Chapter 4 - THE ALIBI IN ROCKFORD
Heidi studied the photograph of her own writing without touching the envelope. It was the page on which she had spent forty-five minutes trying to spell her husband's name. She remembered the aching pressure in her shoulder, the therapist's encouragement, the humiliating tears when the pencil slipped again. Somebody had taken that private effort and turned it into a warning.
“Does this mean he knows we're investigating?” she asked Helen Park.
“It means someone obtained a copy and wanted you to see it,” Helen said. “We should treat it seriously, preserve the packaging and report it. But it doesn't establish who sent it.”
Kellen remained on the other side of the table. He had asked whether Heidi wanted him present; she had said yes. That small permission meant more to him than he dared admit.
“Garrett may have received a copy from the surveillance system,” Kellen said.
“Or somebody in the house with access,” Jo Salazar replied. “We will not give him a head start by assuming.”
A report was filed. Heidi's attorney requested protection appropriate to the documented threats and helped arrange a private way for Heidi to travel between the guesthouse, medical appointments and a new studio she had quietly rented. Her address was not disclosed to Garrett. She did not tell Kellen the location of the studio yet, and he did not ask.
That afternoon, the investigation reached Rockford without a single Mercer employee going near Elias Ward. Jo's colleague, a licensed investigator named Rosa Vale, contacted him through his theater employer and explained that his old testimony conflicted with the recently obtained roster. Elias initially refused to speak. Then he asked whether he could bring an attorney.
The meeting took place in a small office overlooking the municipal theater's empty stage. Elias was fifty-two, thinner than in the photograph, with a limp from an accident he said had ended his work as a rigger. He kept looking at the door as if expecting Garrett to walk through it.
“I was there,” he admitted after his lawyer explained the scope of the interview. “The Orpheum night. Not in Milwaukee like the statement said.”
“Why did you lie?” Rosa asked.
“I was told that if I said where I'd been, my daughter would lose her apprenticeship. There was a contract waiting for her. Garrett knew the man signing it.”
“Who told you?”
“Garrett.”
“Did he tell you what happened in the coatroom?”
Elias looked at his hands. “I helped install emergency catches on the service doors. The east coatroom door was supposed to unlock outward. A week before the benefit somebody ordered the latch reversed. I refused. Two days later another crew completed the work. Then Garrett asked me to sign a certificate saying the old latch remained in place.”
“Did you sign?”
“Yes. I wish I hadn't.”
Rosa waited. Elias's confession implicated him in falsifying a safety record, but not yet in the attempted murder. She made no promises about his legal exposure.
“I saw a man carrying a cable spool toward the coatroom,” Elias continued. “He wore a contractor jacket with a patch from Cordon Risk. I didn't know him. I'd already given the key to Garrett because he said the locksmith wanted it.”
“Did you see the attack?”
“No. I heard a crash and ran. I found a woman in a pale blue dress on the floor, holding her right hand. Blood was everywhere. Garrett was standing over her. He told me to get out and say I hadn't been there.”
“Did she speak?”
“She asked for an ambulance. He told me an ambulance had already been called. I learned later he'd sent her to a private clinic, not the emergency entrance where Mr. Mercer was taken.”
Heidi had never told Kellen about asking Elias for help. When Helen relayed the account that evening, she confirmed it with a single nod. “I thought he was going to come back.”
“Why didn't you tell anyone?” Kellen asked quietly.
“I couldn't remember his name. And by the time I could think properly, everyone in your house was calling Garrett a hero.”
Kellen looked at the surgeon's report, which Helen had obtained directly from Heidi with written consent. He remembered shaking Garrett's hand at the hospital. The thought made him ill. Yet even now he could not know whether Elias's recollections would survive scrutiny or whether records existed to corroborate them.
Rosa requested the stage-maintenance invoices and original badge records. Elias offered an old notebook in which he'd written the date of the latch change and the number of the work order. Its cover was smeared with grease, and the pages contained dozens of routine entries before and after the night in question. The continuity made it potentially useful; the investigator photographed it and arranged for careful preservation.
