Chapter 7
Darlene studied the photograph without touching my phone. For a moment, the only sound in her office was the soft rush of air through the vents and the faint click of her brace beneath her jacket as she shifted her weight.
“Where did you get this?”
“Unknown number. No message except the words.”
Her gaze fixed on the screen. “She will fall again.”
“You know them?”
“I know where I’ve seen them.” She looked up, and the hard line of her mouth had changed. Not softened—cracked. “That phrase appeared in a sealed interview transcript from the investigation into my crash.”
“Who said it?”
“I don’t know. The transcript was summarized before I ever saw it. I was told the wording was irrelevant.”
She reached for the desk, caught herself, and planted her palm firmly on the wood. I started to move, but she shot me a look.
“Don’t.”
I stopped.
“I’m not asking you to catch me,” she said. “I’m asking you to understand that someone has access to a document they were never supposed to have.”
“And they know about your brace.”
“I know what they know.” She drew a careful breath. “I don’t yet know what they intend to do with it.”
Her fear was there, plain as the metal beneath her clothes. So was the fury she used to stand in front of it.
The office door opened. Victor Hale came in with a tablet tucked against his chest. He saw the photograph on my phone and stopped short.
“Did you send this?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you recognize the room?”
His eyes flicked over the image, then away. “No.”
Darlene leaned forward. “You’re going to look at it again.”
Victor did. His face tightened at the twisted strap, though he said nothing.
“Grant ordered you to give him copies of my accident file,” she said. “What else did he order?”
Victor pressed the tablet to his ribs. “I’ve already told you what I gave him.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
The quiet stretched. In the glass wall behind him, the three of us looked like strangers waiting for someone else to make the first move.
Victor lowered the tablet. “After the crash, Grant asked me to remove the original repair record from the file.”
“What repair record?” I said.
“The work done on the fleet sedan after the accident.” He glanced toward Darlene, then back to me. “He called it a clerical correction. Said the duplicate copy didn’t belong in the archive.”
“And you took it out?”
“Yes.”
Darlene’s hand curled around the edge of the desk. “You didn’t think to ask why?”
“I thought it was an administrative cleanup.”
“That’s what you thought when he asked for my accident reports, too?”
Victor flinched. “I know how it looks.”
“Then stop telling us how it looks,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”
He held my gaze a second, then dropped it. “I removed the record. I didn’t destroy it.”
“Where is it?” Darlene asked.
“I don’t know. Grant handled the archive.”
“That wasn’t what he asked,” I said.
Victor’s jaw moved as if he were testing a lie before letting it out. “I don’t know where the record is now.”
It wasn’t the same as saying he’d never known. Darlene heard the difference. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t press him—not yet.
“Did Grant tell you to remove anything else?” she asked.
“No.”
“Did he tell you to duplicate your credential?”
Victor’s face went pale. “No.”
The denial came too quickly to settle anything.
Darlene stepped away from the desk. A small hitch caught her stride; she mastered it before she reached the door.
“Blake, find the mechanic who worked on that car.”
“I already did.”
“Then go back.”
Victor lifted his head. “If the copy is gone—”
“Then we learn it’s gone,” I said. “But you don’t get to decide for us what’s worth looking for.”
The service garage smelled of hot rubber, old oil, and rainwater drying on concrete. A radio muttered somewhere behind the tool cages. Manny, the mechanic who’d slipped me the torn fragment days earlier, looked up when I entered, then glanced past me toward the open bay.
“You alone?”
“Right now.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
He wiped his hands on a rag already dark with grease. I told him what Victor had admitted—not the threat, and not Abigail’s name. Manny’s expression grew still at the mention of the original repair record.
“I kept a copy,” he said.
“Where?”
He looked at the service entrance, then crossed to a metal locker scarred by years of wrenches and dropped bolts. The lock stuck. He worked it with a key on a cord around his neck, opened the door, and reached behind a stack of shop manuals.
The folded paper he pulled out was yellow at the edges. A dark thumbprint crossed one corner. Manny held it between us without letting go.
“You understand this doesn’t prove the steering was tampered with before the crash,” he said. “It proves what was written down afterward. Nothing more.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Because people get ahead of the paper when they’re scared.”
He let me take the copy.
The top half showed the sedan’s fleet number and a post-crash service date. The description named a steering assembly replacement. Beneath it sat an authorization code and a handwritten approval: G. Stanley.
I read it twice. The ink didn’t change.
“Grant approved the replacement,” I said.
“After the crash,” Manny replied. “That’s what the date says. Don’t turn it into more than it is.”
I could almost hear Darlene’s voice from the office: the people who knew about her injury, the people who had access to the sealed investigation. The record in my hand connected Grant to a repair. It didn’t tell us why he’d ordered it, what the steering assembly had looked like before, or who had handled the car.
Manny tapped the lower corner.
“There’s another notation.”
In smaller handwriting, half obscured by a crease, were six words:
COMPONENT REMOVED BEFORE INVESTIGATORS ARRIVED.
My fingers tightened on the paper.
“Who wrote that?”
Manny stared at the line as if he’d hoped it wouldn’t be there.
“I didn’t,” he said.
May you like
Then he pointed to the note, and the garage seemed to go very quiet.
“That,” Manny said, “is the part they cut away.”
