Episode 8
1494 Words
The Recording
Dorian set the recorder on the desk.
They stood side by side in the pool of light from the desk lamp and looked at it the way you look at something before you do the thing that cannot be undone. The study was silent around them. The house was silent beyond it. Outside, the winter's night pressed against the windows and the grounds were dark and still.
Mara reached out and pressed play.
Static first. Then the sound of a room. Ambient noise. The clink of glass. Voices in the background, indistinct. And then two voices became distinct, as though the recorder had been moved closer to its subjects or its subjects had moved closer to it.
The first voice was Vincent Voss. She recognized it immediately. That particular quality of quiet authority that did not need volume to fill a space.
The second voice took her a moment longer.
When she recognized it, she made no sound. She simply became very still.
It was Eli Crane.
Not the Eli Crane of pressed suits and police procedure and spiral notebooks. This was a younger voice. Less controlled at the edges. The voice of a man who was either very frightened or very angry and was not yet skilled enough at hiding either.
"You said you had information about my father," Eli's voice said from the recorder. "That's the only reason I'm here."
"Sit down, Eli," Vincent said.
"I'd rather stand."
"Suit yourself." The sound of liquid being poured. "Your father was a good man. I want you to know I believed that. I still believe it."
"My father is in prison because of you."
"Your father is in prison because he made choices." Vincent's voice was entirely without apology. "Choices I warned him against. Choices he made anyway because he thought doing the right thing was more important than the consequences."
"He was going to expose your operation."
"Yes."
"So you framed him."
A pause. "I protected my family."
"You destroyed mine."
The recording was quiet for a moment. Just the ambient sound of the room and the clinking of ice in a glass.
"Why am I here," Eli said. His voice had changed. Harder now. More controlled.
"Because you have been building a case against me for three years," Vincent said pleasantly. "I know this. You know I know this. I thought it was time we spoke honestly."
"You want me to stop."
"I want to offer you something better than a case you will never successfully prosecute." The sound of movement. A chair. "I know where the evidence is that it will free your father. The real evidence. The documentation that proves the charges against him were fabricated."
The silence that followed was the longest on the recording. Mara counted eight seconds.
"What do you want," Eli said finally.
"Nothing dramatic," Vincent said. "I want you to redirect your professional attention. Away from my family. Away from my business. There are other criminals in this city, detectives. Concentrate on them."
"You want me to walk away."
"I want you to make a practical decision."
"And my father."
"Will be home within six months of our agreement."
Another silence. Shorter this time.
"I need to think," Eli said.
"Of course," Vincent said warmly. "Take a week."
The recording ended.
The study was absolutely silent.
Mara stood looking at the recorder and thought about Eli Crane sitting across from her at the folding table in the storage room on the night of the wedding. Those grey eyes. That notebook. The careful precise questions. The way he had looked at her when she said I don't," in response to his suggestion that people make mistakes.
She thought about the date on the list beside his name. Four years ago.
"Did he take the offer," she said.
"I don't know," Dorian said.
"Your father would know."
"Yes."
"Is his father actually in prison?"
Dorian moved to the desk and sat on its edge and crossed his arms. "Thomas Crane. Convicted of evidence tampering and corruption fourteen years ago. He has been in Voss City Correctional for eleven years."
"Still there?"
"As far as I know."
She looked at the list again. Eli Crane's name. The date. "If he had taken the offer, his father would have been released within six months. That would have been three and a half years ago." She paused. "Is Thomas Crane still in prison?"
Dorian pulled out his phone. He made a call she did not hear the other side of, spoke for three sentences, and ended it. He looked at her.
"Still there," he said.
She absorbed that.
"So he didn't take it," she said.
"Apparently not."
"Which means he has been investigating your family for four more years while your father holds evidence that could free his father." She looked at the recorder. "Which means Eli Crane is either the most principled man in this city or he has a different plan entirely."
"Or both," Dorian said.
She picked up the recorder and turned it over in her hands. "There are more recordings on this."
"Almost certainly."
"We need to listen to all of them."
"Not tonight," Dorian said. He stood and looked at her with an expression that was more open than she had seen. Something about the darkness and the late hours and the weight of what they had just heard had moved something in him, shifted it slightly toward visible. "Tonight we put this back, and we locked the cabinet, and we acted as though we were never here."
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow we will figure out who put that box in your dressing room and why."
She looked at him. "You have a theory."
"I have a suspicion," he said carefully. "I am not ready to say it out loud."
She thought about Vivienne in the garden. The warmth that covered everything like fresh paint over old walls. The thing she had seen move through those brown eyes when Hartwell's name was mentioned.
"I think you are ready," she said. "I think you just don't want to be."
His jaw tightened. He said nothing. Which was, she was learning, its own kind of answer.
She put the recorder back on the bottom shelf exactly as it had been. She locked the cabinet. She held the key in her hand and looked at it.
"I'm keeping this," she said.
Dorian looked at her for a moment and then nodded once.
They left the study the way they had entered it. Quietly, with the desk lamp off and the door pulled shut and the house sleeping around them as they moved through its corridors and up its stairs. At the door of the bedroom, Dorian stopped.
"Mara."
She turned.
He stood in the corridor with the low light behind him and looked at her with those deep unreadable eyes that were slightly more readable than they had been a week ago.
"I know this is not the marriage either of us chose," he said. "But I need you to know that whatever happens with this investigation, whatever comes out about my family, I will not let them use you as the answer to their problems."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"I appreciate that," she said. "But I should tell you something, Dorian."
"What?"
"I am not waiting to be protected," she said quietly. "I am finding out who did this. And I am going to bring them down myself. With or without your help."
Something moved through his expression that she thought might have been the beginning of respect. A real kind, not a performed kind.
"With," he said. "If you'll allow it."
She considered him standing in the corridor of his family's house with the weight of everything his name carried and the particular exhaustion of a man who had been upright under that weight for a very long time.
"Goodnight, Dorian," she said.
She went inside and closed the door and stood with her back against it in the dark room and breathed.
Her phone lit up on the bedside table.
The unknown number.
She crossed the room and answered it before the second pulse.
"You listened to the recording," the voice said. Not a question.
"How do you know that," she said.
"Because I put the recorder there for you to find," the voice said. "Along with everything else."
"Who are you," she said.
A pause. Longer than the previous ones. As though the answer was being weighed one final time before being released.
"My name is Thomas Crane," the voice said.
The room tilted slightly.
"Eli's father," she said.
"Yes," Thomas Crane said. "And the man who knows exactly who poisoned Phillip Hartwell. And why. And who is going to be next?"
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Who," she said.
"You," he said simply. "Mrs. Voss. You are going to be next."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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