Chapter 12 - Ethan's Signature
I met Ethan at a quiet diner near the highway.
He placed his phone facedown between us.
“Someone used my name as the recipient of a transfer,” he said.
“Did you receive it?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I requested my records the moment I saw the entry.”
He showed me the transaction reference, which listed an account he had never owned.
The signature beneath his name was visibly different from his own.
The implication was clear.
Somebody might have wanted an investigator to believe he had been compensated for silence.
Ethan looked sick.
“That isn't the worst part,” he said.
He pulled out an old photograph from his personal effects.
It showed three exhausted operators in a temporary medical station.
One was Ethan, pale and bandaged.
Beside him sat a man I remembered only by his callsign, Finch.
“Finch vanished from our group after the inquiry,” Ethan said.
“We were told he transferred overseas.”
“Did you ever hear from him?”
“Once, last month.”
Finch had called to say he wanted to correct his witness statement about Sentinel.
He never made the meeting.
Ethan had assumed he changed his mind.
Now he believed the silence might have been deliberate.
I felt the old urge to take control of every piece of the problem.
I stopped myself.
We were not investigators of our own case.
Ethan shared everything with the proper authorities.
Later that night, Finch finally contacted him from a hospital in Georgia.
He had been injured in an unrelated accident, and his phone had been destroyed.
The explanation was ordinary enough to be almost disappointing.
But the statement he made next was not.
“Ethan, I signed the wrong report,” he said over the hospital call.
“They told us the route change came from Captain Bennett.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
Finch paused.
“A civilian liaison.”
“Name?”
May you like
“Dean Bennett.”
