Chapter 13 - The Empty Warehouse.
Ruiz offered Nora the option of having another officer retrieve the family storage boxes.
Nora refused.
If Thomas Hayes had left something important, she wanted to be present when it surfaced.
The decision was emotional rather than investigative.
Ruiz understood the difference and documented it anyway.
When Nora saw her father's employment record, she initially wanted to dismiss the connection.
Coincidences existed.
Chicago was full of companies bought, sold, renamed, and merged.
Then Northstar appeared in the old papers.
The same name across fourteen years erased the comfort of coincidence.
Her family history had not wandered into the case accidentally.
Someone had gone looking for it.
The South Side warehouse frightened Nora more than the guarded apartment had.
The apartment proved someone could find her.
The warehouse proved someone had studied her.
Photographs showed routines she never considered worth remembering.
Nora buying coffee.
Nora leaving work.
Nora carrying groceries.
Nora standing beside Caleb outside his school.
Nothing private in the dramatic sense.
Everything private in the human sense.
A person's life was made of repetition, and repetition made surveillance easy.
Ruiz told her not to blame herself for having routines.
Nora did not.
She blamed the people who converted ordinary life into a file.
The anger helped.
Fear made her want to hide.
Anger made her want to understand.
The warehouse stood behind a chain-link fence beneath a sky the color of steel.
Detective Ruiz would not allow Nora inside.
For once, Nora did not argue.
She waited in Hargrove's SUV across the street while police moved through the building.
Enzo remained at the hospital with Lily.
Marcus had gone to his office to locate old records connected to Gabriel Voss.
Hargrove stood outside the warehouse entrance, hands in his coat pockets, looking like a man holding himself together by force.
Dawson's wallet had been found.
Blood had been found.
Dawson had not.
Nora watched forensic technicians photograph the missing SUV.
There was no visible damage.
The blood on the wheel might have been Dawson's.
It might have belonged to someone else.
Nothing in this case arrived without a second possibility attached.
Ruiz finally returned after almost an hour.
She opened the passenger door and leaned in.
"We found a room set up like a temporary office."
Nora frowned.
"Whose?"
"Don't know yet."
"Dawson?"
"Maybe."
Hargrove joined them.
His expression told Nora there was more.
"There are printouts of the Aurelian floor plans," he said.
"Private dining schedule. Security rotations. Staff photographs."
Nora's stomach tightened.
"Mine?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
"A lot."
Ruiz added, "Someone had a full surveillance file on you."
Nora looked through the windshield at the warehouse.
"Why me?"
"Because you worked the table," Hargrove said.
"That doesn't explain photographs from weeks before the party."
Ruiz did not soften the answer.
"Then you were chosen in advance."
The words felt worse than the threatening messages.
Being chosen meant someone had watched her routines.
Someone knew when she left home.
Someone knew which train she took.
Someone knew she noticed details.
"They knew I'd spot the straw," she said.
Hargrove looked at her.
"Maybe."
"Janelle's attacker said I was supposed to."
"Yes."
Nora's thoughts raced.
"Then the wrapper on Whitcomb wasn't a mistake."
Ruiz nodded.
"Probably not."
"It was placed where I'd see it."
"Possibly."
"And Whitcomb was told to blame me so I'd defend myself by pointing out everything wrong with the table."
Ruiz's expression sharpened.
"That's a strong theory."
"Whoever planned this needed me to say the straw was different."
Hargrove frowned.
"Why?"
Nora looked toward the warehouse.
"Because if security found it first, Enzo might think it was planted."
"But you were the person who served Lily."
"Exactly."
Ruiz completed the thought.
"You authenticate the clue."
Nora felt used in a way she had not expected.
Her honesty had been turned into part of someone else's machinery.
"What else was in the warehouse?"
Ruiz hesitated.
"A photograph of Dominic."
"Recent?"
"Looks recent."
"Where?"
"Outside a motel in Kenosha."
Hargrove said, "Date stamp says last week."
Nora looked at him.
"Could be fake."
"Yes."
"Could be real."
"Yes."
Nora sighed.
"I hate this case."
Ruiz almost smiled.
"That's healthy."
Another officer approached with an evidence bag.
Inside was a broken wristwatch.
Hargrove's face changed when he saw it.
"That's Dawson's."
