“We need to find him first.”
My heart monitor accelerated.
“What do you mean, find him?”
Miller pulled the visitor’s chair closer and sat down.
“Adrian left your house thirty minutes before Vivian entered the hospital.
A patrol unit followed him, but he switched cars in a parking garage.
The second vehicle was registered to a shell company.”
I closed my eyes.
Of course it was.
For years, Adrian had pretended not to understand my work.
Whenever I mentioned layered ownership structures or circular transfers, he would smile, kiss my forehead and call me his brilliant wife.
I had mistaken condescension for affection.
Miller continued.
“The district attorney is preparing warrants for the accounts you identified.
But we need to know what he thinks you found.”
“He thinks I found the life insurance policy.”
“You found more.”
It was not a question.
I looked toward the closed door.
Vivian’s perfume still hung in the air, but beneath it I could smell something else: the sterile adhesive of the wire taped under my gown.
“Three weeks before the fall, Adrian asked me to review the books of a family investment company,” I said.
“He claimed one of the managers was stealing.
I found payments moving through four consulting firms.
Each company invoiced the next for services that never existed.”
“Where did the money end up?”
“A private account in the Cayman Islands.”
“In Adrian’s name?”
“No.
In Vivian’s.”
Miller leaned back.
“That gives her motive.”
“It gives both of them motive.
The money began disappearing from trusts established by Adrian’s late father.
Vivian controlled the trusts, but Adrian authorized the transfers.
If the beneficiaries discovered what they had done, they would lose everything and face prison.”
“Did you confront him?”
“I asked him to explain one invoice.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me I was tired.”
The words sounded harmless outside the memory.
Inside it, they carried the full weight of what followed.
Adrian had taken the file from my hands and poured me a glass of wine.
I had not drunk it.
Later that night, I found the quadrupled life insurance policy in his desk.
He had forged my electronic signature on the amendment.
The next evening, he suggested we eat on the balcony.
“I copied the records before the fall,” I told Miller.
His eyes sharpened.
“Where are they?”
“I hid a drive inside the lining of my gray work bag.”
“We searched the house.
There was no gray bag.”
My stomach tightened.
“Then Adrian has it.”
Miller stood and stepped into the hallway.
