Chapter 82: Forty-One Seconds

Lucas did not press play.

He screenshotted the missed call and the voicemail notice, sent both to Reed, and stood in the bathroom doorway with the phone in his hand until Reed called back. It took less than two minutes. Reed sounded like he had been asleep and was pretending he had not.

"Did you listen to it?"

"No."

"Good. Don’t. Not tonight." A lamp clicked on somewhere on Reed’s end. "I want to hear it with you, the first time, so if anybody asks later who heard what and when, there are two of us and a time stamp. Don’t call the number back. Don’t delete anything. Don’t forward the audio. Turn off any setting that clears old voicemails."

"There’s a setting for that?"

"There’s a setting for everything. Check." Reed waited while Lucas went into the phone menu and found a toggle that deleted voicemails after thirty days. He turned it off. "I’ll be at your place at nine. I’m bringing coffee, because I’ve had yours."

"Everyone keeps saying that."

"Everyone is right. Chain on. Go to bed."

[Priority Quest Active.]

[Objective: Preserve the voicemail. Do not return the call. Allow counsel to hear it first.]

[Reward on completion: 200 AP.]

He did go to bed. He did not sleep much. Twice he picked up the phone and looked at the red dot, and twice he put it back face down on the nightstand. Forty-one seconds was not long. He had sat through longer silences in a hallway outside a courtroom. It was the not knowing that kept him awake, the sense that a man he had never met had been in his phone for less than a minute and had left something behind like a coat on a chair.

Reed knocked at eight fifty-eight with two coffees in a cardboard tray and a small digital recorder in his coat pocket. He was wearing a sweater instead of a suit. Lucas had never seen him in a sweater. It made him look like somebody’s uncle and did nothing to soften his eyes.

"Sit," Reed said. "Phone on the table. Speaker."

Lucas sat. Reed put the recorder next to the phone, pressed a button, and said the date, the time, his name, Lucas’s name, and the address in the flat voice of a man reading a label.

"Go ahead."

Lucas pressed play.

There was a short pause, the hiss of a car interior or a quiet room. Then a man’s voice, older, unhurried, the kind of voice that had spent decades being listened to in rooms with long tables.

"Lucas, this is Philip Danner. I sit on the Vertex board. I know you’ve been told not to speak with me, and I respect that, so I’ll keep this short. I’m not asking about anything you’ve told anyone. I’m calling because Victoria is going to be asked to explain how the Halcyon approvals moved as fast as they did, and you were in the room for most of that. People remember things differently under pressure. I would hate for anyone’s memory to be the thing that costs her the company. If you’d like to talk about how to protect her, you have this number. Nobody needs to know we spoke."

The message ended with a soft click.

Neither of them said anything for a while. The recorder kept running. Through the wall the neighbor’s television was playing a cooking show, a woman explaining how to brown butter.

Reed reached over and stopped the recorder.

"Play it again," he said, and started the recorder again, and said the time again.

Lucas played it again. It was worse the second time, because now he could hear the care in it. Every sentence had been built to sound like concern. None of them asked him to lie. All of them pointed at the same place.

"Last sentence," Reed said when it ended. "That’s the one."

"Nobody needs to know we spoke."

"A man who just wants to help Victoria doesn’t need it to be secret. A man who’s been told by a prosecutor’s office that you’re a cooperating witness, through his own lawyer, and calls you anyway at eleven at night to talk about your memory, that’s a different man." Reed sat back. "I’m not going to tell you what statute it is. Miller can decide what it is. I’m going to tell you it’s not a courtesy call."

"He said he respects that I’ve been told not to talk to him."

"He said that so he can say later that he respected it." Reed picked up his coffee, found it had gone lukewarm, and drank it anyway. "He’s careful. Careful people leave voicemails like this when they think the clock is running out on them. Something changed for him this week. The audit committee. Miller’s Monday. The car getting lost at a light and then not lost on paper."

Lucas thought about the shell company and the mail drop in Wilmington and kept it in his mouth.

"What happens now?"

"Now I call Miller. On a Sunday, which she’ll pretend to mind." Reed stood up and walked to the window, phone already at his ear. "You don’t touch that voicemail. Monday, after her ten o’clock, she’ll want a statement from you about how you received it, and her people will want to copy the phone properly. Not a screenshot. The whole thing, with the metadata."

"The whole phone?"

"The relevant parts. You’ll sign a consent that limits it. I’ll read every word first." Reed glanced back. "That includes your texts with Victoria, by the way, if they’re in the window. Nobody’s interested in them except to show you didn’t pass her anything. Which you didn’t. So they help you."

Lucas thought about what was in those texts. Romantic. Practical. Same thing, tonight. He decided he could live with Morgan reading that.

Reed’s call with Miller lasted eleven minutes. Lucas heard only Reed’s half: yes, both plays recorded, no, he hadn’t returned it, yes, the same number, no, nothing since. Then a longer pause, and Reed saying, "I’ll tell him," and hanging up.

"She says thank you for not being an idiot," Reed said. "Her words. Statement tomorrow at two at the annex, after her call. Morgan will do the extraction. You bring the phone and nothing else."

