When she sat opposite him, she placed a sealed envelope on the table and kept her hands beside it.
Her left ring finger was bare.
“I filed for separation last week,” she said before Daniel could ask.
“Richard doesn’t know where I’m staying.”
He wanted to ask why she had tolerated Richard for so long, but the question sounded too much like the ones he feared others would ask him about Jessica.
Instead he asked what she could prove.
Caroline slid a photocopy of a hotel invoice across the table.
It listed the private dining room, twelve meals, a security contractor, and three performers booked under a talent agency.
The invoice carried a purchase-order code from a shell company Richard controlled.
Caroline had obtained it from a shared accounting archive she still had legal permission to inspect.
“That’s why you know the dinner was staged,” Daniel said.
“It’s one reason.
The agency also gave me contracts showing the roles the performers were paid to play.”
One actor’s role was described as a retired investigator.
Another was a former counselor.
Each had been instructed not to discuss any actual knowledge of Saint Alden.
Daniel felt the familiar surge of nausea that came whenever a piece of ordinary paper made Jessica’s account more believable and her choices more painful.
“You hired a lawyer?” he asked.
“Two,” Caroline said.
“One for my marriage.
One for what I found.”
She did not tell him to trust her attorneys.
She gave him the name of an independent civil rights lawyer, Mara Ellison, who had represented families in institutional safety cases and had no financial connection to the Hales.
Daniel wrote it down.
Caroline’s own investigation began when Richard’s assistant quit after fifteen years.
The assistant, Laurel Finch, had asked Caroline to arrange a safe meeting because she could no longer bear to schedule private appointments with young employees and families of the Saint Alden victims.
Laurel had given her a list of dates, not a complete confession.
On the list were the day Jessica first met Richard, the dates of four other supposed restitution dinners, and a notation beside Peter’s name: collection pending.
“Collection of what?”
Daniel asked.
“I assumed money,” Caroline said.
“Then Laurel described the way Richard spoke about a cedar box.”
Daniel showed Caroline the photograph of Peter’s postcard.
She touched the edge of the phone with one finger, not enough to take it away.
Her expression changed when she read the words on the back.
