Chapter 18 - THE PREPAID NUMBER
The prepaid device didn’t stay anonymous for long.
Marcus traced location overlaps and payment patterns with boring persistence that made miracles unnecessary.
The burner had been activated at a gas station two towns over. Two refills were purchased with a debit card linked to a local handyman business.
Owner: Russell Dane.
I knew the name immediately.
Russ had done repair work for Mercer Utility’s storage yard for years. He also fixed gutters for Helen every fall and once replaced a pump at our house while Nathan was hospitalized.
Not family.
Worse in some ways.
An ordinary man whose loyalty could be purchased.
Briggs brought him in.
At first he denied everything.
Then she showed him the payment logs, the message to the burner, and neighborhood footage placing his truck near Dana’s street the night Wren’s window was filmed.
Russ broke fast.
He said Cole hired him for “retrieval work.”
The recorder. Nathan’s laptop. Any files in the den. Watch the lake house if I went there.
“Did you know why?” Briggs asked.
Russ looked sick.
“Cole said Evelyn was unstable and hiding company property.”
Not murder.
Not medication.
Just another man recruited with the story that the widow was dangerous.
Then Briggs asked the question that mattered.
“Did you ever go into the house before the break-in?”
Russ hesitated.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“The week Nathan died.”
My whole body stiffened.
“Why?”
“Cole wanted copies of hard drives from Nathan’s office.”
He said Cole gave him a spare key Nathan never knew existed from an old renovation phase.
That explained months of tiny wrongness I could never prove.
A drawer slightly shifted.
Papers not quite where I left them.
Nathan’s sense that someone had been through the house.
Russ swore he never touched medication. Maybe true. Maybe not. But he admitted something useful.
“The night before Nathan went down, Cole was desperate. He said if Nathan made it to the lawyer, everyone was finished.”
Everyone.
Plural.
Cole.
Helen.
Maybe Russ if he knew too much.
Then Briggs asked whether Russ ever saw Helen directly involved.
“Once,” he said.
“Where?”
“At Helen’s garage. Cole gave her a folder and said, ‘If he dies before signing, you know what to say about his head.’”
My skin went cold.
About his head.
Not his heart.
His head.
They were preparing the mental instability story before Nathan died.
Leah immediately moved to preserve Russ’s statement.
Not because he was suddenly a hero.
Because liars can still become good witnesses when their lies are documented, their motives known, and their facts corroborated.
Then Marcus found something inside Nathan’s hard-drive mirror from the shed files.
A draft letter to the board of Mercer Utility naming both Cole and Helen and recommending Cole’s immediate removal pending investigation.
Nathan never sent it.
Date saved: March 21, 11:08 p.m.
May you like
Only hours before he collapsed.
📖 Russ confirmed Cole was desperate to stop Nathan from reaching a lawyer, but Nathan’s last unsent letter showed that by the night before he died, he was finally ready to remove both Cole and Helen from the company. 👇