Meanwhile, an unexpected problem erupted at the Mercer commercial properties. Tenants at the Whitcomb Exchange building received notices that their leases would soon be managed by a new company. The letters stated that their payment accounts would change on Friday, the same day the disputed trust transfer was supposed to be signed. One tenant called Kellen's office to ask whether the notices were genuine.
He requested copies, then learned that Garrett had approved them without the signatures of the family trustees. The transfer had not been completed. There was no lawful basis for a new landlord to demand rent.
With advice from outside counsel, Kellen sent tenants a neutral statement: no change in ownership or payment instructions had been finalized, they should verify any new demands with the existing property management office, and they would not be penalized for requesting confirmation. He instructed the finance team to preserve its records. He did not use his criminal associates to pressure anyone.
Jo examined the letters. “This is an attempt to create the appearance of a transaction before the documents are complete,” she observed. “It may be a mistake. It may be part of a broader fraud. We need the communication chain.”
The chain led to Felicity Crowne, Garrett's chief financial analyst, who had spent eleven years managing property acquisitions. Her email included a schedule of projected rent transfers. The schedule was dated three weeks earlier. It assumed Heidi would sign on Friday, although she had refused to sign anything for two years.
“Why would anyone assume that?” Heidi asked.
“Because they believed they could make it happen,” Helen said. “But we still have to determine how.”
Heidi looked at the unsigned document herself for the first time. She had been frightened by it not merely because she could no longer sign easily but because its pages contained a provision granting the new manager access to medical and financial data held under the marital trust. She had asked Garrett why a property transfer needed medical information; he had laughed and said she had misunderstood the clause.
Now Helen traced the paragraph with a pencil. It was not standard language. A separate authorization would have given the manager power to access protected records under certain circumstances, but the wording was broad and ambiguous.
“Who drafted this?” Heidi asked.
“According to the correspondence, Felicity submitted it,” Helen answered. “The outside attorneys questioned it. Garrett told them to retain it.”
Kellen stared at the page. A month earlier he had asked Heidi why she made such a fuss about paperwork. He had treated her refusal as an obstacle instead of evidence that she had read something he had not bothered to read.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
Heidi looked at him. “I know. You have told me.”
“You sound tired of hearing it.”
“I'm tired of being sorry for both of us.”
He lowered his eyes. “Then I will do something other than apologize.”
She held out a hand—not her injured right hand but her left—and rested it briefly on the table between them. He did not reach for it without asking.
That night Kellen went back over the original attempted-assassination files with Helen's permission to examine his own records. The investigator had obtained a photograph from the Orpheum insurer showing the service corridor twenty minutes before the attack. On the wall hung a brass emergency key cabinet. One compartment stood open. Beneath it someone had scratched a tiny cross in the paint.
The mark matched an identifying notch on the end of a metal tool listed in Elias Ward's old notebook. Kellen showed the detail to Jo rather than drawing a conclusion. She arranged to have the image examined without enhancing it beyond what the data could support.
At midnight, Sylvia called from the guesthouse. Heidi had returned late from the studio and found a gift basket outside the door: fruit, chocolates and a white envelope. There was no note, only a photograph tucked beneath the tissue paper.
It showed the guesthouse entrance, taken that afternoon. In the lower right corner, Heidi could see herself walking inside.
Helen told them not to handle the basket further. Police were notified and arrangements changed. Heidi would stay somewhere the sender did not already know.
Before she left, she called Kellen herself.
“I'm not hiding because I'm ashamed,” she said. “I'm leaving because I am done pretending fear is normal.”
“I believe you.”
“Then tomorrow, when your lawyers ask you to save the company at the expense of my privacy, remember those words.”
The call ended before he could answer.
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An hour later, the corporate attorney forwarded a new email: Garrett Sloan had requested an emergency board meeting for eight the next morning to discuss Kellen's fitness to manage the trust.
Attached was a medical disclosure form bearing Heidi's name, signed in a handwriting far more graceful than anything she had written since the Orpheum attack.
