Chapter 6 - THE COST OF THE FAVOR
Roman Moretti received the photograph two hours after Khloe did. His attorney had forwarded it as part of the materials relevant to the road closure. He sat in his office above the river, examining Liam Davenport's expression, and discovered that anger was the easiest emotion available to him. The harder one was regret.
Five years ago Khloe had saved his life in an alley. Roman had told himself he repaid the debt when he arrived at the Davenport gate. Yet the woman who had helped him without asking for anything now had reason to suspect his name appeared somewhere in the machinery that had destroyed her marriage. A damaged gate was not the worst thing he had done for her. It might have been the most honest, because at least it was visible.
He called his attorney, Ada Moreno. "I want an independent review of every transaction with Vale Infrastructure after I sold it."
"That could lead to questions about your earlier operations," Ada said.
"I understand."
"Do you? If you volunteer records to the government, you can't decide which questions they'll ask."
Roman looked at the photograph again. "Then I should have cleaned the company before I sold it."
Ada was silent for a moment. "I'll arrange the review. But you are not going to conduct your own interrogation of Felix Grant."
"I wasn't planning to."
"You were thinking about it. I know you."
He smiled without pleasure. "That's why I pay you."
Meanwhile Khloe sat with Miriam and a forensic document examiner studying the questioned will. The examiner explained that copying a signature from an old document could produce a visually convincing mark but would often lack the natural variation of a fresh signature. She compared original examples from before and after Liam's wrist injury, including signed pharmacy acknowledgments obtained with proper authorization.
The purported will contained a signature that matched a healthy-hand sample from four years earlier remarkably closely. Too closely. Several line intersections and tiny imperfections repeated with the same spacing. The examiner could not yet identify how the mark had been transferred, but she prepared a report explaining why the evidence was inconsistent with natural execution.
"That doesn't tell us who did it," Khloe said.
"Correct," the examiner replied. "It tells us the document needs closer examination."
Miriam was pleased to hear Khloe make the distinction. Khloe was less pleased with herself. Her husband's name looked as though someone had made a rubber stamp of his life, and she wanted someone to be held accountable now.
Alden Pryce's office produced a limited set of correspondence under the preservation order. The messages showed Patricia had requested revisions to a draft will two months before Liam's death. Pryce responded that Liam's instructions would need to be independently verified. Then the emails stopped. The final document appeared with a certificate stating that Liam had been examined and considered competent to sign. The certifying clinician was Celeste Pryce's business partner.
Khloe remembered meeting the man. Dr. Edwin Hale had arrived with a stethoscope and a small leather bag and stayed for less than ten minutes. Liam had been asleep. Patricia had told Khloe the doctor was merely reviewing a prescription.
"I can identify him," she told Miriam. "I saw him in the hallway that day."
Miriam wrote it down. "Then we'll ask for his clinical record and whether he actually examined Liam at the time described."
The same afternoon a bank responded to the court order with records of the gallery reserve. Liam had funded it steadily during the first two years of marriage, then stopped after his accident. Someone had submitted a change of authorized signatory shortly after his rehabilitation began. The listed replacement was Harrison Davenport. The supporting authorization bore Liam's name and an electronic certification from Orpheus Rehabilitation.
Khloe swallowed. She had paid for his treatments with money earned by selling her grandmother's jewelry. The clinic had apparently helped transfer control of the money intended to restore her career.
"I want to confront Harrison," she said.
"I know," Miriam replied. "But his answers in private won't necessarily help. Formal questioning under oath will."
For three days she lived by the rhythm of subpoenas, call logs, and short meals eaten in Miriam's office. The routine was exhausting, but it replaced the helplessness of waiting for Patricia to tell her what she was allowed to know. She found herself using skills from the gallery: keeping labels aligned, recording provenance, comparing dates, noting whose handwriting appeared on a receipt.
