Chapter 8

Reid's POV

Daniels set the phone down on his desk like it might still be listening.

"This isn't the first one," he said. "Since I recovered the backup, someone's been following me. Same car outside my building three nights running before I convinced myself I was imagining it. Then my office got broken into. Whoever it was went through exactly one filing cabinet, the one holding everything on your father's murder, and touched nothing else."

"You didn't mention any of this before now," I said.

"I didn't want to believe it meant anything." He rubbed a hand over his jaw. "I don't have that luxury anymore."

Cam hadn't said a word since the call ended. He was still staring at the spot where the phone had been, like it might ring again and finish what it started.

"There's one more thing," Daniels said quietly. "The car was still outside my building this morning. Same spot, engine cold. Whoever it was hadn't just been watching me. They'd been waiting to see if I'd walk out with you two."

Whatever had started three years ago hadn't ended when Thane's name was cleared. It had gone quiet, waiting to see if anyone would keep pulling the thread. Now it knew we were.

Daniels cleared the rest of the desk and started laying out folders until the wood grain disappeared under yellowing paper. Police reports, witness statements, financial records from the estate, an autopsy timeline with corners curled soft from age.

"Everything that survived the break-in," he said. "Start reading. Something's looked wrong to me for the last hour and I still can't name it."

I pulled the autopsy report toward me and worked backward from the recorded time of death.

Something didn't fit.

"This report has my father dead by ten forty," I said. "But this witness statement says someone heard a struggle at eleven fifteen."

Cam leaned over my shoulder, studying both pages.

"That's not a small gap. That's thirty-five minutes."

Daniels slid another folder across.

"The security contract for that building was renewed two weeks before your father died, then quietly cancelled a week afterward. No explanation on file."

I flipped through the rest of the witness statements. Three neighbors gave three accounts of the same night, and none of them agreed on so much as the color of the car parked outside.

"It's not sloppy," Cam said. "Sloppy looks random. This looks arranged."

"Arranged how?"

"Like someone built a version of that night strong enough to survive one investigation and no more. Enough contradictions to bury the real questions under paperwork nobody wanted to read twice."

Daniels froze over one financial page, his finger stopping halfway down a column.

"What?"

"This payment. The security company whose contract got cancelled. I've seen this name somewhere else in these files, and I don't think that's a coincidence."

He started searching through another folder without looking up.

My hand tightened around the report until the paper crumpled beneath my fingers.

"If Thane was innocent," I said, "why did nobody go looking for the man in the hood?"

I pushed the surveillance still across the desk.

"He's right there. He's the one who actually killed my father. So why did every report from that night point at Thane instead?"

Nobody answered.

"Somebody decided who the murderer was before the investigation even started," I said. "And it wasn't the man who actually killed him."

The silence that followed wasn't confusion.

It was recognition.

Everyone in the room understood exactly how dangerous that answer would become once somebody finally said it out loud.

A knock cut through it.

The woman who stepped inside was the detective Daniels had mentioned earlier, one of the few officers assigned to the archives division, the kind of department that existed to file old cases away, not reopen them. Her hair had been pulled back in a hurry, and a thick folder sat wedged under one arm like she hadn't trusted it out of her grip since she found it.

"I found something," she said. "I need you to see it before I decide what to do with it."

She held out an envelope, its edges soft with age.

"It was never logged into evidence. Never presented at the time. Someone filed it under the wrong case number. If I hadn't gone through every related archive by hand, I'd never have found it."

Inside was a single photograph.

Sterling Calloway, my father, stood in a doorway, speaking to someone just outside the frame. The timestamp placed it only minutes before he died.

The other man's face was turned away.

Hidden.

But his hand wasn't.

It rested against the doorframe, and on one finger sat an old, heavy signet ring engraved with a pattern I'd never seen before.

I turned to Cam.

"Does this mean anything to you?"

He took the photograph.

The color drained from his face.

His breathing changed.

His grip tightened until the edges bent beneath his fingers.

"You've seen it before."

His eyes never left the picture.

"Cam."

His throat worked before any sound came out.

"That's impossible."

"Cam."

I stepped closer.

"Whose ring is that?"

He didn't answer.

He shoved his chair back so hard it slammed into the wall.

"Cam!"

He was already at the door.

His phone was at his ear before he reached the hallway.

"Find him," he said, his voice low and urgent. "Now."

A pause.

Then he stopped walking.

The color drained from his face.

"No..." he whispered.

Another silence.

"That's impossible."

The call ended.

Slowly, he turned to look at me.

For a moment, I thought he was finally going to tell me everything.

Instead, he said only four words.

"He's supposed to be dead."

Then he walked away.

I stared at the photograph in my hand, my pulse hammering.

Whoever the man wearing that ring was...

...he had just become the most dangerous person in my father's murder.