Chapter 15 - Eleven Minutes of Darkness
I canceled every recovery call for six hours.
No truck moved until Leon and two outside mechanics inspected the entire fleet.
My drivers hated it.
Customers complained.
One insurance company threatened a penalty because a wrecked tractor-trailer remained on Interstate 65 longer than contracted.
I didn’t care.
A damaged truck could be repaired.
A dead employee could not.
By noon, we discovered two more problems.
One wrecker had three wheel nuts loosened.
Another had contamination inside its auxiliary hydraulic reservoir.
Someone had not come to frighten me.
Someone had come prepared to hurt people.
Marcus Bell returned with state police technicians.
They photographed everything.
The cut brake line.
The fence.
The camera wiring.
A partial boot impression behind the warehouse.
“Professional?” I asked.
Bell crouched beside the sliced cable.
“Maybe.”
“That helpful?”
“No.”
He stood.
“People assume professional criminals are invisible. Most aren’t. They’re just patient.”
I pointed toward the disabled camera.
“Eleven minutes.”
“Which means whoever did this knew your system.”
That bothered me more than anything else.
Our cameras weren’t advertised.
The recorder cabinet was inside a locked maintenance room.
The rear camera cable ran through conduit except for a small exposed section behind an old electrical box.
A random stranger would never find it.
Someone had studied the yard.
Or someone had been inside before.
I gathered every employee.
Nine drivers.
Three mechanics.
Two dispatchers.
An office manager.
Richard.
Leon.
I hated what I had to say.
“Until this is solved, everybody’s access codes are being reset.”
Nobody complained.
“Second, nobody enters alone after dark.”
Still silence.
“Third, if anybody here has been approached, paid, threatened, or questioned by someone connected to MidState, Mercer Auto Finance, or River Crown, tell me now.”
Nobody moved.
Then my youngest driver raised his hand.
Tyler Briggs was twenty-two and had been with us six months.
His face was pale.
“A guy talked to me last week.”
“When?”
“At the gas station.”
My jaw tightened.
“What did he want?”
“He asked if Nolan treated employees fairly.”
Leon cursed.
Tyler hurried.
“I thought he was some union recruiter or competitor. He offered me five hundred bucks to tell him when the heavy rigs were usually out.”
“Did you take it?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Tyler looked ashamed.
“Because I didn’t think it mattered.”
I took a breath.
Getting angry would accomplish nothing.
“What did he look like?”
Tyler described the same man who had photographed the warehouse.
Baseball cap.
Heavy coat.
Gray sedan.
Bell showed him several photographs.
Tyler pointed.
“That one.”
Daniel Cross.
The retired deputy recorder.
Bell’s expression changed instantly.
Within an hour, officers drove to Cross’s home.
He wasn’t there.
Neither was his car.
Neighbors had last seen him the previous evening.
His phone was off.
His bank card had not been used since midnight.
By late afternoon, Cross had officially become a person investigators wanted to locate.
Not a suspect in the sabotage yet.
But definitely a man with questions waiting for him.
Harper arrived after work.
When she heard about the brake line, she started crying.
“This is because of me.”
“No.”
“Nolan—”
“It involves you. That isn’t the same thing.”
She looked through the shop window toward Milo, who was coloring at the dispatch desk while Adam spoke with Richard.
“I thought my worst mistake was stealing Dad’s money.”
“It was a pretty bad one.”
She gave me a watery laugh.
“I deserve that.”
“Harper, listen to me.”
I waited until she looked up.
“You can’t change what you did three years ago. You can decide what you do today.”
Her expression hardened.
“What do you need?”
“Everything you remember about Mercer.”
She nodded.
For the next two hours, Harper reconstructed her gambling life.
Casinos.
Websites.
Private chat groups.
People who offered loans.
People who offered “solutions.”
Then she remembered a username.
CROWNMAKER77.
The account had first contacted her before Mercer ever appeared.
Bell searched archived records investigators had obtained from the gambling platform.
The account was registered to an email.
That email belonged to Cynthia Hale.
The missing notary.
But something else appeared in the activity log.
Cynthia’s account had logged in three days earlier.
From Indiana.
She wasn’t missing.
May you like
She was hiding.
And she had just become the most important witness in the case.