"Certain?" Ruiz asked.
"I gave it to him after five years with the team."
The back was engraved.
D.D. - STAY SHARP.
The glass face had cracked at 6:13.
The hands were frozen there.
Ruiz looked at the tower data.
Dawson's phone had last pinged at 6:14.
"If the watch broke during a struggle, the timing fits."
Hargrove looked toward the warehouse doors.
"So where is he?"
Police dogs searched the surrounding lots.
Hospitals were checked.
Transit cameras were pulled.
No Dawson.
Inside the temporary office, technicians found another clue.
A paper shredder had been used recently.
Most material was destroyed beyond easy reconstruction.
One strip remained caught beneath the blade.
Ruiz showed Nora a photograph.
Only part of one sentence survived.
...HAYES MUST BE AT TABLE WHEN...
Nora stared at her own last name.
"That settles it."
Ruiz nodded.
"You were selected before the party."
"For what?"
"We still don't know."
Hargrove looked uncomfortable.
"Maybe because of your father."
Nora turned toward him.
"My father?"
"We ran a deeper background check after the photographs were found."
Nora's anger rose.
"You did what?"
"Someone is targeting you. I needed to know whether there was a connection."
"My father has been dead for twelve years."
"I know."
"Then why bring him up?"
Hargrove looked at Ruiz.
She answered.
"Your father, Thomas Hayes, worked as an accountant."
"Yes."
"For twenty-one years."
"Yes."
"His last employer was Lakeshore Freight."
Nora's irritation turned to confusion.
"So?"
Hargrove spoke quietly.
"Lakeshore Freight was purchased by Voss Logistics fourteen years ago."
Nora stopped.
She knew her father had worked late.
She knew he had hated his job near the end.
She knew he died of a heart attack at fifty-four.
She had never known the name Gabriel Voss.
"That can't matter."
Ruiz watched her carefully.
"Maybe it doesn't."
"My dad was a payroll accountant."
"Payroll connects to money."
"He wasn't some investigator."
"We aren't saying he was."
Nora looked away.
She remembered boxes her mother had thrown out after his death.
Old tax forms.
Ledgers.
Yellow legal pads filled with numbers.
Her father had been the kind of man who noticed when a grocery receipt was off by forty cents.
Maybe that was where Nora got it.
Hargrove handed her a printed employment record.
Thomas Hayes had worked at Lakeshore through the acquisition.
He resigned six months later.
The reason listed was voluntary departure.
Nora knew that part was false.
"He didn't quit."
Ruiz looked at her.
"What happened?"
"He told us he was laid off."
"Are you sure?"
"I was fourteen. I remember my parents fighting about money for months."
Ruiz made a note.
"Did he ever mention Voss?"
"Not that I remember."
"Did he keep work files at home?"
Nora thought of the basement shelves in her mother's old house.
Her mother had moved to Arizona three years ago.
Most possessions had been sold or donated.
Nora had kept only a few boxes in a storage unit.
"Maybe."
Hargrove looked at her.
"Where?"
"I have a storage locker in Skokie."
Ruiz's eyes sharpened.
"What's in it?"
"Family stuff. Photos. Old documents. I haven't opened half the boxes in years."
"We need to look."
Nora almost refused on instinct.
Then she looked again at the shredded sentence with her name on it.
If her father had somehow become part of this story, she wanted to know why.
They drove to the storage facility with two patrol units.
Nora signed them in herself.
Unit 318 smelled like cardboard and dust.
She had stacked her life badly.
College textbooks.
Christmas decorations.
Her father's old desk lamp.
A box labeled TAXES 2008-2014 sat under three bins.
Ruiz photographed it before Nora opened it.
Inside were tax returns, pay stubs, medical bills, and a thick brown envelope with her father's handwriting.
Nora recognized it immediately.
DO NOT DISCARD.
She sat on the concrete floor.
Her hands had begun to shake.
Inside the envelope were photocopied spreadsheets from Lakeshore Freight.
Rows of payments.
Vendor codes.
Routing numbers.
One company appeared repeatedly.
Northstar Consulting.
The same company that had paid Dawson eighty-four thousand dollars.
Nora stared at the page.
Her father had circled the name in red ink fourteen years earlier.
May you like
Beside it he had written three words.
VOSS IS HIDING IT.
