Chapter 5 - THE WITNESS IN THE RAIN
Nolan Voss called at midnight.
The voice was thin and frightened.
"I can give you names," he told David, "but I won't talk on a telephone."
We met the next afternoon at a public library, with Helen present and Detective Ruiz informed.
Nolan looked decades older than the man in David's photograph.
He carried a soaked canvas bag despite the clear weather.
"Greg wasn't stealing vacations back then," he said.
"He was moving contracts."
He described phantom deliveries, inflated invoices, and shell vendors.
He had copies of purchase orders, but no originals.
He said Thomas had planned to confront the board.
"Then somebody threatened your daughter," Nolan added.
I felt my pulse rise.
"Who?"
"I never saw the sender. Greg showed Thomas photographs of Sarah leaving work, buying groceries, going to the gym."
For the first time, I saw a possible explanation for Thomas's silence.
It did not excuse Sarah's violence against me.
It complicated the story I had wanted to believe.
Nolan removed a USB drive from the bag.
Helen refused to plug it into a personal computer.
She arranged for a forensic copy instead.
The drive included account ledgers and voice recordings whose authenticity would need checking.
Before leaving, Nolan gripped my wrist.
"Mr. Hale said the safest place was the safe you never use."
"I have only one floor safe."
Nolan shook his head.
"He said you wouldn't recognize it as a safe."
I thought of Thomas's workbench, his old radio, his miniature clocks.
Then Nolan said something worse.
"When your husband learned Greg had returned, he told me the person he feared most wasn't Greg."
"Then who?"
Nolan glanced over his shoulder.
A woman in a beige coat had entered the library and stopped near the exit.
Nolan went pale.
"The one who kept calling herself your friend," he whispered.
May you like
He fled through the staff corridor before he would tell us her name.
