Chapter 5 - THE MAN IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR
"Stay inside this lobby," I told Elena, already rising from my chair and pulling my car keys from my coat pocket. "Go straight to the front desk, get the room key I paid for on the third floor, and lock the deadbolt. Do not open that door for anyone until I call the room phone."
"Wait!" Elena grabbed my sleeve, her eyes wide with panic. "Mr. Vance, you can't go back there! My father's wooden toolbox is still on the floorboard behind the driver's seat, and the rest of his site journals are inside it. If Richard's men are breaking into our van, how did they even know we were in Lancaster?"
I stopped, looking down at her pale face. "Who knew you were heading this way tonight?"
"Nobody," she breathed, her chest heaving. "When the landlord evicted us on Tuesday and those lawyers showed up at the dry cleaners, I took my last paycheck in cash, threw away my old cell phone, and drove west out of Philadelphia. I haven't used a credit card in four days."
Maya looked up from beside her mother, clutching the yellow crayon tightly in her small fist. "Mommy, what about the red blinky light under the back bumper?"
Elena blinked, looking down at her daughter. "What blinky light, sweetheart?"
"Yesterday when I dropped my mitten at the gas station," Maya said simply, the way children state things adults completely miss. "When I crawled under the tailpipe to get it, there was a black plastic box stuck to the metal with a tiny red light blinking on it. I thought it was part of the brakes."
A chill ran straight down my spine.
"A magnetic GPS tracker," I said grimly. "Whoever served you with that cease-and-desist order at the dry cleaners on Tuesday slapped a fleet tracker onto your undercarriage while you were inside. They didn't lose you when you left Philadelphia, Elena. They've been watching your location on a screen for seventy-two hours, waiting for you to stop somewhere isolated after dark."
Elena pulled Maya tightly against her coat, her knuckles white. "Then those men could already be watching the hotel."
"They only tracked your van, not my SUV," I said, glancing out through the glass vestibule. Across the highway median, the two men in dark jackets were tossing Elena's battered plastic suitcase onto the freezing asphalt and tearing through the back seats of the Honda Odyssey. "They think you abandoned the broken-down van and walked toward the highway shopping strip. Listen to me carefully: take this blueprint and the ledger up to Room 312 right now."
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"That is my company's truck over there," I said, my voice hardening into the tone that had built a forty-million-dollar enterprise from a single dump truck thirty years ago. "I'm going to find out who is driving it."
I waited until the night manager handed Elena the electronic keycard and watched her usher Maya into the elevator before I stepped out into the biting wind.
Climbing into my Mercedes, I kept my headlights off until I pulled out onto the shoulder of Route 30. In less than ninety seconds, I turned into the unplowed rear lot of the dark diner and flipped my high beams directly onto the back of the minivan.
The two men froze in the blinding white glare.
One was a stranger in a ski mask holding a crowbar, but the second man standing beside the open tailgate of the Odyssey wasn't a low-level street thug. Wearing a shearling leather coat and leather driving gloves, holding Elena's wooden carpenter's box in his hands, was Cole Garrett—my company's Chief of Site Security, a former state trooper whom Richard had hired five years ago.
I put the Mercedes in park, left the high beams blazing, and stepped out onto the black ice.
"Put that box down, Cole!" I barked, my voice echoing off the brick wall of the closed diner.
Cole shaded his eyes against the headlights. When he recognized my silhouette and the white hair beneath my fedora, his jaw dropped. He quickly motioned for the second man to get into the cab of the flatbed truck, then stepped forward, forcing a tight, professional smile onto his face.
"Mr. Vance?" Cole called out, setting the wooden toolbox gently on the bumper of the minivan. "Sir, what in the world are you doing out here on Christmas Eve?"
"I could ask you the same thing, Cole," I said, stopping ten feet away from him so I remained squarely in view of my dashboard camera. "Why are you using a Vance Construction flatbed to break into an abandoned minivan with a crowbar at nine o'clock at night?"
Cole cleared his throat, slipping his gloved hands into his coat pockets. "Mr. Sterling called me two hours ago, sir. He told me a disgruntled former employee stole confidential engineering records from our Philadelphia storage archive and fled toward Lancaster. When our recovery tag pinged in this lot, Richard asked me to retrieve company property quietly so we wouldn't have to involve the police over the holidays."
"Is that what Richard told you?" I asked coldly. "That box belongs to Thomas Hale's daughter. And there was no theft from our archives."
Cole's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. "With all due respect, Mr. Vance, you haven't been in the operations loop for a long time. Richard handles security protocols now. If you just step back into your car and head home, I'll wrap this up and have a full report on your desk Monday morning."
"You work for Vance Construction, Cole. My name is on the bottom of your paycheck, not Richard's," I said, stepping forward and picking up Thomas Hale's wooden toolbox from the bumper before he could reach it. "And as of this second, you are suspended without pay. If you or your driver come within a mile of this lot again tonight, I'll personally hand my dashcam footage of this break-in to the Pennsylvania State Police."
For a long, tense moment, Cole stared at me in the freezing wind. He glanced at the red recording light blinking behind my windshield mirror, then slowly backed away toward the flatbed cab.
"You're making a mistake backing that woman, Mr. Vance," Cole said quietly as he pulled the heavy truck door open. "You have no idea how much Richard has been protecting you from."
The flatbed roared out of the parking lot, its tires spinning on the ice before disappearing down Route 30.
My heart was hammering against my ribs as I carried the heavy oak toolbox back to my SUV and set it on the passenger floorboard. The padlock had already been pried off by Cole's crowbar.
Sitting inside the driver's seat with the doors locked, I lifted the splintered wooden lid. Inside were yellowed site inspection notebooks, a brass plumb bob, and a stack of bank envelopes bound with a rubber band.
May you like
I pulled off the rubber band and opened the top envelope. Inside were twelve carbon-copy cashier's checks drawn from a private account at Lancaster First National Bank, dated once a month for the year preceding the Riverbend collapse. Each check was made out to Thomas Hale for five thousand dollars.
And at the bottom of the envelope was a folded deposit receipt signed not by me, and not by Richard—but by my wife, Caroline.
