Chapter 70: Small Version

Reed picked him up at eight forty in a gray sedan that smelled of printer toner and cold coffee.

"You are not going in," Reed said before Lucas had the door shut. "Miller agreed to let you sit in the annex witness room on the second floor. Different floor, different hallway, no line of sight. If Ward says something only you can confirm, Miller sends someone down with a question on paper. You answer on paper. That is the whole job today."

"Why bring me at all?"

"Because if her lawyer tries to say Cole named you as some kind of partner, Miller wants a correction in the next ten minutes, not the next ten days." Reed pulled into traffic. "And because Victoria asked that you not be alone in your apartment while Richard is still counting down to things."

Lucas looked at him.

"She asked you that?"

"She asked the GC to ask me. I am telling you so you stop reading her silence as a verdict. It is a legal posture. She is good at legal postures."

The annex was quieter than it had been the day before. The security officer recognized Lucas, checked his letter anyway, and walked them to a small room with a window that faced a parking deck. There was a table, a box of tissues nobody had touched, and a wall clock that ran two minutes fast.

Reed set a legal pad in front of him.

"Do not write theories," Reed said. "Write facts you would swear to. If you are not sure, write that you are not sure."

Then he left to join Miller upstairs.

Lucas sat. At nine fifty his phone buzzed once on the table. He turned it over without picking it up.

Unknown local number. No message.

He photographed the screen, sent it to Reed and the detective, and turned the phone face down again. Reed sent back one word: Logged.

At ten the clock read ten-oh-two. Somewhere above him, Helen Ward was walking into a room with her lawyer and a version of herself she had probably practiced in the car.

For forty minutes nothing happened. He read the fire evacuation map on the back of the door twice. He counted the cars on the second level of the deck. A woman in a hospital lanyard sat in a silver hatchback and ate a muffin without looking at her phone, which seemed like the most disciplined thing he had seen all week.

At ten forty-three a clerk knocked and handed him a folded sheet.

Miller’s handwriting was square and tired.

Ward says Cole told her, about six weeks before signing, that "Vintage" was asking about his onboarding file and his old Wilmington clients. True or false? When did you first ask about Cole’s background?

Lucas thought about the question before he touched the pen. The truth was boring, which made it easy to write.

True that I asked. Roughly seven weeks before signing, during the Vertex diligence review, I asked the Vertex HR coordinator why Cole’s prior-employer verification only listed one reference. I asked once in person and once by internal email. The email should still exist on Vertex servers. I did not know Helen Ward then and did not ask about her.

He signed it, dated it, and handed it back. The clerk left.

Twenty minutes later the door opened again. This time it was Reed himself, coat over his arm.

"Your email exists," Reed said. "The GC found it in four minutes. It is dull, polite, and dated exactly where you said. Miller read it aloud in the room. Ward’s lawyer stopped taking notes for a moment."

"What did Ward say?"

Reed sat down across from him. He took his time, which meant he was choosing what Lucas was entitled to hear.

"She said what everyone expected first. Cole was a good candidate. She did not know about Delaware. She left Vertex for a better title. She was used." Reed folded his hands. "Then Miller showed her the consulting invoice."

"What invoice?"

"The detective pulled it last night from the Arlington custody file. Six months before Cole’s hire, Ward invoiced a consulting company for ’talent advisory services.’ That company is owned by the same Wilmington trustee who holds Richard’s private trust. Ward said she did not know who owned it. Miller asked who she spoke to when she was hired for the work."

Lucas waited.

"She said Richard," Reed said. "She said he called her personally. She said he described it as helping a friend’s protégé find a seat at a company that would appreciate him. She said she knew Richard from Vertex dinners years ago, when he was still married to Victoria. She said she did not think it was strange."

"Did she think it was strange?"

"Yes." Reed almost smiled. "Her lawyer asked for a break at that point. When they came back, she told the rest more carefully. Richard asked her to recommend Cole. She did. Later, after Cole was inside, Cole called her twice. The second call was the one about you. Cole said a Vertex attaché was asking about his references and might be trouble. Ward says she told him to stop calling her."

"So the hallway was real."

"The hallway was real. Ward recruited Cole into Vertex at Richard’s request and took money for it through a company she claims she never looked up. That is not the small version she walked in with. It is not the whole house either. She still says she knew nothing about the shells or the signing."

Lucas looked at the parking deck. The woman with the muffin was gone.

"What happens to her?"

"That is Miller’s decision. My guess is she becomes a witness with her own lawyer and a very unpleasant year. What matters for you is simpler. Your name came from Cole doing his job badly, not from you doing anything with Ward. Miller said that on the record. The detective nodded. Ward’s lawyer did not argue."

Something in Lucas’s chest loosened by a small degree. He did not trust it yet.

"And Richard?"

"Richard is the reason we are leaving through the loading dock."

Reed stood and checked his phone. "Detective says the voip gateway lit up again during the interview. A call to the Arlington private bank. Somebody using Richard’s authentication asked about the release procedure for the parked wire. Bank stalled him under the custody order. He is trying to get his money moving before Ward’s statement is typed up."

[Priority Quest Generated.]

[Objective: Exit the annex without contact from Richard Sterling or his counsel, and deliver your written confirmation of the HR email to Vertex’s acting GC through Reed.]

