Chapter 13 - The Ring on the Table

They sent a photograph. My ring's twin lay beside a chipped cup and a piece of bread. Marcus had engraved the inside with a date and four words: STILL YOUR BEST DECISION.

I knew every scratch. I also knew he never willingly removed it.

"He left it for us," I said.

"That's possible," Price replied.

I forced myself to study the room instead of the ring. A window overlooked a blue warehouse roof. A cheap clock hung crooked above the door. On the table, under the ring, lay a torn receipt.

"Zoom in," I said.

The receipt was from a grocery chain, printed in English. Beside a total of $18.42, someone had written a number that looked like an address. Marcus often left clues in harmless places. He trusted ordinary objects because ordinary people forgot to look at them.

Analysts confirmed the receipt corresponded to a location near a ferry terminal. Surveillance footage showed an injured man being helped into an unmarked medical vehicle hours before the rescue.

"He was moved," Price said. "And he wasn't walking by himself."

I watched the footage until my eyes hurt. Marcus tilted his head once. It was the tiny motion he made when listening through his left ear, damaged by an explosion years before.

"It's him," I whispered.

Ellis refused to let hope replace evidence, but she didn't take it away. "We have a direction. That's something."

Later that day Victoria arrived at the clinic with a state investigator. She looked smaller in jeans and a borrowed sweatshirt than she had in her silk robe. Her mascara was gone. So was her certainty.

"I didn't know what Raymond was doing," she told me. "But I liked being married to someone who paid for everything. I ignored things I shouldn't have ignored."

"And you took my room anyway."

Her eyes filled. "Yes. I did."

She handed me a crumpled envelope. "I found this in his coat before we left. It has your name on it."

Inside was a photo of Marcus standing alive outside a clinic, dated two weeks earlier.

On the back, in Raymond's handwriting, were six words:

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SHE MUST NEVER SEE THIS PHOTOGRAPH.