwell witnessed something eleven years ago. Something my father did. Something that involved a woman who was subsequently paid a very large sum of money and relocated and has not been heard from since." He paused. "Anna Hartwell has been looking for her mother for three years."

"Did she find her," Mara said.

"I don't know yet," he said. "But I know that six weeks ago Anna Hartwell arrived in Voss City for the first time in her life."

Six weeks ago. The dinner. Hartwell is on the terrace finding Mara alone. Starting to tell her something and stopping when Vincent appeared.

"He was trying to warn me," she said slowly. "On the terrace. He wasn't just talking about the marriage arrangement. He knew something was going to happen. He was frightened."

"He had reason to be," Dorian said. "If Anna was asking questions and getting close to answers, anyone connected to what her father witnessed eleven years ago had reason to be frightened."

"Including Hartwell himself," she said. "Because if Anna found the truth, it would destroy the silence he had been paid to keep. Which destroyed his protection."

"Which made him a liability," Dorian said.

They looked at each other across the desk and the shape of it assembled itself between them. Hartwell knows too much and is becoming dangerous. His daughter arrived in the city and started to pull threads. Someone decided that the simplest solution was to remove Hartwell before the threads came loose.

"Where is Anna now," Mara said.

"That," Dorian said, "is what I spent this morning trying to find out."

"And?"

"She checked into a hotel in the Meridian district four days before the wedding," he said. "She checked out the morning after."

"She was at the wedding," Mara said.

Dorian looked at her steadily. "There was a guest who was never on the list," he said. "Eli mentioned it during one of his visits. An unidentified woman was seen in the peripheral footage from the hotel security cameras. Never close enough to identify clearly."

"Anna Hartwell," Mara said.

"Almost certainly."

"Which means she saw everything," Mara said. "She was there when her father died."

The study absorbed that. A young woman was watching her father die in a room full of people, none of whom knew she existed.

"We need to find her," Mara said.

"Before Eli does," Dorian said. "Or before whoever killed her father decides she is the next thread to pull."

She retrieved the envelope at two in the afternoon.

She had hidden it the morning after the wedding in a place she was confident no search for the mansion would find it because it was not in the mansion. The garden had a stone wall along its eastern boundary, old enough that the mortar between certain stones had loosened over the decades. She had found the right stone on her second morning in the house during one of her window-watching sessions and had noted it the way she noted everything that might be useful.

She crossed the garden in her coat with her hands in her pockets and the cold winter light flat and grey above the bare hedges. She reached the wall and found the stone, worked it loose with careful fingers, and retrieved the envelope from the space behind it.

Still sealed. Still intact. Exactly as she had left it.

She put the stone back and walked inside.

Eli came at three.

She had called him after retrieving the envelope. He arrived without the second detective this time and without his notebook, which she thought might be deliberate. A signal of some kind. That this was outside the official parameters.

They sat in the second-floor study rather than the sitting room. Dorian was present. The three of them arranged around the desk in a configuration that would have seemed impossible six days ago and was now simply necessary.

She put the envelope on the desk.

Both men looked at it.

"Three days before the wedding," she said, "I went into my father's study while he was out of the room. I had been looking for the original contract. The marriage arrangement. I wanted to understand exactly what had been agreed and what leverage I had." She paused. "I found the contract. But I also found something else. Documents that were not filed with anything else. Hidden inside a false bottom in his desk drawer."

"You knew about the false bottom," Eli said.

"I put things in it when I was fourteen," she said. "My father never knew I knew."

She opened the envelope and laid the documents on the desk carefully. Three pages. She had read them so many times she could have recited them. She watched Eli and Dorian read them now and tracked their faces as they moved through the language and reached the part that changed everything.

Eli went very still.

"This is a record of payments," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"From Vincent Voss," he said. "To a list of recipients." His eyes moved down the page. "These are payments to officials. Judges. Department head." He stopped. "This name."

"Yes," she said.

"Commissioner Hale," he said quietly. "Our current Commissioner of Police."

"Has been on the Voss payroll for nine years," she said. "According to that document."

The study was completely silent.

"This is why your investigation kept losing ground," Mara said. "This is why Lena Park retired suddenly. This is why the witness against me was placed and then removed when it became more useful for her to recant. Someone at the top of your department has been managing this investigation on Vincent Voss's behalf from the beginning."

Eli looked at the document for a long time. She watched something move through his face that was complicated and old and had the quality of a man seeing the complete shape of something he had only ever seen pieces of.

"If this document is authenticated," he said, "it dismantles the entire leadership structure of the department."

"Yes," she said.

"It also makes every official move I make from this point dangerous," he said. "If Hale knows I have this—"

"He cannot know," Dorian said. It was the first time he had spoken since Eli arrived. Both of them looked at him. "Nothing that happens next goes through official channels until we are ready to move on all of it simultaneously. If one piece surfaces early, the others disappear."

Eli looked at Dorian with an expression that had the particular quality of a man being forced to agree with someone he would strongly prefer to disagree with.

"He's right," Mara said.

"I know," Eli said. He looked back at the document. "Where did your father get this?"

"I don't know," she said. "But I intend to ask him."

"That is not a conversation you should have alone," Eli said.

"I know," she said. "Which is why I am going tomorrow, and you are coming with me."

Eli looked at her. Then at Dorian. Dorian's expression was unreadable, but she had learned to read the unreadable parts and what she read was not objectionable.

"There is one more thing," she said.

She told them about Anna Hartwell.

The study went quiet in a different way than it had been quiet before. The kind of quiet that comes when a new piece arrives and the picture it completes is larger and more dangerous than the one that existed a moment ago.

"A woman who witnessed her father's murder," Eli said slowly. "Who knows what he knew. Who had been looking for her mother for three years? He looked at Mara. "She is not hiding."

"No," Mara agreed.

"She is waiting," he said.

"Yes," Mara said. "The question is what for."

Her phone lit up on the desk between them.

Unknown number.

She answered it on speaker without hesitating.

But it was not Thomas Crane's voice this time.

It was a young woman's voice. Quiet and steady and carrying underneath it the particular tone of someone who has been waiting a long time to make a specific phone call and has finally decided the time has come.

"Mrs. Voss," the voice said. "My name is Anna Hartwell. I think it is time we met."