Chapter 7: Capture
Nathan was arrested on a gray morning outside a storage facility at the edge of the city, eleven days after he ran from Willow Creek with sirens in the trees.
The unit had been rented under a middle name he used in college and paid for in cash installments that still left a trail for people who knew how to look. Inside, investigators found copies of internal Morgan Technologies documents he was not authorized to hold, a second camera still in its packaging, a laptop with deleted browsing history that recovery tools partially restored, and a spiral notebook in which my name appeared beside dates, locations, and small observations about routines. The under-bed joke occupied a margin note with a question mark dated months earlier and a later check mark in darker ink. Ruiz allowed Alex to see a photocopy of that page in a quiet room at the station. He read it twice, then sat down hard, as if the check mark had cut a wire that had been holding him upright.
May you like
Nathan had not needed a tip from the bride. He had needed one careless story told over wine and a willingness to turn a marital home into a stage with a hidden lens. The storage unit also held draft language for statements that would have followed Alex’s “heart attack”—language about a young wife, stress, and the tragic pressure of a high-value marriage. Reading those drafts made my hands go cold in a way the dust under the bed had not. Planning a death was one kind of evil. Planning the sentence that would land on the survivor was another.
Alex did not ask me again how Nathan had known where to aim the question. The notebook had answered it. What remained was the slower work of letting the answer settle into the places the doubt had occupied.