[Quest Completed!]

[Objective Met: Voicemail preserved. No return call. Counsel heard it first, on record.]

[Reward: 200 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 6200.]

"Your screen happy?" Reed asked, watching his face.

"It says I did it right."

"It’s got decent judgment for a hallucination." Reed picked up the recorder and the empty tray. "One more thing. Victoria. You’re seeing her tonight?"

"Dinner. She’s bringing bread."

"Then here’s the paper. You can tell her you got a message from an unknown number and that it’s with counsel. That’s already true and she already knows the category. You can’t tell her who, you can’t tell her what it said, and you absolutely cannot tell her it was about her." Reed paused at the door. "I know that last part is the hard one."

"It’s all hard."

"That one’s harder. Because it’s her name in somebody else’s mouth, and you want to give it back to her." Reed looked at him. "Don’t. It’s not yours to give yet."

Victoria arrived at six with a canvas bag, a loaf of sourdough under her arm, and her hair down for the first time he could remember outside his bedroom. The Suburban parked across the street. She waved at it without looking.

"I brought three cheeses," she said, setting things on the counter. "One is soft, one is hard, and one smells like a barn. The man at the shop said it was the best one. I didn’t argue with him because he had a knife."

"Do I open the wine?"

"Not that one." She pulled a bottle out of the bag. "This one. Yours is going to stay in the fridge as a monument."

They ate at the small table with a board between them and the lamp on. She talked about her week, the parts that were hers to talk about. A product meeting that had gone badly in a normal way. A director’s spouse who had sent flowers to her office with a card that said thinking of you and nothing else, which she had found more unsettling than kind.

"I sent them to the hospital down the street," she said. "Nurses like flowers. I don’t like cards that don’t say anything."

Lucas cut bread and did not ask which director.

She ate the barn cheese and said it was the best one, irritated about it. She drank half a glass of wine and stopped. Around eight she put her elbows on the table and looked at him properly.

"Something happened," she said. "Since yesterday. You’ve got the face."

"What face?"

"The one where you’re holding something heavy and pretending it’s a coat." She did not smile. "You can tell me the category."

"I got a voicemail from an unknown number last night. It’s with Reed. He heard it before I did. It’s going to Miller’s office tomorrow."

She was quiet. She turned her glass by the stem, a quarter turn, the way she turned everything.

"The same number as before?"

"I can’t."

"Right." She nodded slowly. "That’s an answer too, you know. You can’t confirm it, so you’d have said no if it were a different one. You’re not good at this, Lucas. You’re just obedient."

"I’m trying to be both."

"I know." Her hand found his across the table, and she held on harder than he expected. "My turn. This one’s mine to tell. On Saturday morning the chair got a letter from a director asking for a special session of the board on Tuesday. The subject line was ’CEO judgment and the integrity of the internal review.’ He sent it to me because he has to. He didn’t tell me who wrote it, because he doesn’t have to."

Lucas kept his face still. It took everything he had.

"Tuesday," he said.

"Tuesday. They want to talk about whether a CEO who’s sleeping with a witness can be trusted to stay out of a review she’s supposed to be recused from anyway." She said it flat, like reading a line off a slide. "It’s a fair question if you strip out who’s asking it. I’ve told the chair I’ll answer anything they want in front of counsel. I’ve also told him that if it’s who I think it is, someone should ask that director what he’s been doing with his evenings."

Lucas said nothing. She watched him say nothing.

"There it is again," she said, quieter. "The wall. You know what’s funny? I’m not angry tonight. I think I’m actually grateful. If you’d told me, I’d have walked into Tuesday with something in my mouth that wasn’t mine, and somebody would have heard it."

"That’s what Reed said."

"Reed and I agree about more things than either of us admits."

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Relationship Status: Intimate Partner (Probationary).]

[Target State: Composed. Reading the shape of the wall instead of pushing on it. Trust trend: stabilizing.]

She left at ten, because the chair had asked her to sleep in her own bed again until Tuesday was over, and because, she said, she was a woman who followed good advice when she was too tired to argue with it. At the door she kissed him longer than she needed to, with her hand flat on his chest over his heart, and then stepped back.

"Wednesday," she said. "After Tuesday and after your Pellman and Hoyt thing. I’m staying. I’m putting it on the calendar so nobody can say it’s an emergency."

"You can put me on a calendar?"

"I can put anyone on a calendar. That’s most of my job." She went down the stairs. He watched through the peephole until the Suburban’s door closed.

He put the chain on. He washed the board and the glasses. At nine fifty-two his phone buzzed on the counter. Reed.

Danner’s personal lawyer just emailed Miller and me. He’s withdrawn from the representation, effective tonight. No reason given. Miller’s ten o’clock tomorrow is now with nobody. Don’t read anything into it. I’m reading everything into it.

Lucas stood at the sink with a wet glass in his hand and read the message again. A lawyer did not walk away from a client on a Sunday night for no reason. He walked away when he heard something he could not stand next to.

Somewhere across the city, Philip Danner was finding out that forty-one seconds had cost him the one person paid to stand between him and Miller.