Chapter 9: The Ledger's Hidden Page
Marcus hoisted Geller by his elbow, shoving him toward Trooper Higgins, who stood waiting in the open doorway with his rifle angled toward the dark treeline. "Take him out to the lead cruiser," Marcus ordered. "Get him separated from any local contact before Vance finds out we're here. I want his phone secured in a Faraday bag right now."
As Higgins hauled the cursing clerk out into the night air, I stayed behind in the cramped pump house. My fingers hovered over the open ledger on the desk. The top page was filled with columns of figures, but the paper felt unusually thick near the bottom corner—stiff, like two sheets pressed together with industrial glue.
I slid my thumbnail beneath the lower right edge of the page and pulled upward. With a soft tearing sound, a hidden second sheet peeled away from the backing.
Beneath it was a hand-drawn topographical map of our estate and the surrounding three hundred acres of private timberland, annotated with red ink marks that indicated blind spots in the security cameras and perimeter fence lines. Written in the margin in Arthur Vance's familiar block handwriting was a single sentence that made the breath catch in my throat: Subject isolated at the lower hunting lodge; transfer scheduled for Friday dawn before the state audit.
The lower hunting lodge. It was an old stone cabin built by my wife's grandfather back in the nineteen-seventies, tucked deep inside a steep ravine four miles behind the main mansion—a place so remote that cell phones couldn't reach it and no one ever went unless they knew the exact combination to the gate lock.
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I folded the map carefully, sliding it into the interior pocket of my suit jacket right over my heart. The girls thought I was just keeping them safe inside the kitchen, baking flour into counters while the world fell apart. But my wife hadn't vanished into thin air fourteen months ago. She had been boxed up like an asset on a county balance sheet, hidden four miles from her own children by men who thought badges and tax stamps made them untouchable.
I turned off the desk lamp, plunging the small room into sudden shadow, and walked out into the cool night air where Marcus was waiting by the cruiser.