[Reward: 350 AP.]

[Failure Penalty: Witness credibility questioned; Ward’s account gains room to shift.]

[Current AP Balance: 3150.]

Lucas read the brackets and stood.

"There is a written confirmation the GC will want," he said. "That the email is mine and I have not altered it. I can write it now."

Reed handed him the legal pad back.

"Two sentences. No adjectives."

Lucas wrote: The email dated during the Vertex diligence review asking HR about Nathan Cole’s single prior-employer reference was written and sent by me from my Vertex account. I have not accessed, altered, or forwarded it since. He signed it. Reed photographed it, sent it to the GC, and put the original in a plastic sleeve from his briefcase.

They went down the back stairwell. A security officer opened the loading dock door for them and stood there until Reed’s sedan pulled up. Nobody from Pell and Garrity was on the dock. Nobody was on the street side of the gate either, except a delivery driver arguing with a parking app.

In the car, Reed drove three blocks before he spoke again.

"Victoria wants you at Vertex at two."

Lucas turned his head.

"She said not unless you brought me."

"I am bringing you. GC, outside counsel, me. Conference Room 2B. She heard Ward’s statement on the line from her office. She wants to review the civil outline with your timeline inside it." Reed glanced at him. "She also said, and I am quoting the GC, ’I want to see his face when he hears what Helen did.’ I do not know what that means. I am not paid to know."

"It means she wants to know whether I already knew."

"Did you?"

"No."

"Then your face will do what faces do."

[Priority Quest Completed!]

[Objective: Exit the annex without contact from Richard Sterling or his counsel, and deliver your written confirmation of the HR email to Vertex’s acting GC through Reed.]

[Reward: 350 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 3500.]

Thirty-five hundred. Lucas let the number fade without looking at the shop. There was nothing in it that fixed a conference room.

They ate at a counter place near Reed’s office because Reed refused to let him sit through another two o’clock on an empty stomach. Lucas had soup. Reed had a sandwich and did not appreciate the irony when Lucas pointed it out.

At one twenty Camilla texted.

Reed says Ward confirmed Richard. Is that true?

Yes. Through a consulting invoice. She says she didn’t know the owner.

She knew. Helen always reads the signature line. A pause, then: Are you going to Vertex?

At 2. With Reed.

The three dots appeared and disappeared twice.

Victoria will be decent to you in that room because there will be lawyers in it. Do not mistake decent for finished. I am saying that as someone who has the same problem with you.

Lucas read it more than once.

I won’t mistake it.

Good. My sister says I’m allowed to go home tonight. Building security has your photo and Richard’s. I added yours so they’d let you in if Reed ever needs to send you. Not so you can visit.

Understood.

She sent the single dot.

At two the Vertex lobby looked exactly as it had for the last three weeks, which was its own form of insult. The security desk issued Lucas a temporary visitor sticker. His own badge was still in an evidence envelope somewhere in the GC’s office. The elevator took them to the second floor, and the receptionist outside 2B did not look up longer than politeness required.

Victoria was standing at the window when they came in.

She wore charcoal, no jewelry except a thin watch. Her hair was pinned back. She looked like she had slept, which Lucas doubted.

The GC and two outside counsel took one side of the table. Reed took a chair beside Lucas on the other. Victoria did not sit.

"Mr. Reed," she said. "Thank you for bringing him."

"Ms. Sterling."

Then she looked at Lucas.

"Helen Ward sat at my table for six years," Victoria said. "She proofread my first shareholder letter as CEO and told me it was too polite. She took Richard’s money to put a man in my building who stole from me. Did you know any of that before ten o’clock today?"

"No," Lucas said. "I knew Cole had one reference. I didn’t know whose."

She watched his face for a long moment, the way she had watched him in the riverside apartment before she decided to trust him the first time. He did not look away.

"All right," she said.

She sat. The meeting became a meeting. Outside counsel walked through the civil outline. Lucas confirmed dates. The GC asked about the HR email and accepted his two sentences without revision. Reed objected once to a phrase that made Lucas sound like an investigator instead of a witness, and outside counsel struck it.

It took ninety minutes. Nobody raised their voice.

When they were packing up, Victoria spoke without looking at the papers.

"Mr. Reed. I would like two minutes with your client. The door stays open. You can stand in it."

Reed considered it, then went and stood in the doorway with his back half turned, close enough to count as a witness and far enough to count as courtesy.

Victoria kept her voice low.

"You asked HR about Cole seven weeks before any of this," she said. "You were right, and you were alone, and you never told me."

"I didn’t have anything to tell you. One reference isn’t a crime."

"No. It’s a question." She looked at him directly. "You stopped bringing me your questions somewhere around page forty-seven. I want to know if that habit is broken or if it just got caught."

"It’s broken," he said. "Or I’m breaking it. That’s the honest answer."

"That is a better answer than you gave me in my car."

Her phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it and her face went still.

She turned the screen toward him and Reed.

It was a text from a number Lucas recognized from his own call logs. The local prefix. One digit off.

Victoria. Helen talked. Now it’s your turn. I’m in the city. Tonight, or I sign the release and the money and the photographs go where I choose.

Reed was already dialing the detective.