Her old supervisor, Celia Ward, called after reading a local article about the probate dispute. Celia had offered Khloe work before her marriage, and Khloe feared the woman would hear Patricia's version first.
"I saw the headline," Celia said. "Are you all right?"
"Not particularly."
"Do you want to come back to work? I need someone to catalogue the Ash Street collection. It isn't glamorous, but it pays."
Khloe began crying before Celia finished the sentence. Not because the job was wonderful, though it was. Because somebody had offered her something that didn't require her to be Liam's widow or Roman's rescued friend.
"Yes," she said. "I would."
Celia told her to start with a short schedule and to bring whatever documents she needed for payroll. Khloe went to the gallery the next morning, set a stack of photographs on her desk, and spent four hours identifying paper types and repair marks. At lunch she realized she had gone almost an hour without thinking of the Davenports.
That evening Roman came to the gallery by appointment. He was dressed in a dark sweater instead of a suit, and his driver remained outside. Khloe met him in the public exhibition room.
"You wanted to speak?" she asked.
"My former company used a vendor to close the bridge road. There are records I can produce that may help reconstruct who approved it. My attorney is providing them to the investigators."
"Did you know Felix Grant?"
"Yes. I hired him ten years ago. I dismissed him after he falsified a training certificate. He appealed, and my managers kept him as a contractor. Later the buyer rehired him. I should have insisted he never work on safety systems again."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I thought firing him had solved my problem."
Khloe regarded him for a long moment. "You don't get to be the hero of a story just because the villain used a business you once owned."
"I know."
"And I don't owe you forgiveness because you showed up in the rain."
"I know that too."
She pointed to a photograph on the wall. It showed the West Loop at dawn in 1978, shopkeepers opening their doors as a bus passed. "My father used to say a person was the sum of the jobs they finished, not the speeches they made."
Roman looked at the picture. "He told me something similar."
"Then finish the job. Tell the truth about your company. Even if it costs you."
"That's what I'm trying to do."
She believed that he was trying. She did not know whether trying would be enough. But for the first time, she felt she could stand beside him without being dragged behind him.
The following morning Ada Moreno's audit team discovered a payment from Vale Infrastructure to a private investigator named Silas Dunn. The payment was made three weeks before the bridge crash. The invoice described "discreet spouse monitoring" for a client identified only as D. The attached work order listed Khloe's former gallery address, her father's workshop, and her usual route home.
Khloe's stomach tightened when Miriam showed her the record. "They were watching me before Liam was hurt."
"It appears someone paid to monitor you," Miriam said. "We need to identify who requested the service and what was done."
Roman, told about the invoice by his attorney, sounded furious. But he did not ask Khloe for permission to retaliate. He said he would supply every relevant file.
Then a second document arrived from the clinic's insurer. It was an intake note written by Liam at the start of his rehabilitation. In the margin, underlined twice, was a sentence in his unmistakable shaky handwriting:
SHE MUST NOT BE TOLD ABOUT THE GARAGE UNTIL I KNOW WHO WAS FOLLOWING HER.
Khloe stared at the words. The photograph of Liam and Felix at the underground garage suddenly looked different. Perhaps he had not been trading her safety. Perhaps he had been trying to discover who had threatened it.
At the bottom of the page was another notation, made in a different hand:
PATIENT'S CONCERNS ATTRIBUTED TO CONFUSION. DO NOT DISCUSS WITH SPOUSE.
May you like
The initials beside it belonged to Dr. Edwin Hale.
She read the note aloud once and heard how calm the clinical language made it sound. Her husband had described a concrete danger. Someone had converted that concern into evidence that he could not be trusted. Khloe had lived beside his bed while a stranger's brief notation outweighed what Liam tried to tell her. She had blamed herself for missing the signs. Now she understood that some of the signs had been deliberately covered. The realization brought no relief, only the urgent determination that nobody else should have their fear filed away as a symptom simply because it inconvenienced the people in charge.
