Chapter 4 - The Golf Partner
"She's not in the office, Tyler," a second voice said. Mark.
I heard their footsteps moving through the kitchen, the sound of the refrigerator door opening. "The old lady downstairs must have her," Mark continued. "Her car wasn't in her spot when we pulled in."
"Good," Tyler said. "That gives us twenty minutes to find the ledger and the keys to the safe-deposit box. If Maya found that bucket on the balcony, she’s already called her lawyer."
"She didn't find it," Mark said, his voice closer now, right outside the office door. "The paint bucket fell from the top floor. She thinks the red on the ground was just a freak accident with the maintenance crew. She’s too stupid to look under the AC compressor."
"Don't talk about my wife like that," Tyler said, though there was no anger in his voice—only a cold, mechanical amusement. "She’s not stupid. She’s just predictable. You give her a child in danger, and her brain shuts off for forty-eight hours. It’s science."
The door handle of the office rattled.
I stepped back against the wall behind the door, my heart hammering against my ribs so loudly I was certain they could hear it through the wood.
"It’s locked," Mark said.
"The key’s in the trophy," Tyler replied.
A pause. Then the sound of Tyler chuckling. "Well, looks like she did find something. The trophy’s smashed."
The door was kicked open with a violent explosion of splintered pine.
Mark stepped into the room first, his golf shirt damp with sweat, his eyes scanning the desk. He didn't see me behind the door. But Tyler did.
As he followed his brother into the small room, his eyes met mine in the reflection of the glass-fronted bookcase against the wall. He didn't yell. He didn't turn around to grab me. He simply reached backward with his left hand and slammed the heavy office door shut, locking the three of us inside the soundproofed room.
"Maya," Tyler said, turning to face me with a small, tired smile. He looked at the passports in my hand. "You always had to look behind the curtain, didn't you?"
"You were going to take her," I whispered, holding the papers against my chest like a shield. "You were going to take my baby to Canada."
"Our baby," he corrected me, taking a slow step forward. Mark moved to the left, cutting off my path to the desk phone. "And it wasn't Canada permanently. Just until the restructuring was done. If you hadn't come home early from the store, she would have been 'rescued' by me. I would have been the hero who climbed over the railing while you were gone, Maya. I would have filed for emergency custody based on your neglect—leaving her alone while you went shopping."
The horror of it was perfect. The text messages he had sent me—the ones that looked like he was the one abandoning her—they were sent from my old phone, the one he had taken from the kitchen drawer the night before. He had swapped the SIM cards. To the police, on paper, it would look like I was the one who had texted him saying I was leaving Lily on the balcony because she wouldn't stop crying.
He hadn't been building a smoke screen for a bank fraud. He had been building a trap for me.
"Give me the passports, Maya," Tyler said, extending his hand. "And the silver recorder. I know you have it. Mark saw the blue paint on your screwdriver in the kitchen."
I looked at Mark. His face was pale, but there was no sympathy there. He was a partner in the firm; if Tyler went down, his life was over too.
"No," I said.
I didn't run for the door. I ran for the window.
It was a fixed transom, six feet off the ground, but I didn't need to open it. I grabbed Tyler’s heavy, brass "Executive of the Year" award from the shelf and threw it through the glass.
The window shattered, a shower of sharp fragments raining down onto the balcony outside.
"Help!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, my voice echoing through the courtyard of the apartment complex. "Help! He’s trying to kill me!"
Mark lunged at me, his heavy hands grabbing my hair, dragging me backward onto the carpet. The passports flew from my grip, scattering across the floor. Tyler dropped to his knees, his fingers scrambling for the silver voice recorder that had slipped from my purse.
May you like
But before his hand could close around the metal, a bright, white light flashed through the broken transom window.
It wasn't the sun. It was a drone—a high-end, commercial quadcopter, hovering three feet outside the broken glass, its high-definition camera lens pointed directly down at Tyler’s face.
