The third voicemail arrived the following morning at 6:52 AM.Nora had slept three hours, sitting up at her kitchen table, which was the only kind of sleep she'd been able to manage since Thursday night. The phone buzzed and she looked at the screen with the specific alertness of a person whose sleeping brain has been waiting for a sound.Unknown Number.She answered before it could go to voicemail.
"Nora. This is the third contact point. I'm going to assume you've found Derek Chu and confirmed the photo array contamination, and that you've verified the Reiss-Axis connection. If I'm wrong about where you are, some of this will be ahead of you — that's fine. Everything I tell you now is about Whitmore specifically, because Whitmore is the most dangerous part of this and the part most likely to become lethal if he realizes the investigation is active."She had the notepad ready. She wrote: Whitmore. Lethal.
"Whitmore has been on Diane Reiss's payroll since 2017. Not officially — through a consulting arrangement with a real estate firm she controls called Parkside Advisory. He gets a monthly deposit of four thousand dollars into a personal account registered to his brother-in-law. I have the bank records. They're in the folder, last page, in the envelope marked 'Supplemental.' Look at those carefully — there's a payment record from October 2021 that corresponds to the week of the Briar investigation. The payment is ten thousand instead of four. A bonus, presumably."She had already looked at those records. She had noted the October payment and not fully understood what it was for until now.
"Calloway — the actual killer — has not been in contact with Reiss directly since the murder. That's deliberate, it's standard practice for professionals in his field. But I have his financial fingerprint through Meridian. There's a payment from an entity traceable to Reiss, dated October 4th — five days before Briar's death — for forty thousand dollars. That's the contract."
"What I don't have, and what you need: Calloway's current location. He doesn't stay in one place. But there's a pattern in his previous jobs — he keeps a base within two hundred miles of any contract site. Ashfield is his last known contract. That means he's probably still in the region. Meridian's last filed address was a mailbox service in Creston — that's forty miles north. I'd start there."
"One more thing. Nora, I need to tell you something I should have said when I was alive. When Morrow was arrested and the case moved fast, I was uncomfortable. I said something to Whitmore about the pace — I said I thought we were rushing. He said the evidence was solid. I deferred. I've spent eighteen months not forgiving myself for that. Whatever you find in that folder, whatever happens next — the case was both of ours. The mistake was both of ours. That's not blame. That's just — accurate."The recording ended.She sat with it for a moment.Then she found herself doing something she hadn't expected: talking back to a recording."I didn't remember the photo array," she said, to the silent phone. "Which means I was managing too many cases and relying too much on the file and I should have—" She stopped. "You're right. It was both of ours."She put the phone down.She got up. She made coffee. She thought about a man in prison for eleven months who had not killed anyone.She thought about Creston.She thought about how to take down a sitting police lieutenant without going through the department he controlled.She called the one person she could think of.
