The Evidence

The PI's next report came back with something new.

Diane had watched the storage facility twice in the past week. The first time, nothing. The second time, she had been there when a car pulled in — a car registered to someone who worked for Drake, someone she recognized from the background check that had been done at the start of the case.

But this time, the man from the car had brought something with him when he left. A box. A large one. He put it in the trunk and drove away.

"We are still trying to identify what was in the box," Diane said. "The unit is still accessible — we have not been able to confirm what has been removed. But the pattern suggests something was moved."

Liza thought about what that meant. Drake was moving things out of the storage unit. He was removing evidence — evidence of something, from somewhere, that she did not yet understand.

"We need to get access," she said.

"The unit is in your mother's name. Technically, as next of kin, you may have a claim to—"

"I do not want to claim it. I want to see inside it." She was quiet. "I want to know what is in there before it is gone."

"Understood. I will work on it."

She hung up and sat at the kitchen table and thought about the storage unit and the photographs and the box in the trunk of a car driven by someone who worked for Drake, and she thought about what it meant to build a record, and she thought about what it meant when the other side was building a record too.