Chapter 4 - The Name I Borrowed
At 2:18 a.m., Detective Ortiz came back with a picture of a gray sedan parked outside Ben's apartment building. The plates were registered to a rental agency. Somebody had paid cash, then used an identification card belonging to a man who had been dead for eight months.
"That tells us they're trying to hide," Ortiz said. "It doesn't tell us where your brother is."
"His last call was to me. Can't you trace it?"
"We have a request in. I won't promise what I can't deliver."
After she left, Elias moved his chair closer to the bed. He wasn't asking the kind of questions a billionaire asks an employee. He looked like a man checking whether the floor beneath his life had ever been solid.
"You said your father repaired our clock. What's his name?"
"Thomas Quinn."
His face lost its color. "The Glen Creek engineer?"
"The same man your company called negligent after the floodgate failed."
"Our investigation found—"
"Your company's investigation," I cut in. "No independent access to the software logs. No public hearing for his family. Fourteen funerals, and a press release blaming a man who couldn't speak for himself."
Elias leaned back. I could see him remembering the photographs that had filled the newspapers: water above the doorways, ambulances on dry ground, a school gym turned into a shelter.
"I was twenty-eight," he said. "My father told me there'd been a maintenance failure. I believed him."
"I was twenty-three. My brother was eleven. They called him a dead man's son at school. He stopped speaking for three months."
Elias looked down at his stained cuff. "Why come to my house?"
"Because last spring somebody mailed me a copy of a service ticket my father supposedly signed. He'd been dead for nine days when it was dated. Your company refused to explain it. Then a former employee told me Bellwether House held the original archive."
"So you came in under another name."
"I came in because the front door was closed."
He didn't answer right away. Then he held out his phone.
"My father just texted me. He wants every member of the household staff dismissed before morning."
"Will you do it?"
"No."
Something eased in my chest until I saw his next message.
Everett Wren had sent Elias a photograph of Ben tied to a chair.
May you like
Under it were seven words.
Bring the girl home. No police.
